Association between Cancer and the Detection and Management of Comorbid Health Conditions among Elderly Men with Prostate Cancer in the United States

Using the data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results registry (SEER)-Medicare Program, this dissertation analyzed the longitudinal relationship between prostate cancer and comorbid conditions. This study examined the detection and use of care for comorbidities among patients who were diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2000. The study also assessed racial disparity in survival among the survivors after controlling for use of care for non-cancer comorbidities, which have never been controlled for in previous cancer survival analyses. Prostate cancer survivors not only were more likely to be diagnosed with comorbidities, but also received more necessary care for non-cancer conditions after 2000. The prevalence rates of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, depression, hypercholesterolemia, and hypertension and the overall severity of comorbidities increased more among the prostate cancer group than the non-cancer comparison group across time. After 2000, prostate cancer survivors were more likely to receive necessary care, especially clinical assessment and management of chronic conditions, than individuals without cancer. Although these findings did not differ by race, the magnitudes of changes after cancer diagnosis were larger among black survivors. Black prostate cancer survivors had higher overall, cancer-specific, and non-cancer mortality rates than white survivors. Although racial disparities in survival were largely explained by racial differences in socioeconomic status and cancer disease information, the disparities were no longer statistically significant after controlling for comorbidities and use of care for non-cancer conditions. In conclusion, cancer diagnosis may represent an important opportunity for prostate cancer survivors, especially black survivors, to be more aware of their health and to receive more necessary care. Efforts to increase early diagnosis, appropriate treatment, and post-diagnosis use of care among black survivors may be necessary to improve their survival and to further eliminate racial disparities in prostate cancer survival

Bis[2-(pyrimidin-2-ylamino)pyrimidin­ium] hexa­molybdate

The title compound, (C8H8N5)2[Mo6O19], was prepared by reaction of Mo(CO)6 and dipyrimidylamine in refluxing toluene. The hexa­nuclear polyoxomolybdate anions lie on centres of inversion. Each 2-(pyrimidin-2-ylamino)pyrimidinium cation forms an intra­molecular N—H⋯N hydrogen bond and the cations are linked through self-complementary pairs of N—H⋯N hydrogen bonds into dimers across centres of inversion. The cations and anions are inter­linked through C—H⋯O contacts

Getting cancer prevalence right: using state cancer registry data to estimate cancer survivors

Cancer incidence and mortality statistics provide limited insight regarding the cancer survivor population and its needs. Cancer prevalence statistics enumerate cancer survivors—those currently living with cancer. Commonly used limited-duration prevalence (LDP) methods yield biased estimates of the number of survivors. National estimates may not allow sufficient granularity to inform local survivorship programs. In this study, complete prevalence (CP) methods are applied to actual North Carolina Central Cancer Registry (NCCCR) data to generate better, more informative prevalence estimates than previous methods

Evaluating Self-supervised Speech Models on a Taiwanese Hokkien Corpus

Taiwanese Hokkien is declining in use and status due to a language shift towards Mandarin in Taiwan. This is partly why it is a low resource language in NLP and speech research today. To ensure that the state of the art in speech processing does not leave Taiwanese Hokkien behind, we contribute a 1.5-hour dataset of Taiwanese Hokkien to ML-SUPERB's hidden set. Evaluating ML-SUPERB's suite of self-supervised learning (SSL) speech representations on our dataset, we find that model size does not consistently determine performance. In fact, certain smaller models outperform larger ones. Furthermore, linguistic alignment between pretraining data and the target language plays a crucial role.Comment: Accepted to ASRU 202

Janus monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides.

Structural symmetry-breaking plays a crucial role in determining the electronic band structures of two-dimensional materials. Tremendous efforts have been devoted to breaking the in-plane symmetry of graphene with electric fields on AB-stacked bilayers or stacked van der Waals heterostructures. In contrast, transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers are semiconductors with intrinsic in-plane asymmetry, leading to direct electronic bandgaps, distinctive optical properties and great potential in optoelectronics. Apart from their in-plane inversion asymmetry, an additional degree of freedom allowing spin manipulation can be induced by breaking the out-of-plane mirror symmetry with external electric fields or, as theoretically proposed, with an asymmetric out-of-plane structural configuration. Here, we report a synthetic strategy to grow Janus monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides breaking the out-of-plane structural symmetry. In particular, based on a MoS2 monolayer, we fully replace the top-layer S with Se atoms. We confirm the Janus structure of MoSSe directly by means of scanning transmission electron microscopy and energy-dependent X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and prove the existence of vertical dipoles by second harmonic generation and piezoresponse force microscopy measurements

Adaptation of High-Growth Influenza H5N1 Vaccine Virus in Vero Cells: Implications for Pandemic Preparedness

Current egg-based influenza vaccine production technology can't promptly meet the global demand during an influenza pandemic as shown in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. Moreover, its manufacturing capacity would be vulnerable during pandemics caused by highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses. Therefore, vaccine production using mammalian cell technology is becoming attractive. Current influenza H5N1 vaccine strain (NIBRG-14), a reassortant virus between A/Vietnam/1194/2004 (H5N1) virus and egg-adapted high-growth A/PR/8/1934 virus, could grow efficiently in eggs and MDCK cells but not Vero cells which is the most popular cell line for manufacturing human vaccines. After serial passages and plaque purifications of the NIBRG-14 vaccine virus in Vero cells, one high-growth virus strain (Vero-15) was generated and can grow over 108 TCID50/ml. In conclusion, one high-growth H5N1 vaccine virus was generated in Vero cells, which can be used to manufacture influenza H5N1 vaccines and prepare reassortant vaccine viruses for other influenza A subtypes

Post‐translationally‐modified structures in the autophagy machinery: an integrative perspective

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113777/1/febs13356_am.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113777/2/febs13356.pd