The relationship between disgust propensity and disgust sensitivity with contamination/washing obsessive-compulsive symptoms in students

Background: There is increasing attention for the role of disgust in psychopathology, especially contamination/washing obsessive-compulsive symptoms by Western researchers in recent decades. There has not been much attention paid to this disorder in Iran. This study aimed at determining the role of disgust propensity and disgust sensitivity in predicting contamination/washing obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Materials and Methods: In this analytical descriptive study, 295 students were selected from Shahed University by the cluster sampling method. The participants completed the demographic questionnaire, Padua Inventory (PI, contamination subscale) and Disgust Propensity and Sensitivity Scale-Revised (DPSS-R). Results: The results of Pearson correlation showed that there was a positive and significant relationship between the disgust propensity and the disgust sensitivity with contamination/washing obsessive-compulsive symptoms and this relationship was stronger in women (0.41-0.42) than in men (0.23-0.24). The results of regression analysis showed that disgust propensity (β=0.34, P<0.001) and disgust sensitivity (β=0.17, P<0.001) could predict the contamination/washing obsessive-compulsive symptoms (R=0.45, R2=0.20). Disgust propensity had a stronger predictive role (R2=0.16, P<0.001). However, age could not predict contamination/washing obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Conclusion: The present study provides support for the role of disgust in the prediction of contamination/washing obsessive-compulsive symptoms and it can be used for early diagnosis and timely treatment of this disorder

The relationship of depression, distress tolerance and difficulty in emotional regulation with addiction to cell-phone use in students of Kashan University

Background: Cell phone plays an essential role in communications throughout the world. This question has been raised whether the over use of the cell-phone could lead to addiction. Addiction to cell phone use is characterized by the overuse and preoccupation with the mobile phone. So, the aim of this study was to investigate the relationship of depression, distress tolerance and difficulty in emotional regulation with addiction to cell-phone use in students of Kashan University. Materials and Methods: In this analytical-descriptive study, 200 students of Kashan University in the academic year 2016-2017 were selected by the cluster sampling method. The research tools included the cell-phone over-use scale (COS, 2007(, Beck depression inventory (BDI), difficulty in emotion regulation scale (DERS), and distress tolerance scale (DTS). Results: The results of the regression analysis showed that depression, distress tolerance and difficulty in emotional regulation explained more than 33 of the changes in addiction to cell-phone use. Also, there was a significant correlation between depression and addiction to cell-phone use (r=0.22, P<0.05). In addition, there was a significant correlation between distress tolerance (r=-0.47, P<0.05) and difficulty in emotion regulation (r=0.50, P<0.05) with cell-phone addiction in Kashan University students. Conclusion: According to the results of this study, addiction to cell-phone use can be predicted by three variables of depression, distress tolerance, and difficulty in emotion regulation. The difficulty in emotion regulation played a stronger role in this prediction

Evaluation of executive and cognitive functions in bipolar patients and their family members

Background: Bipolar disorder is a debilitating psychiatric disorder characterized by recurrent depression, manic, and hypomanic episodes. Examination and comparison of executive and cognitive functions in bipolar patients and their family members has not been addressed in Iran so far. The aim of the present study was to examine executive and cognitive functions in bipolar patients and their family members. Materials and Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 50 patients with bipolar disorder, 50 of their family members, and 50 healthy controls were included. The Young Mania Rating Scale, Beck Depression Inventory, Tower of London task, Wisconsin Card Sorting Task, Trail Making Test, Ruler Drop method, Four- Choice task, and general intelligence test were used to examine executive and cognitive functions of the participants. Results: Executive and cognitive functions in patients with a bipolar disorder were significantly lower than those in the other groups (P<0.01), but there was no significant difference in executive and cognitive functions between family members of the patients and healthy controls. Conclusion: According to the results of the present study, executive and cognitive functions have been destroyed in patients with bipolar disorder, but their family members have normal executive and cognitive functions

Multi-Fidelity Cost-Aware Bayesian Optimization

Bayesian optimization (BO) is increasingly employed in critical applications such as materials design and drug discovery. An increasingly popular strategy in BO is to forgo the sole reliance on high-fidelity data and instead use an ensemble of information sources which provide inexpensive low-fidelity data. The overall premise of this strategy is to reduce the overall sampling costs by querying inexpensive low-fidelity sources whose data are correlated with high-fidelity samples. Here, we propose a multi-fidelity cost-aware BO framework that dramatically outperforms the state-of-the-art technologies in terms of efficiency, consistency, and robustness. We demonstrate the advantages of our framework on analytic and engineering problems and argue that these benefits stem from our two main contributions: (1) we develop a novel acquisition function for multi-fidelity cost-aware BO that safeguards the convergence against the biases of low-fidelity data, and (2) we tailor a newly developed emulator for multi-fidelity BO which enables us to not only simultaneously learn from an ensemble of multi-fidelity datasets, but also identify the severely biased low-fidelity sources that should be excluded from BO

On the Effects of Heterogeneous Errors on Multi-fidelity Bayesian Optimization

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a sequential optimization strategy that is increasingly employed in a wide range of areas including materials design. In real world applications, acquiring high-fidelity (HF) data through physical experiments or HF simulations is the major cost component of BO. To alleviate this bottleneck, multi-fidelity (MF) methods are used to forgo the sole reliance on the expensive HF data and reduce the sampling costs by querying inexpensive low-fidelity (LF) sources whose data are correlated with HF samples. However, existing multi-fidelity BO (MFBO) methods operate under the following two assumptions that rarely hold in practical applications: (1) LF sources provide data that are well correlated with the HF data on a global scale, and (2) a single random process can model the noise in the fused data. These assumptions dramatically reduce the performance of MFBO when LF sources are only locally correlated with the HF source or when the noise variance varies across the data sources. In this paper, we dispense with these incorrect assumptions by proposing an MF emulation method that (1) learns a noise model for each data source, and (2) enables MFBO to leverage highly biased LF sources which are only locally correlated with the HF source. We illustrate the performance of our method through analytical examples and engineering problems on materials design

Comparison the frequency of dry eye syndrome in patients with newly diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis with healthly people in Zahedan

زمینه و هدف: از شایع ترین تظاهرات درگیری چشم، سندرم چشم خشک می باشد. سندرم چشم خشک باعث افزایش خطر عفونت چشم و اختلال در میزان دقت بینایی می گردد. مطالعات مختلف نتایج متفاوتی در خصوص شیوع آرتریت روماتویید و سندرم چشم خشک نشان داده اند. به نظر می رسد یکی از علل تفاوت شیوع سندرم چشم خشک در مطالعات مختلف، تفاوت آب و هوایی در مناطق مورد مطالعه باشد. هدف از این مطالعه، بررسی میزان شیوع خشکی چشم در بیماران مبتلا به آرتریت روماتویید در مناطق با آب و هوای گرم و خشک در مقایسه با افراد سالم و همچنین بررسی میزان شیوع سندرم چشم خشک در مبتلایان به آرتریت روماتویید تازه تشخیص داده شده می باشد. روش بررسی: در این مطالعه مورد-شاهدی،60 نفر از مبتلایان به آرتریت روماتویید و 60 نفر از افراد سالم که از نظر سن و جنس همسان سازی شده بودند وارد مطالعه شدند و در آنها علاوه بر شرح حال و علایم بالینی تست های شیرمر، منیسک اشک، فلورسین و شکست اشک بررسی شد. در بیمارانی که یکی یا بیشتر از این تست ها مثبت بود، تشخیص سندرم چشم خشک داده می شد. داده ها با استفاده از آزمون آماری کای اسکوئر مورد تجزیه و تحلیل قرار گرفتند. یافته‌ها :از 60 نفر مبتلا به آرتریت روماتویید 32 نفر (53) مبتلا به سندرم چشم خشک قطعی و 15 نفر (25) مبتلا به سندرم چشم خشک احتمالی بودند و در گروه کنترل 6 نفر (10) سندرم چشم خشک داشتند بین دو گروه بیمار و کنترل از نظر وجود سندرم چشم خشک قطعی اختلاف آماری معنی داری وجود داشت (001/0

Overexpression and translocation of dynamin 2 promotes tumor aggressiveness in breast carcinomas

Dynamin 2 is a GTPase protein that has been implicated in cancer progression through its various roles such as endocytosis, morphogenesis, epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), cellular contractions, and focal adhesion maturation. The increased expression levels of this molecule have been demonstrated with the development of several cancers such as prostate, pancreas, and bladder. However, its clinical significance in breast cancer is unclear yet. In the present study, the membranous, cytoplasmic, and nuclear expression levels of dynamin 2 molecule were evaluated for the first time, using immunohistochemistry (IHC) on tissue microarray (TMA) slides in 113 invasive breast cancer tissues. Moreover, afterward, the association between the dynamin 2 expression and clinicopathological features was determined. Our finding showed that, a higher nuclear expression of dynamin 2 is significantly associated with an increase in tumor stage (P = 0.05), histological grade (P = 0.001), and age of the patients (P = 0.03). In addition, analysis of the cytoplasmic expression levels of this molecule revealed that, there was a statistically significant difference between the expression levels of dynamin 2 among the different breast cancer subtypes (P = 0.003). Moreover, a significant association was found between the increased expression of dynamin 2 membranous and vascular invasion (VI) (P = 0.02). We showed that dynamin 2 protein expression has an association with more aggressive tumor behavior and more advanced disease in the patients with breast cancer; therefore, dynamin 2 molecule could be considered as an indicator of disease progression and aggressiveness

Internal evaluation of speech therapy department of Semnan University of Medical Sciences

Introduction: Using students' view for teacher evaluation is a common method. This study was designed to investigate the view of faculties and medical students about faculty teaching experiences. Materials and Methods: 100 medical students and 35 faculties from Jahrom University of Medical Sciences were participated in this study. Two separate questionnaires were designed for this purpose and after determining validity and reliability completed by teachers and students. Results: 70.9 percent of faculties reported that they are satisfied with evaluation by students. 48.6 percent of them reported that feedback from this evaluation improved their teaching. 48.8 percent of them thought that some students behave spitefully. 60 percent reported self assessments as a useful method for evaluation of their own teaching. The majority of medical students (76.6%) reported that teachers' communication skills are one of the important factors in teacher evaluation. 67.4 percent of them reported that they completed the teachers' evaluation forms carefully and 60.9 percent of them asserted that teachers, who take difficult examinations, have lower grades in evaluation forms. Conclusion: In general, most teachers are agreed with teacher evaluation. Since students' opinion about their teachers is influenced by some factors which have no close relationship with the evaluation subject and is merely related to other factors, using other evaluation methods such as self evaluation and peer evaluation seems to be necessary. In addition, we should establish a single national and standard method for teacher evaluation all over the country

Tumor Matrix Stiffness Provides Fertile Soil for Cancer Stem Cells

Matrix stiffness is a mechanical characteristic of the extracellular matrix (ECM) that increases from the tumor core to the tumor periphery in a gradient pattern in a variety of solid tumors and can promote proliferation, invasion, metastasis, drug resistance, and recurrence. Cancer stem cells (CSCs) are a rare subpopulation of tumor cells with self-renewal, asymmetric cell division, and differentiation capabilities. CSCs are thought to be responsible for metastasis, tumor recurrence, chemotherapy resistance, and consequently poor clinical outcomes. Evidence suggests that matrix stiffness can activate receptors and mechanosensor/mechanoregulator proteins such as integrin, FAK, and YAP, modulating the characteristics of tumor cells as well as CSCs through different molecular signaling pathways. A deeper understanding of the effect of matrix stiffness on CSCs characteristics could lead to development of innovative cancer therapies. In this review, we discuss how the stiffness of the ECM is sensed by the cells and how the cells respond to this environmental change as well as the effect of matrix stiffness on CSCs characteristics and also the key malignant processes such as proliferation and EMT. Then, we specifically focus on how increased matrix stiffness affects CSCs in breast, lung, liver, pancreatic, and colorectal cancers. We also discuss how the molecules responsible for increased matrix stiffness and the signaling pathways activated by the enhanced stiffness can be manipulated as a therapeutic strategy for cancer

High expression of Talin-1 is associated with tumor progression and recurrence in melanoma skin cancer patients.

BACKGROUND: Talin-1 as a component of multi-protein adhesion complexes plays a role in tumor formation and migration in various malignancies. This study investigated Talin-1 in protein levels as a potential prognosis biomarker in skin tumors. METHODS: Talin-1 was evaluated in 106 skin cancer (33 melanomas and 73 non-melanomas skin cancer (NMSC)) and 11 normal skin formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissue samples using immunohistochemical technique on tissue microarrays (TMAs). The association between the expression of Talin-1 and clinicopathological parameters, as well as survival outcomes, were assessed. RESULTS: Our findings from data minings through bioinformatics tools indicated dysregulation of Talin-1 in mRNA levels for skin cancer samples. In addition, there was a statistically significant difference in Talin-1 expression in terms of intensity of staining, percentage of positive tumor cells, and H-score in melanoma tissues compared to NMSC (P = 0.001, P \u3c 0.001, and P \u3c 0.001, respectively). Moreover, high cytoplasmic expression of Talin-1 was found to be associated with significantly advanced stages (P = 0.024), lymphovascular invasion (P = 0.023), and recurrence (P = 0.006) in melanoma cancer tissues. Our results on NMSC showed a statistically significant association between high intensity of staining and the poor differentiation (P = 0.044). No significant associations were observed between Talin-1 expression levels and survival outcomes of melanoma and NMSC patients. CONCLUSION: Our observations showed that higher expression of Talin1 in protein level may be significantly associated with more aggressive tumor behavior and advanced disease in patients with skin cancer. However, further studies are required to find the mechanism of action of Talin-1 in skin cancers