Population-based proband-oriented pedigree information system: application to hypertension with population-based screening data (KCIS No. 25)

Objective To develop a population-based probandoriented pedigree information system that can be easily applied to various diseases in genetic epidemiological studies, making allowance for the capture of theoretical family relationships. Designs and Measurements A population-based proband-oriented pedigree information system with ties of consanguinity based on both population-based household registry data and Keelung Community Integrated Screening data was proposed to build a comprehensive extended family pedigree structure to accommodate a series of genetic studies on different diseases. We also developed an algorithm to efficiently assess how well theoretical family relationships affecting the occurrence of diseases across three generations with respect to the relative relationship score, a quantitative indicator of genetic influence, were captured. Results We applied this population-based probandoriented pedigree information system to estimate the rate of hypertension with various relative relationships given the selection of probands. The degree of capturing complete familial relationships was assessed for three generations. The risk for early onset of hypertension was proportional to the proband-oriented relative relationship score with 2% increased risk and 1% correction for incomplete capture. Conclusions The population-based proband-oriented pedigree information system is powerful and can support various genetic descriptive and analytic epidemiological studies

ZARA: Improving Few-Shot Self-Rationalization for Small Language Models

Language models (LMs) that jointly generate end-task answers as well as free-text rationales are known as self-rationalization models. Recent works demonstrate great performance gain for self-rationalization by few-shot prompting LMs with rationale-augmented exemplars. However, the ability to benefit from explanations only emerges with large-scale LMs, which have poor accessibility. In this work, we explore the less-studied setting of leveraging explanations for small LMs to improve few-shot self-rationalization. We first revisit the relationship between rationales and answers. Inspired by the implicit mental process of how human beings assess explanations, we present a novel approach, Zero-shot Augmentation of Rationale-Answer pairs (ZARA), to automatically construct pseudo-parallel data for self-training by reducing the problem of plausibility judgement to natural language inference. Experimental results show ZARA achieves SOTA performance on the FEB benchmark, for both the task accuracy and the explanation metric. In addition, we conduct human and quantitative evaluation validating ZARA's ability to automatically identify plausible and accurate rationale-answer pairs.Comment: Accepted as a long paper at EMNLP Findings 202

Effect of Acupressure and Trigger Points in Treating Headache: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Abstract: The efficacy of acupressure in relieving pain has been documented; however, its effectiveness for chronic headache compared to the muscle relaxant medication has not yet been elucidated. To address this, a randomized, controlled clinical trial was conducted in a medical center in Southern Taiwan in 2003. Twenty-eight patients suffering chronic headache were randomly assigned to the acupressure group (n = 14) or the muscle relaxant medication group (n = 14). Outcome measures regarding self-appraised pain scores (measured on a visual analogue scale; VAS) and ratings of how headaches affected life quality were recorded at baseline, 1 month after treatment, and at a 6-month follow-up. Pain areas were recorded in order to establish trigger points. Results showed that mean scores on the VAS at post-treatment assessment were significantly lower in the acupressure group (32.9 ± 26.0) than in the muscle relaxant medication group (55.7 ± 28.7) (p = 0.047). The superiority of acupressure over muscle relaxant medication remained at 6-month follow-up assessments (p = 0.002). The quality of life ratings related to headache showed similar differences between the two groups in the post treatment and at six-month assessments. Trigger points BL2, GV20, GB20, TH21, and GB5 were used most commonly for etiological assessment. In conclusion, our study suggests that 1 month of acupressure treatment is more effective in reducing chronic headache than 1 month of muscle relaxant treatment, and that the effect remains 6 months after treatment. Trigger points help demonstrate the treatment technique recommended if a larger-scale study is conducted in the future

Toxicity risk of non-target organs at risk receiving low-dose radiation: case report

The spine is the most common site for bone metastases. Radiation therapy is a common treatment for palliation of pain and for prevention or treatment of spinal cord compression. Helical tomotherapy (HT), a new image-guided intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT), delivers highly conformal dose distributions and provides an impressive ability to spare adjacent organs at risk, thus increasing the local control of spinal column metastases and decreasing the potential risk of critical organs under treatment. However, there are a lot of non-target organs at risk (OARs) occupied by low dose with underestimate in this modern rotational IMRT treatment. Herein, we report a case of a pathologic compression fracture of the T9 vertebra in a 55-year-old patient with cholangiocarcinoma. The patient underwent HT at a dose of 30 Gy/10 fractions delivered to T8-T10 for symptom relief. Two weeks after the radiotherapy had been completed, the first course of chemotherapy comprising gemcitabine, fluorouracil, and leucovorin was administered. After two weeks of chemotherapy, however, the patient developed progressive dyspnea. A computed tomography scan of the chest revealed an interstitial pattern with traction bronchiectasis, diffuse ground-glass opacities, and cystic change with fibrosis. Acute radiation pneumonitis was diagnosed. Oncologists should be alert to the potential risk of radiation toxicities caused by low dose off-targets and abscopal effects even with highly conformal radiotherapy