Objective: The anxiety of Alzheimer's disease (AD) contributes significantly to decreased quality of life, increased morbidity, higher levels of caregiver distress, and the decision to institutionalize a patient. However, the incidence of anxiety in AD patients hasn't been discussed. In this study, artificial neural networks were used to predict the incidence of anxiety inAD patients.
Methods: A large randomized controlled clinical trial was analyzed in this study, which involved AD patients and caregivers from 6 different sites in the United States. The incidence of anxiety in AD patients was predicted by backpropagation artificial neural networks with one and hidden layers. After cross validation, the Predictive Accuracy (PA) of the models was measured to select the best structure of artificial neural networks.
Results: Among all models for predicting the incidence of anxiety in AD patients, the artificial neural network with respectively 6 and 3 neurons in the first and second hidden layers achieved the highest predictive accuracy of 85.56%.
Conclusions: The incidence of anxiety in AD patients can be predicted by an accuracy of over 80%. When used for anxiety prediction, neural networks with two hidden layers perform better than those with one hidden layer. These findings will benefit the prevention and early intervention of anxiety in Alzheimer's patients.
Artificially created treebank of elliptical constructions (gapping), in the annotation style of Universal Dependencies. Data taken from UD 2.1 release, and from large web corpora parsed by two parsers. Input data are filtered, sentences are identified where gapping could be applied, then those sentences are transformed, one or more words are omitted, resulting in a sentence with gapping. Details in Droganova et al.: Parse Me if You Can: Artificial Treebanks for Parsing Experiments on Elliptical Constructions, LREC 2018, Miyazaki, Japan.
Let $(R,\mathfrak {m})$ be a complete Noetherian local ring, $I$ an ideal of $R$ and $M$ a nonzero Artinian $R$-module. In this paper it is shown that if $\mathfrak p$ is a prime ideal of $R$ such that $\dim R/\mathfrak p=1$ and $(0:_M\mathfrak p)$ is not finitely generated and for each $i\geq 2$ the $R$-module ${\rm Ext}^i_R(M,R/\mathfrak p)$ is of finite length, then the $R$-module ${\rm Ext}^1_R(M,R/\mathfrak p)$ is not of finite length. Using this result, it is shown that for all finitely generated $R$-modules $N$ with $\operatorname {Supp}(N)\subseteq V(I)$ and for all integers $i\geq 0$, the $R$-modules ${\rm Ext}^i_R(N,M)$ are of finite length, if and only if, for all finitely generated $R$-modules $N$ with $\operatorname {Supp}(N)\subseteq V(I)$ and for all integers $i\geq 0$, the $R$-modules ${\rm Ext}^i_R(M,N)$ are of finite length.
Samples of bottom ash and fly ash coming from the combustion of lignite with the addition of limestone, from the cocombustion of lignite and wood residue with limestone and from co-combustion of lignite, wood residue, biological sludges from the waste water treatment plant and municipal waste as well with the addition of limestone were examined. Scanning electron microscopy with X-ray microanalyser were used for study of morphology and chemical composition of ash particles. The results were compared with average composition of bottom ashes, fly ashes and input materials found by X-ray fluorescence spectrometry and with phase composition found by X-ray diffraction method. There were proved no significant differences in the character and the structure of individual samples coming from various regimes of combustion., Vladimír Tomášek, Ondřej Šustai, Jana Seidlerová, Zdeněk Klika, Martin Stach, Zdeněk Weiss and Václav Roubíček., and Obsahuje bibliografii
Osteosarcoma (OS), a severe malignant bone tumour, usually occurs in adolescents and children and has a poor prognosis. Asiatic acid (AA), an active component isolated from Centella asiatica (L.) Urb., exhibits appreciable anti-oxidant and anti-tumour activities. So far, the effects and underlying mechanisms of AA against OS have not been clarified. Here, we explored the anti-tumour effects of AA against human OS and the involved mechanism mediating its actions. To evaluate effects of AA on the cell proliferation of human OS cells, cell viability and colony formation assays were performed. Flow cytometry was used to evaluate apoptosis in OS cells exposed to AA and mitochondrial membrane potential. Western blotting and RT-PCR were applied to determine expression of the relevant proteins and their mRNA levels. Our explorations showed that AA inhibits proliferation of human OS cells in a concentration- and time-dependent manner, and induces apoptosis of OS cells by the intrinsic (mitochondrial) pathway. Importantly, we found that inhibition of the AA-induced phosphorylation of JAK2/STAT3 signalling molecules and the decrease in MCL-1 contributed to the anti-tumour efficacy of AA. Collectively, our results suggest that AA could evoke mitochondrial- induced apoptosis in human OS cells by suppression of the JAK2/STAT3 pathway and MCL-1 expression. These results strongly demonstrate that AA could be a potential anti-tumour agent for OS treatment.
The acidic tumor microenvironment (TME) of pancreatic cancer affects the physiological function of pancreatic stellate cells (PSCs), which in turn promotes cancer progression. Acid-sensing ion channel 1a (ASIC1a) is responsible for acidosis-related physiopathological processes. In this study, we investigated the effect of acid exposure on the activation and autophagy of PSCs, and the role of ASIC1a in these events. The results showed that acidic medium upregulated the expression of ASIC1a, induced PSCs activation and autophagy, which can be suppressed by inhibiting ASIC1a using PcTx1 or ASIC1a knockdown, suggesting that ASIC1a involves these two processes. In addition, the acidinduced activation of PSCs was impaired after the application of autophagy inhibitor alone or in combination with ASIC1a siRNA, meaning a connection between autophagy and activation. Collectively, our study provides evidence for the involvement of ASIC1a in the acid-caused PSCs activation, which may be associated with autophagy induction.
In this paper I have introduced one case of modification of articulation at the word-boundary, i. e. the assimilation, which regularly takes place in Dutch, but is impeded in Czech. In Dutch the assimilation of [s] in front of [j] is the result of coarticulation, applied in order to reduce the articulatory effort. It is, however, not an isolated phenomenon, but it is connected with the not clearly defined phonological and phonetic opposition of [s] and [š]. In Czech, despite the presumption that the coarticulation of the [s] in front of [j] also is possible, it is not audible for the speakers as modification, and - most importantly - it does not yield assimilation of the former to the latter, i. e. the realization of [š]. In our opinion the constraints are complex, in the first place we should point to the distinctive role of the /s/ and /š/ in the whole system. The perceptual segmentation in Czech, moreover, is ruled by the distribution of word-stress at the initial syllable of the word (after a pause); this brings about the hyperarticulation of the syllable, so that no need is felt to reduce the articulation. Because of the typological difference between Czech and Dutch, as respectively inflective and not-inflective languages, the phonetic phenomena at the word-end can be very significant and should be examined further.