Scientific Research Publishing

The number of colorectal cancer (CRC) patients has been increasing rapidly worldwide in recent decades, and the survival rates of CRC patients have increased in the past few years, possibly as a result of progress in diagnostic faculty and improved chemotherapy. The aim of this study was investigating the predictive potential of these available and convenient laboratory dates in stage IV colorectal cancer (CRC) patients. The authors identified the cases of 114 consecutive patients who underwent the surgery at our Hospital between January 2006 and December 2012 by using the multivariate analysis, the Cox proportional-hazard regression model. They divided the patients in 3 groups: 1) metastatic lesion resection group with primary lesion resection (n = 52 in the Met/Prim lesion group), 2) primary lesion resection without metastatic lesion resection (n = 38 in the Primary lesion group) and 3) palliative operation (n = 24 in the Palliative group). Routine laboratory measurements prio...

There is an increasing concern that parental mental health may have far-reaching undesirable consequences for children. However, factors impeding parental resiliency to overcome mental illness have been less forthcoming in the literature. The present study aimed to investigate independent and interactive impacts of risk and protective factors influencing depression among parents receiving welfare. The study used panel data from the first two waves (Wave 1 in 2004 and Wave 2 in 2006) of the nationally representative Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. The analytic sample included 1204 parents of children aged 4 - 5 years old who participated in both of the waves and received government payments as their main income source in Wave 1. At Wave 2, twenty seven percent of all participant parents had income support as their main income source, and one-third of these parents reported having depressive symptoms during the 4 weeks prior to the interview. In hierarchical regressi...

Since the development of cattle superovulation and non-surgical embryo recovery in the 1970s, the unpredictability and variability of the superovulatory response has remained a major obstacle. Anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH) is a glycoprotein that is expressed in granulosa cells of growing follicles. It has been classified as a good predictive marker of the ovarian response to follicular stimulation for oocyte retrieval and in vitro embryo production, as well as an endocrine marker that could help predict superovulatory responses of cows. This study evaluated Anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH) and/or follicle counts as predictors of subsequent superovulatory response and embryo production in 79 beef cows. Before superovulation, 3 to 5 mm follicles presented on the ovaries of donor cows were counted, and blood was collected for measure of serum AMH. Across cows, serum AMH ranged from 0.013 to 0.898 ng/mL, with a mean of 0.293 ng/mL. The distribution of both AMH concentrations and ...

Cognitive control is essential for performing daily activities. It allows the brain to vary adaptive behavior according to current goals and tasks, rather than remaining rigid and inflexible. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies reveal that neurophysiological mechanisms underlying cognitive disorders involve disrupted large-scale brain networks. To elicit mechanisms of cognitive dysfunction, there has been a significant interest in understanding networks that manage cognitive function. Recent imaging studies have explored neural mechanisms underlying cognitive dysfunction based on brain network architecture and functioning. The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) is thought to regulate large-scale intrinsic brain networks, and plays a primary role in cognitive processing with the anterior insular cortex (aIC), thus providing salience functions. Although neural mechanisms have been elucidated at the connectivity level by imaging studies, their understanding at t...

Bone marrow is the soft, fatty tissue inside your bones. The bone marrow produces blood cells. Stem cells are immature cells in the bone marrow that give rise to all of your different blood cells. A bone marrow transplant is a procedure to replace damaged or destroyed bone marrow with healthy bone marrow stem cells. Bone marrow transplantation (BMT) with pre-treatment conditioning is an established treatment for childhood leukemia, myelodysplastic syndrome and other hereditary and metabolic hematologic disorders. While BMT has increased life-expectancy for children with hematologic disorders, this life-saving intervention has a number of sequelae including cataract formation. In this study, the authors presented the outcome of cataract surgery in children who have had BMT.  The authors conducted a retrospective chart study with 15 BMT patients (28 eyes) who underwent cataract extraction between 2002 and 2012. Outcome measures included change in best corrected visual acui...

Forages, including maize ( Zea mays L.) silage, are key components of diets for ruminants. There is a renewed interest in forages especially in energy dense diets such as those required for high producing dairy cows due to the increase in grain prices partially driven by the creation of new markets especially for corn grain as a primary feedstock for ethanol production. The cross-linked nature of plant cell walls provides structural integrity for continued growth and development, but limits degradation and utilization by ruminants. In grasses, a major cross-linking component is ferulic acid that is incorporated into cell walls as an ester linked residue on arabinoxylans. Ferulates can become coupled to each other and to lignin forming a highly cross-linked matrix of carbohydrates and lignin. Seedling ferulate ester mutants ( sfe ) were produced in maize using the transposon system and evaluated in feeding trials. The work described here was undertaken to characterize changes ...

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) represents a group of intestinal disorders that cause prolonged inflammation of the digestive tract. The two major types of IBD are ulcerative colitis (UC), which is limited to the colonic mucosa, and Crohn disease (CD), which can affect any segment of the gastrointestinal tract from the mouth to the anus, involves "skip lesions," and is transmural. With respect to n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) is metabolized to eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). N-3 PUFA are essential fatty acids present in large amounts in perilla oil and fish oils and inhibit the metabolism of n-6 PUFA by competitively antagonizing metabolic enzymes, such as delta 6- and delta 5-desaturases, cyclooxygenase (COX) and 5 lipoxygenase (LOX), thereby producing anti-inflammatory actions by inhibiting the synthesis of AA-derived inflammatory mediators and thromboxane A2 (TXA2). Therefore, it is thought that the reg...

All biological processes recurring daily, also known as circadian-controlled processes, are governed by the so-called circadian clock, a self-sustained time-keeping system controlling rhythmic behavioral, biochemical and physiological processes. In other words, the circadian clock affects the sleep-wake cycle, body temperature, hormone secretion, enzyme activity, renal blood flow, heart rate, and various other physiological activities as well as the regulation of the cell cycle and of apoptosis. In mammals, the cogwheels of this clock are the so-called clock genes which control their own expression via several feedback loops. One of these genes is  hPER 1, a clock gene which disposes of a glucocorticoid-responsive element and might therefore be influenced by glucocorticoids. In humans, stress is associated with an increase in the glucocorticoid cortisol and is seen as a major factor in the etiology of numerous mental health problems. For this reason, the goal of this paper...

A growing body of evidence indicates that downsizing and its related forms of organizational restructuring can have profound adverse effects on worker safety, health and well-being through stress. In this study, a research laboratory, employing 160 personnel, submitted to downsizing and related forms of organizational restructuring in the following two years was contacted. A stress management program using cardiac coherence was implemented after the organizational downsizing. Nine voluntary workers were participated in order to evaluate the efficiency of the program. The mean age of the nine male respondents was 39.77 (6.45) years old with 7.9 ± 1.9 years of education above grade 7. A baseline evaluation was conducted on psychological variables (anxiety, perceived-stress, wellbeing and sleep), endocrine assessments (urinary cortisol excretion, alpha-amylase and salivary concentrations) and physiological recordings (sleep and heart rate variability). The low number of participants...

Obtaining a graduate level degree is a challenging process that can result in significant stress and anxiety for many students. Students in graduate level educational programs are especially susceptible to increased anxiety and stress related to academic performance, the fear of failing, finances/debt, and poor work/school-life balance. Some studies showed that stress and anxiety levels in physical therapy students are higher than that in their age and gender matched peers. One method of reducing stress and anxiety that is gaining popularity on college campuses is animal-assisted interventions, in which volunteers bring their registered therapy animals to visit with students on campus. The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of an animal-assisted intervention on stress and anxiety of entry-level physical therapist (PT) students prior to a laboratory practical exam. Twenty-three first-year PT students (mean age 23.4 ± 1.70) participated in this study. A 15 - 20...