Notes

Several "Between-the-Lines" Questions Most Integrity Professionals Should Always Inquire.
7%). Over and above the effects of racism and SGM-based victimization, subtle intersectional minority stressors were associated with greater depressive symptoms and lower self-esteem and sense of mastery. Mediation analyses indicated that subtle intersectional minority stressors had indirect effects on depressive symptoms through lower self-esteem and sense of mastery for the aggregate sample of SGMA of color and most racial/ethnic groups in the sample. The results demonstrate that subtle and intersectional minority stress is a unique and significant form of minority stress that is a risk factor for depressive symptoms for SGMA of color. Moreover, our findings underscore self-concept mechanisms as targets for prevention and intervention.Incidences of pancreatic cancer and acute and chronic pancreatitis are rising globally, and often no curative treatment is available at the time of diagnosis. We tested the hypothesis that low and high plasma concentrations of pancreatic amylase are associated with increased risk of pancreatic cancer, acute pancreatitis, and chronic pancreatitis in the general population. selleck products We included 101,765 individuals (55% women) aged 20-100 years from the Copenhagen General Population Study with baseline measurements of plasma pancreatic amylase. After recruitment in 2004-2015 during a median 9 years of follow-up (range 0-15), we collected information about diagnoses of pancreatic cancer, acute pancreatitis, and chronic pancreatitis from the national Danish Patient Registry, the national Danish Cancer Registry, and the national Danish Causes of Death Registry. The median age was 58 years (interquartile range 48-67) and the median plasma pancreatic amylase 32 U/L (26-40). During follow-up, 442 individuals were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, 282 with chronic pancreatitis, and 401 with acute pancreatitis. Compared to individuals with pancreatic amylase levels in the 41st-60th percentiles, those with extreme low (1st-2.5th percentiles) and extreme high (97.5th-100th percentiles) pancreatic amylase had hazard ratios of 2.4 (95% confidence interval; 1.6-3.6) and 2.2 (1.4-3.7) for pancreatic cancer, of 1.8 (1.1-3.3) and 3.2 (1.8-5.6) for chronic pancreatitis, and of 1.1 (0.6-1.8) and 1.5 (0.8-2.7) for acute pancreatitis, respectively. In apparently healthy individuals from the general population, extreme low and extreme high plasma pancreatic amylase were associated with 2-threefold higher risk of both pancreatic cancer and chronic pancreatitis.Confounding by comorbidities is of concern in many epidemiological studies. To take this into account a common strategy is to calculate each participant's Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI) and use this for adjustment in regression analyses. Various CCI adjustment strategies are possible, and it is unclear, which is preferable. In this simulation study, we compared common adjustment strategies in Cox regression analyses to determine to which degree they mitigate confounding and conservative bias caused by missing adjustment for independent predictors. We found that adjustment for each comorbidity as separate dichotomous covariate is the preferable adjustment strategy in samples of sufficient size as this mitigates both bias sources to the largest degree. If this is impractical in smaller studies adjustment for CCI split into multiple categories is preferable. In conclusion, the choice of CCI adjustment strategy impacts mitigation of bias in this simulation study, and suboptimal adjustment strategies can cause an observable bias, although of quite limited magnitude of only a few percent in this simulation example. Researcher should be careful when deciding on the adjustment strategies applied to ensure that the desired mitigation of bias sources is achieved.
The association between alcohol intake and glioma remains unclear. We evaluated the association between alcohol intake and incidence of glioma in three large, prospective cohort studies with repeated alcohol assessments.

We harnessed data from three studies with repeat alcohol assessment to compute hazard ratios (HR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for glioma by overall alcohol intake and intake from specific beverages using Cox proportional hazards regression, adjusted for age, cohort, body mass index, smoking status, and caloric intake. Analyses were conducted separately for glioma overall and for glioblastoma (GBM).

We confirmed 554 incident glioma cases (362 GBM) among 237,505 participants with 6,216,378 person-years of follow up. Cumulative average alcohol intake was associated with reduced risk of glioma (HR = 0.75, 95%CI0.56-0.99 comparing > 8-15 to ≤ 0.5g/d; HR = 0.71, 95%CI0.53-0.96 comparing > 15g/d to ≤ 0.5g/d). When stratified by sex, for the same comparisons, the HRs for men were 0.57 (95%CI0.36-0.89) and 0.79 (0.53-1.16), and for women 0.90 (95%CI0.62-1.30) and 0.62, 95%CI0.39-0.97. Results were consistent when examining cumulative average, baseline, and recent intake, and with a 4year lag.

These results provide evidence against a positive association between alcohol intake and glioma risk. Alcohol intake was associated with reduced risk of glioma in both men and women.
These results provide evidence against a positive association between alcohol intake and glioma risk. Alcohol intake was associated with reduced risk of glioma in both men and women.Portable X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) was recognized as an efficient and promising tools to study the contents of chemical elements in various media including soils under the impact of anthropogenic activities. However, the quality of data and the equality of chemical elements with other common analytical methods such as aqua-regia extraction vary depending on site, sample conditions, and analysis time. In this study, we examine the adequacy of XRF and ICP-ES/ICP-MS aqua-regia extractable (AR) results obtained for lab-type pretreated samples (N = 15) for Ti, Fe, Mn, Co, V, Pb, Zn, Cu, Cr, Mo, Sr, and As contents in soils under the impact of copper smelter and assess the equality of PTE contents induced health risk. The obtained results suggested that XRF reached definitive data quality level for As, Zn, and Mn and screening (quantitative) data quality level established for Cu, Pb, Fe, Mo, Cr, V, and Ti. Moreover, in some cases (i.e., for Ti) XRF overperformed AR indicating the high efficiency of XRF application when sparingly soluble mineral matrices are presented. At the same time, PTE induced health risk assessment at the established data quality level showed that equality of non-carcinogenic children health risk was observed for As, Zn, Cu, Pb, Mn, and V. The latter indicating the applicability of XRF to generate reliable base for risky sites identification and characterization.
Heat treatment as a physical method could increase the cellular uptake of nucleic acids. In this study, the effects of heat shock were evaluated to enhance the transfection efficiency of three plasmid DNAs into HeLa and TC-1 cancerous, and HEK-293T and Vero non-cancerous cell lines using lipofectamine 2000 reagent.

Two methods of cell- and DNA-based heat treatment were used. Heating DNA solution was performed at 94°C for 5, 10 and 15min, and also 72°C for 30, 60 and 120min, individually. Moreover, heating the cells was done by incubation at 42°C for 2h in different times such as before, during and after DNA transfection.

Our data showed that the conformation of plasmid DNAs was changed at different temperatures with increasing time. The heat-treated plasmid DNAs (94°C for 10min or 72°C for 30min) indicated higher transfection efficiency than untreated plasmid DNAs (p < 0.05). Furthermore, heat treatment of cells before and during the transfection was higher than untreated cells (p < 0.01). Our results demonstrated that DNA transfection efficiency in cancerous cells was less than non-cancerous cells (p < 0.01).

Generally, these findings showed that transfection mediated by thermal stimulation could enhance gene transfection in mammalian cell lines.
Generally, these findings showed that transfection mediated by thermal stimulation could enhance gene transfection in mammalian cell lines.
DNA fragmenting factor (DFF40), an endonuclease inducing irreversible apoptosis protein, is down-regulated in many types of tumor cells. iRGD is a tumor-penetrating peptide with high affinity to cancer cells overexpressing α
β
receptor. The aim of this study was to produce the recombinant DFF40-iRGD protein as a new molecule to selectively induce cytotoxicity in cancer cells and evaluate its biological effects.

The three-dimensional structure of DFF40-iRGD was predicted using Modeller software and its interaction with α
β
receptor was evaluated by HADDOCK web-server. Recombinant DFF40 and DFF40-iRGD proteins were produced using intein fusion system in Escherichia coli BL21 (DE3). To improve the soluble expression, the inducer concentration, temperature and incubation time were optimized. After purification of DFF40 and DFF40-iRGD using chitin column, the cytotoxic and apoptotic effects of the proteins against MDA-MB-231 (α
β
positive) and MCF-7 (α
β
negative) cell lines were evaluated using ceespecially Triple Negative Breast Cancer Cells.
In this study, DFF40-iRGD protein was produced in soluble form and its inhibitory effects on cancer cell survival and induction of apoptosis were established; therefore, it has the potential to be used as a drug candidate for targeted treatment of breast cancer, especially Triple Negative Breast Cancer Cells.The motor system relies on the recruitment of motor modules to perform various movements. Muscle synergies are the modules used by the central nervous system to simplify the control of complex motor tasks. In this paper, we aim to explore the primitive synergies to reflect different modes of coordination in upper limb motions. Muscle synergies and corresponding activation coefficients were extracted via non-negative matrix factorization from the electromyography signals of three basic and four complex upper limb motions in sagittal plane and coronal plane. Similarities of muscle synergies and activation coefficients between different tasks and different subjects were compared. Moreover, we used network theory to assess the coordination between multiple muscles and to elucidate the neural implementation of muscle synergies. The results showed that the combination of different sets of primitive muscle synergies can achieve complex motions in different planes. The muscle synergy network topology differed significantly between different tasks. We also demonstrated the potential of this study for the understanding of human motor control mechanism and implications for neurorehabilitation.Considering the significant prevalence of silent myocardial ischemia and its related morbidity and mortality in asymptomatic type 2 diabetic patients, it is not well known whether early screening with MPI is cost-effective and predicting factors are not well elucidated. This was a cross-sectional study including 63 asymptomatic patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), with normal ECG and ejection fraction. Patients with any history of documented valvular, congestive or ischemic heart disease, renal or hepatic failure were excluded. At first all patients were interviewed and checked for risk factors and then patients underwent a two-day rest/stress 99mTc-MIBI gated MPI SPECT. Data was assessed by QPS/QGS and 4DM software and evaluated by a nuclear medicine specialist with summed stress score (SSS) of more than 4 defined as CAD. There were 42 females (67%) and 21 males (33%), with a mean age of 61.33 ± 6.98 years and 7.97 ± 4.86 years history of T2DM. CAD was detected in 26 (41.3%) patients and was significantly associated with male gender, smoking and requiring insulin therapy (P-value = 0.
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