Serum levels of cartilage oligomeric matrix protein (COMP) has been presented as a biomarker of liver fibrosis in several cross-sectional studies. COMP is also an essential mediator in carcinoma development and has also been associated with hepatocellular carcinoma. We present a prospective analysis of this biomarker in 38 patients with chronic hepatitis C who were subject to eradication therapy w

Transposable elements (TEs) are dynamically expressed at high levels in multiple human tissues, but the function of TE-derived transcripts remains largely unknown. In this study, we identify numerous TE-derived microRNAs (miRNAs) by conducting Argonaute2 RNA immunoprecipitation followed by small RNA sequencing (AGO2 RIP-seq) on human brain tissue. Many of these miRNAs originated from LINE-2 (L2) e

Microstructure imaging techniques based on tensor-valued diffusion encoding have gained popularity within the MRI research community. Unlike conventional diffusion encoding—applied along a single direction in each shot—tensor-valued encoding employs diffusion encoding along multiple directions within a single preparation of the signal. The benefit is that such encoding may probe tissue features t

Adaptive plasticity allows organisms to cope with environmental change, thereby increasing the population's long-term fitness. However, individual selection can only compare the fitness of individuals within each generation: if the environment changes more slowly than the generation time (i.e., a coarse-grained environment) a population will not experience selection for plasticity even if it is ad

While treatment for testicular cancer (TC) has become standardized after the 1980s with an associated significant improvement in patient survival, this has been accompanied by an increased risk of second primary cancers (SPCs). Patients were identified from the Swedish Cancer Registry spanning the years from 1980 to 2015, including 8788 individuals with primary TC and their SPCs. Relative risks (R

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to test the coherence of a wearable device, an inertial measurement unit (IMU) against the gold standard; also, to test the intra-trial reliability. This study has a cross-sectional design, where measurement of postural sway in the medio-lateral and anterior-posterior directions was performed simultaneously on a force plate and with a IMU called the Snubblomete

This article takes the notion of crisis as a helpful analytical entry point to unfold the tem- poralities and modalities of the machinery of violence as manifested in men’s abuse of their female partners in Vietnam. Based on ethnographic research I conducted over the years, the article argues that some types of crises might be episodic, and thus a bracketing of daily life, while others, such as in

Robotic trajectory generation is reformulated as a controller design problem. For minimum-jerk trajectories, an optimal controller using the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation is derived. The controller instantaneously updates the trajectory in a closed-loop system as a result of the changes in the reference signal. The resulting trajectories coincide with piece-wise fifth-order polynomial trajector

In the world we live in today, the presence and claims of crisis abound – from climate change, financial and political crisis to depression, livelihoods and personal security crisis. There is a challenge to studying crisis due to the ways in which crisis as a notion, condition and experience refers to and operates at various societal levels. Further, different kinds of crisis can overlap and inter

Introduction Including the patient perspective is important to achieve optimal outcomes in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Ample qualitative studies exist on patient outcomes in RA. A Belgian study recently unravelled what matters most to patients throughout the overwhelming and rapidly evolving early stage of RA. The present study, European Qualitative research project on Patient-pref

Background The objective of the present study was to evaluate effectiveness, complications and cost-effectiveness of any surgical or non-surgical treatment for radius or ulna fractures in elderly patients. Secondary objectives were to analyze present treatment traditions of distal radius fractures (DRF) in Sweden and to calculate resource usage for its treatment. Methods and findings The assessmen

The transverse structure of jets was studied via jet fragmentation transverse momentum (j T ) distributions, obtained using two-particle correlations in proton-proton and proton-lead collisions, measured with the ALICE experiment at the LHC. The highest transverse momentum particle in each event is used as the trigger particle and the region 3 < p Tt < 15GeV/c is explored in this study. The measur