Income inequality is associated with poor health when economic disparities are especially salient. Yet, political institutions may alter this relationship because democracies (as opposed to autocracies) may be more inclined to frame inequalities in negative rather than positive ways. Living in a particular political system potentially alters the messages individuals receive about whether inequality is large or small, good or bad, and this, in turn, might affect whether beliefs about inequality influence health. Further, media coverage of economic inequality may negatively affect health if it contributes toward the general perception that the gap between rich and poor has gone up, even if there has been no change in income differentials.

In this study, we explore the relationship between democracy, perceptions of inequality, and self-rated health across 28 post-communist countries using survey and macro-level data, multilevel regression models, and inverse probability weighting to estimate the average treaod for well-being, they may not be unambiguously positive for health. This does not mean, of course, that inequality is good for health nor that, on average, autocracies have better health than democracies; but rather that being more aware of inequality can negatively affect self-rated health.The wettability of carbonate rocks is often oil-wet or mixed wet. A large fraction of oil is still remained in carbonate reservoirs, it is therefore of particular significance to implement effective methods to improve oil recovery from carbonate reservoirs. https://www.selleckchem.com/ALK.html Altering wettability from oil-wet to more favorable water-wet has been proven successful to achieve this goal. Surfactants are widely investigated and served as wettability modifiers in this process. Yet a comprehensive review of altering wettability of carbonate reservoirs with surfactants is ignored in literature. This study begins with illustration of wettability evolution process in carbonate reservoirs. Techniques to evaluate wettability alteration extent or to reveal behind mechanisms are also presented. Several surfactant systems are analyzed in terms of their wettability alteration mechanisms, influential factors of performance, applicable conditions, and limitations. Mixture of different types of surfactants could obtain synergic effects, where applicable conditions are extended, and final performance is improved. Gemini surfactants have many desirable properties, which warrants further investigation for understanding their wettability alteration mechanisms and performance. At the end, this review discusses strategies related with surfactant cost, surfactant adsorption, and challenges at high temperature, high salinity reservoirs conditions. Also, some unclear issues are discussed.
Reversal learning reflects an individual's capacity to adapt to a dynamic environment with changing stimulus-reward contingencies. This study focuses on the potential influence of anxiety on reversal learning skills.

We asked 40 participants with a high level of trait anxiety (HTA) and 40 counterparts with a low anxiety level (LTA) to finish a probabilistic reversal learning task with event-related potential (ERP) recording, during which stimulus-reward contingencies are reversed after players have learned the optimal choice.

We found that compared to their LTA counterparts, the HTA participants showed worse learning performance and were less likely to make lose-shift choices. The FRN amplitude might help interpret these behavioral results, which is suggested to be associated with punishment sensitivity and was positively correlated with the number of lose-shift in this study. Seeing that anxiety level predicted the FRN amplitude for lose-shift, we explain that anxious individuals' inflexible behavioral responses to losses are due to their impaired sensitivity to negative feedback.

A higher level of anxiety is associated with weaker reversal learning performance, possibly because of abnormal sensitivity to negative outcomes. These findings have implications for the understanding of behavioral symptoms in anxiety.
A higher level of anxiety is associated with weaker reversal learning performance, possibly because of abnormal sensitivity to negative outcomes. These findings have implications for the understanding of behavioral symptoms in anxiety.Osteoarthritis in synovial joints remains a major cause of long-term disability worldwide, with symptoms produced by the progressive deterioration of the articular cartilage. The earliest cartilage changes are thought to be alteration in its main protein components, namely proteoglycan and collagen. Loss of proteoglycans bound in the collagen matrix which maintain hydration and stiffness of the structure is followed by collagen degradation and loss. The development of new treatments for early osteoarthritis is limited by the lack of accurate biomarkers to assess the loss of proteoglycan. One potential biomarker is magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We present the results of a novel MRI methodology, Fast Field-Cycling (FFC), to assess changes in critical proteins by demonstrating clear quantifiable differences in signal from normal and osteoarthritic human cartilage for in vitro measurements. We further tested proteoglycan extracted cartilage and the key components individually. Three clear signals were identified, two of which are related predominantly to the collagen component of cartilage and the third, a unique very short-lived signal, is directly related to proteoglycan content; we have not seen this in any other tissue type. In addition, we present the first volunteer human scan from our whole-body FFC scanner where articular cartilage measurements are in keeping with those we have shown in tissue samples. This new clinical imaging modality offers the prospect of non-invasive monitoring of human cartilage in vivo and hence the assessment of potential treatments for osteoarthritis. Keywords Fast Field-Cycling NMR; human hyaline cartilage; Osteoarthritis; T1 dispersion; quadrupolar peaks; protein interactions.
GammaPod, a breast stereotactic radiosurgery device, utilizes 25 rotating Co-60 sources to deliver highly conformal dose distributions. The GammaPod system requires that reference dosimetry be performed in a specific vendor-supplied poly-methylmethacrylate (PMMA) phantom. The nonstandard nature of GammaPod dosimetry, in both the phantom material and machine-specific reference (msr), prohibits use of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine Task Group 51 (TG-51) protocol. This study proposes a practical method using TRS 483 to make the reference dosimetry procedure simpler and to reduce overall uncertainties.

The dose to PMMA (D
) is determined under msr conditions using TRS 483 with an Exradin A1SL chamber placed in a PMMA phantom. The conversion factor, which converts from the dose-to-water (D
) in broad-beam Co-60 reference geometry to D
in the msr small field Co-60 (Q
) geometry, is derived using the Monte Carlo simulations and procedure described in TRS 483.

The new conversion factor IAEA TRS 483 factor for any new small field machine that may be developed.
Fetal biometric measurements face a number of challenges, including the presence of speckle, limited soft-tissue contrast and difficulties in the presence of low amniotic fluid. This work proposes a convolutional neural network for automatic segmentation and measurement of fetal biometric parameters, including biparietal diameter (BPD), head circumference (HC), abdominal circumference (AC), and femur length (FL) from ultrasound images that relies on the attention gates incorporated into the multi-feature pyramid Unet (MFP-Unet) network.

The proposed approach, referred to as Attention MFP-Unet, learns to extract/detect salient regions automatically to be treated as the object of interest via the attention gates. After determining the type of anatomical structure in the image using a convolutional neural network, Niblack's thresholding technique was applied as pre-processing algorithm for head and abdomen identification, whereas a novel algorithm was used for femur extraction. A publicly-available dataset ( parameters.
This study aimed to evaluate the impact of accumulated oral tegafur-uracil (UFUR) as maintenance chemotherapy on overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS) rates after definitive treatment for non-distant metastatic stage IV cancer of the oral cavity.

This retrospective, hospital center-based study analyzed data of patients diagnosed with stage IVa and IVb cancer of the oral cavity who underwent surgical resection and concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CCRT) obtained from a database between October 2008 and December 2014.

Forty-two patients were treated with CCRT (non-UFUR group); the remaining 51 patients received the same regimen, followed by additional oral UFUR (UFUR group). For all study patients, the 3-year DFS rates were 53.05% and 35.41% in the UFUR and non-UFUR groups, respectively (p=0.011), while the 3-year OS rates were 74.96% and 48.47%, respectively (p=0.001).

Adding UFUR to CCRT significantly improved the DFS and OS rates in patients with non-distant metastatic stage IV cancer of the oral cavity.
Adding UFUR to CCRT significantly improved the DFS and OS rates in patients with non-distant metastatic stage IV cancer of the oral cavity.
The association between benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) and impaired calcium metabolism has attracted widespread interest. Several studies have suggested that decreased bone mineral density (BMD) and serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) level are related to the occurrence and/or recurrence of BPPV; however, the characteristics of bone metabolism in patients with BPPV subtypes have not been fully investigated, and conclusions have been controversial. This study aimed to evaluate BMD and serum levels of 25(OH)D and bone turnover markers to clarify the characteristics of bone metabolism in patients with different types of BPPV.

We retrospectively analysed the data of new-onset idiopathic postmenopausal female patients with BPPV at our institution from January 2016 to January 2020. The patients' demographic data including age, medication history, concomitant diseases, onset time, clinical form, laboratory indicators, such as serum levels of 25(OH)D, bone formation markers, namely, amino-terminal prscore<-1 SD) and decreased serum vitamin D level (< 20ng/ml) were not significantly different between the subgroups (P>0.05).

There were no significant differences in bone metabolism in postmenopausal female patients with different types of idiopathic BPPV.
There were no significant differences in bone metabolism in postmenopausal female patients with different types of idiopathic BPPV.
The National Institutes of Health announced the Healthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) study to further understanding of infant brain development. This study examined perceptions and knowledge about research among the demographic groups to be studied in HBCD.

1164 participants (n = 548 pregnant people and 616 mothers of infants < 12 months) completed anonymous, on-line surveys. Domains included research literacy, MRI knowledge, and attitudes about research incentives and biospecimen collection. Logistic regression was used to examine factors related to outcome variables.

Knowledge of MRI safety was low and research literacy was high across participants. Likelihood of participation given various incentives differed between participants. Those with lower education were less likely to rate any items as increasing likelihood of participation. Substance use during pregnancy improved the model fit only for items about alternate visit structures (home and telephone visits) and confidentiality.

Overall results support the feasibility of infant imaging studies, such as HBCD with respondents having high research literacy and interest in learning about their baby's development.