Hatfieldhove2090

Video-based interventions hold promise for improving quality of life (QoL) among African American breast cancer patients.

An interactive, cancer-communication intervention using African American breast cancer survivors' narratives was tested in a randomized controlled trial to determine whether viewing survivor stories improved newly diagnosed African American breast cancer patients' QoL.

Participants were 228 African American women with non-metastatic breast cancer interviewed five times over two years; 120 controls received standard medical care, and 108 intervention-arm participants also received a tablet-computer with survivor stories three times in 12 months. Growth curve models were used to analyze differences between arms in change in eight RAND 36-Item Health Survey subscales, depressive symptoms, and concerns about recurrence. Additional models explored the effects of intervention usage and other intervention-related variables on QoL among patients in the intervention arm.

Models showed no efn) might improve QoL for African American breast cancer patients.

Although no significant impact of the intervention on QoL was observed when comparing the two study arms, in the intervention arm longer intervention use was associated with declines in three QoL subscales and increased concerns about recurrence. Women with improving QoL may have interacted with the tablet less because they felt less in need of information; it is also possible that encouraging patients to compare themselves to survivors who had already recovered from breast cancer led some patients to report lower QoL. Future work is warranted to examine whether adding different stories to this cancer-communication intervention or using stories in conjunction with additional health promotion strategies (e.g., patient navigation) might improve QoL for African American breast cancer patients.Several techniques are available to assess muscle tissue status, including electrical impedance myography (EIM). Despite being used in the assessment of neuromuscular status in injury and response to exercise, reliability data for hamstrings muscles are limited. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the test-retest reliability of EIM components on hamstrings. Twenty-one healthy males (25.3 ± 3.4 years; 173 ± 6.7 cm; and 79.7 ± 15.9 kg) volunteered for this study. Subjects completed two visits, separated by seven days to collect EIM components (resistance, reactance, impedance, and phase angle) in the longitudinal and transversal axis of hamstrings in both thighs, using a bioimpedance device and Ag/AgCL adhesive contact electrodes. The electrode arrangement was in the muscular belly, half the distance between origin and insertion of the hamstrings. Reliability was determined by the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), minimal detectable change (MDC), and Bland-Altman plots. We observed high to excellent reliability (ICC > 0.85) between all EIM components, except for reactance with MDC ranged from 2.0 to 10.8 and the mean bias in Bland-Altman plots ranged from -0.02 to 2.48 (95% limits of agreement from -9.98 to 11.20). From our findings, the hamstrings assessment using EIM technique is reliable to assess muscle tissue; therefore, it enables the evaluation of changes/adaptations in clinical and applied contexts.The female mammal produces, stores and ejects milk from the mammary gland to nourish her offspring. Calcium plays a dual role, both as an essential nutrient in milk and in signal transduction. This perspective covers exciting new insights on calcium and cellular connectivity in this essential organ.The angular precision of crystal orientation determination by cross-correlating dynamically simulated electron diffraction patterns with experimental patterns via spherical harmonic analysis is investigated. The best precision found in this study is 0.016°, which approaches the level reported in the literature for other high-precision electron backscatter diffraction implementations. At this angular precision, the noise floor for geometrically necessary dislocation density calculations is found to be approximately 5×1013 m-2 at a 200 nm step size. Conventional Hough-transform indexing of the same raw patterns gave an angular precision of 0.156° and a dislocation noise floor of 6×1014 m-2, an order of magnitude larger for both parameters, albeit better than is typical for Hough indexing due to the high-quality patterns used. Experimental trade-off curves of precision versus exposure time, pattern resolution (i.e. camera binning), and analysis bandwidth are also presented, allowing for optimization of data collection and analysis rates once the desired level of precision has been determined.Glycosylation is a dynamic enzymatic process that attaches glycan to proteins or other organic molecules such as lipoproteins. Research has shown that such a process in ion channel proteins plays a fundamental role in modulating ion channel functions. This study used a computational method to predict N-linked glycosylation sites, the most common type, in ion channel proteins. From segments of ion channel proteins centered around N-linked glycosylation sites, the amino acid embedding vectors of each residue were concatenated to create features for prediction. We experimented with two different models for converting amino acids to their corresponding embeddings one was fed with ion channel sequences and the other with a large dataset composed of more than one million protein sequences. The latter model stemmed from the idea of transfer learning technique and emerged as a more efficient feature extractor. Our best model was obtained from this transfer learning approach and a hyperparameter tuning process with a random search on 5-fold cross-validation data. It achieved an accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, and Matthews correlation coefficient of 93.4%, 92.8%, 98.6%, and 0.726, respectively. Corresponding scores on an independent test were 92.9%, 92.2%, 99%, and 0.717. These results outperform the position-specific scoring matrix features that are predominantly employed in post-translational modification site predictions. Furthermore, compared to N-GlyDE, GlycoEP, SPRINT-Gly, the most recent N-linked glycosylation site predictors, our model yields higher scores on the above 4 metrics, thus further demonstrating the efficiency of our approach.It is well known that numerical simulations of the cardiac monodomain model require fine mesh resolution, which increases the computational resources required. In this paper, we construct three operator-splitting alternating direction implicit (ADI) schemes to efficiently solve the nonlinear cardiac monodomain model. The main objective of the proposed methods is to reduce the computational time and memory consumed for solving electrocardiology models, compared to standard numerical methods. The proposed methods have second-order accuracy in both space and time while evaluating the ionic model only once per time-step. Several examples using regular wave, spiral wave reentry, and nonsymmetrical scroll wave are conducted, and the efficiency of the proposed ADI methods is compared to the standard semi-implicit Crank-Nicolson/Adams-Bashforth method. Large-scale two- and three-dimensional simulations are performed.Circular economy principles were adopted by European Commission, to support a sustainable growth. They contain general rules that should be considered in all situations. At present, during pandemic, some waste disposal practices are under evaluation to guarantee safety conditions. For example, in view of the recent results reporting the presence of SARS-CoV-2 virus in sewage sludge, the possibility that it diffuses in the environment is alarming. The situation may result critical in densely populated cities, which are the largest sources of sewage sludge. In this frame the diffused practice of reuse of this waste in agriculture is under revision. In this context, incineration may represent a valuable alternative strategy to manage sewage sludge during pandemic. Indeed, due to thermal treatment, the destruction of organic micropollutants and pathogens, eventually present in the waste, is guarantee. Moreover, it is fundamental to highlight that also if the management of sewage sludge changes, the ash resulting from its combustion may have suitable reuse opportunities, and their landfilling should be avoided. This work presents the available possibilities of sewage sludge ash recovery in building applications and shows the results obtained by the analysis of their sustainability. The approach is based on the use of embodied energy and carbon footprint values, to make a simple and fast new method able to be a suitable tool to support and promote sustainability also in critical situations (such as pandemic) and when all the information about a technology are not available, making not possible to perform a full-LCA approach. This work aims to be not only a reference paper for promotion of strategies able to increase waste management safety, but also an example showing that circular economy principles should be pursued also if boundary conditions can change.To ensure safe reuse, biosolids are stabilized to reduce pathogens, odor, and volatile solids. Stabilization by lime addition have high material costs, high transportation costs, and loss of ammonia. Decreasing required lime additions would improve the sustainability of biosolids reuse. This study examined combining lime and heat treatment to reduce lime additions needed for required fecal coliform destruction. In contrast to the current best management practice requiring a pH of 12, fecal coliform reduction for final concentrations less then 1000 MPN/g (where MPN is most probable number) was achieved with pH as low as 10 when combined with a short (1-h) incubation at 60 °C. Analysis of D-values (the time required to destroy 1-log fecal coliform) supported a synergistic treatment response at moderate pH and heat treatments. Samples receiving higher temperature treatments had lower specific oxygen uptake rates, suggesting that readily-available carbon was lost during heat treatment. Samples with lower lime additions had higher final ammonia concentrations, which is a desired characteristic for biosolids reclaimed as a fertilizer. The study demonstrated that optimizing combined lime and heat stabilization can improve beneficial reuse as a means toward enhancing environmental sustainability and improving the circular economy.Quinone compounds could significantly accelerate anaerobic biotransformation of refractory pollutants. However, the effect of quinone compounds application on the propagation of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in the bio-treatment of these pollutants-containing wastewater is not available. see more In this study, the catalytic performance of anthraquinone-2-sulfonate immobilized on polyurethane foam (AQS-PUF), changes of ARGs, mobile gene elements (MGEs) and microbial community structure attached on AQS-PUF and PUF in the up-flow anaerobic bioreactors were investigated. The results showed that AQS-PUF could significantly accelerate the decolorization of azo dye RR X-3B. Meanwhile, metagenomics analysis showed that the total absolute abundance of ARGs increased in the presence of the immobilized AQS. Among ARGs, the number of the efflux pump-encoding ARGs in the biofilm of AQS-PUF accounted for 35.7% of the total ARGs, which was slightly higher than that of PUF (32.1%) due to the presence of the immobilized AQS. The relative abundances of ARGs conferring resistance to MLS (macrolide, lincosamide and streptogramin), tetracycline and sulfonamide, which were deeply concerned, reduced 10%, 21.