TNF Antagonists, The Prevention of Myocardial Infarction in Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients?

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) has been acknowledged to be a major extra-articular comorbidity in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), with myocardial infarction (MI) particularly being the most prominent. Contributory factors include the rise in traditional risk factors and proinflammatory changes seen in RA patients. Two drivers of proinflammatory changes are mainly emphasized in this review: insulin resistance and dyslipidaemia. Among the cytokines involved, tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) has been identified as one of the major molecules contributing to the proatherogenic state seen in these patients. As such, biological therapies such as anti-TNF drugs are hypothesized to have a secondary function in reducing CVD in these patients. Using TNF-α as an example, this review provides an overview of how chronic inflammation increases the risk of CVD, focusing mainly on the two drivers: insulin resistance (IR) state and dyslipidaemia. The review also investigates if anti-TNF drugs can reduce the effects of these two drivers and hence, determine if anti-TNF drugs can produce a clinical effect of reducing the risk of MI in RA patients.A literature search was conducted using Medline and Google Scholar (1990–January 2013). Studies were selected if they addressed the pathophysiology of TNF-α in CVD risk for RA patients or the effects of anti-TNF therapy on IR, dyslipidaemia or MI in RA patients. Although the studies were unable to establish if anti-TNF therapy can reduce CVD risk, responders to anti-TNF therapy appears to have a significant lower risk of MI.Despite its effects, additional studies should be conducted to determine its cost-benefit ratio. This is because of its high cost and its administration limitations. Future studies should also determine if the lipid profile in RA patients truly reflects their risk of CVD, as some studies have reflected an increased CVD risk as compared to the general population

A Crowd-Assisted Real-time Public Transport Information Service: No More Endless Wait

Many passengers have expressed frustration in waiting for public bus endlessly without knowing the estimated ar- rival time. In many developing countries, requiring bus operators to invest in the installation of a GPS unit on every bus in order to track the bus location and subsequently predicting the bus arrival time can be costly. This paper proposes passenger-assisted sharing of bus location to provide an estimation of bus arrival time. Our scheme aims to exploit the availability and capability of passenger mobile phones to share location information of the travelling buses in order to collect transportation data, at the same time provide an estimation of bus arrival time to the general public. A mobile app is developed to periodically report bus location to the cloud service, and it can detect location spoofing by malicious users. The preliminary results of the field tests suggest that the proposed system is viable and the predicated ETA falls within three minutes of the bus actual arrival time

Cheryl's Birthday

We present four logic puzzles and after that their solutions. Joseph Yeo designed 'Cheryl's Birthday'. Mike Hartley came up with a novel solution for 'One Hundred Prisoners and a Light Bulb'. Jonathan Welton designed 'A Blind Guess' and 'Abby's Birthday'. Hans van Ditmarsch and Barteld Kooi authored the puzzlebook 'One Hundred Prisoners and a Light Bulb' that contains other knowledge puzzles, and that can also be found on the webpage http://personal.us.es/hvd/lightbulb.html dedicated to the book.Comment: In Proceedings TARK 2017, arXiv:1707.0825

Systematic review of predictive performance of injury severity scoring tools

Many injury severity scoring tools have been developed over the past few decades. These tools include the Injury Severity Score (ISS), New ISS (NISS), Trauma and Injury Severity Score (TRISS) and International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-based Injury Severity Score (ICISS). Although many studies have endeavored to determine the ability of these tools to predict the mortality of injured patients, their results have been inconsistent. We conducted a systematic review to summarize the predictive performances of these tools and explore the heterogeneity among studies. We defined a relevant article as any research article that reported the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve as a measure of predictive performance. We conducted an online search using MEDLINE and Embase. We evaluated the quality of each relevant article using a quality assessment questionnaire consisting of 10 questions. The total number of positive answers was reported as the quality score of the study. Meta-analysis was not performed due to the heterogeneity among studies. We identified 64 relevant articles with 157 AUROCs of the tools. The median number of positive answers to the questionnaire was 5, ranging from 2 to 8. Less than half of the relevant studies reported the version of the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) and/or ICD (37.5%). The heterogeneity among the studies could be observed in a broad distribution of crude mortality rates of study data, ranging from 1% to 38%. The NISS was mostly reported to perform better than the ISS when predicting the mortality of blunt trauma patients. The relative performance of the ICSS against the AIS-based tools was inconclusive because of the scarcity of studies. The performance of the ICISS appeared to be unstable because the performance could be altered by the type of formula and survival risk ratios used. In conclusion, high-quality studies were limited. The NISS might perform better in the mortality prediction of blunt injuries than the ISS. Additional studies are required to standardize the derivation of the ICISS and determine the relative performance of the ICISS against the AIS-based tools

Systematic review of predictive performance of injury severity scoring tools

Many injury severity scoring tools have been developed over the past few decades. These tools include the Injury Severity Score (ISS), New ISS (NISS), Trauma and Injury Severity Score (TRISS) and International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-based Injury Severity Score (ICISS). Although many studies have endeavored to determine the ability of these tools to predict the mortality of injured patients, their results have been inconsistent. We conducted a systematic review to summarize the predictive performances of these tools and explore the heterogeneity among studies. We defined a relevant article as any research article that reported the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve as a measure of predictive performance. We conducted an online search using MEDLINE and Embase. We evaluated the quality of each relevant article using a quality assessment questionnaire consisting of 10 questions. The total number of positive answers was reported as the quality score of the study. Meta-analysis was not performed due to the heterogeneity among studies. We identified 64 relevant articles with 157 AUROCs of the tools. The median number of positive answers to the questionnaire was 5, ranging from 2 to 8. Less than half of the relevant studies reported the version of the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) and/or ICD (37.5%). The heterogeneity among the studies could be observed in a broad distribution of crude mortality rates of study data, ranging from 1% to 38%. The NISS was mostly reported to perform better than the ISS when predicting the mortality of blunt trauma patients. The relative performance of the ICSS against the AIS-based tools was inconclusive because of the scarcity of studies. The performance of the ICISS appeared to be unstable because the performance could be altered by the type of formula and survival risk ratios used. In conclusion, high-quality studies were limited. The NISS might perform better in the mortality prediction of blunt injuries than the ISS. Additional studies are required to standardize the derivation of the ICISS and determine the relative performance of the ICISS against the AIS-based tools

A Case of Ovarian Fibromatosis and Massive Ovarian Oedema Associated With Intra-Abdominal Fibromatosis, Sclerosing Peritonitis and Meig's Syndrome

Purpose:To discuss a case of ovarian fibromatosis/massive ovarian oedema, intra-abdominal fibromatosis, sclerosing peritonitis and Meig's syndrome. To review the reported therapeutic options

Spherical Tin Oxide, SnO2 Particles Fabricated via Facile Hydrothermal Method for Detection of Mercury (II) Ions.

Smooth-surface spherical tin oxide particles were fabricated via hydrothermal processing route. X-ray diffraction (XRD) revealed that the particles consisted of the rutile phase of SnO2 with tetragonal structure. The spherical morphology was realized with the aid of ammonia. The aggregation of SnO2 particles could be avoided by adjusting the concentration of tin (II) chloride. Bare glassy carbon electrode (GCE) was modified with the hydrothermally prepared SnO2 particles to detect the presence of mercury (II) ions (Hg2+), in the presence of potassium chloride (KCl) as a supporting electrolyte. GCE modified with the spherical SnO2 particles that possessed small crystallite size and smooth surface exhibited significantly enhanced oxidative and reductive current of Hg2+ during cyclic voltammetry compared with its bare counterpart. The reductive current was observed to increase by two fold and the detection limit of 75 nM for Hg 2+ was achieved. This suggests that SnO2 particles are a promising chemical sensor for the detection of Hg2+ in natural waters

Plasma lipoprotein subfraction concentrations are associated with lipid metabolism and age-related macular degeneration

10.1194/jlr.M073684Journal of Lipid Research5891785-179

BarraCUDA - a fast short read sequence aligner using graphics processing units

Abstract Background With the maturation of next-generation DNA sequencing (NGS) technologies, the throughput of DNA sequencing reads has soared to over 600 gigabases from a single instrument run. General purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU), extracts the computing power from hundreds of parallel stream processors within graphics processing cores and provides a cost-effective and energy efficient alternative to traditional high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. In this article, we describe the implementation of BarraCUDA, a GPGPU sequence alignment software that is based on BWA, to accelerate the alignment of sequencing reads generated by these instruments to a reference DNA sequence. Findings Using the NVIDIA Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) software development environment, we ported the most computational-intensive alignment component of BWA to GPU to take advantage of the massive parallelism. As a result, BarraCUDA offers a magnitude of performance boost in alignment throughput when compared to a CPU core while delivering the same level of alignment fidelity. The software is also capable of supporting multiple CUDA devices in parallel to further accelerate the alignment throughput. Conclusions BarraCUDA is designed to take advantage of the parallelism of GPU to accelerate the alignment of millions of sequencing reads generated by NGS instruments. By doing this, we could, at least in part streamline the current bioinformatics pipeline such that the wider scientific community could benefit from the sequencing technology. BarraCUDA is currently available from http://seqbarracuda.sf.netRIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are