A common genetic variant near MBOAT7 (rs641738C>T) has been previously associated with hepatic fat and advanced histology in NAFLD; however, these findings have not been consistently replicated in ...the literature. We aimed to establish whether rs641738C>T is a risk factor across the spectrum of NAFLD and to characterise its role in the regulation of related metabolic phenotypes through a meta-analysis.
We performed a meta-analysis of studies with data on the association between rs641738C>T genotype and liver fat, NAFLD histology, and serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT), lipids or insulin. These included directly genotyped studies and population-level data from genome-wide association studies (GWAS). We performed a random effects meta-analysis using recessive, additive and dominant genetic models.
Data from 1,066,175 participants (9,688 with liver biopsies) across 42 studies were included in the meta-analysis. rs641738C>T was associated with higher liver fat on CT/MRI (+0.03 standard deviations 95% CI 0.02–0.05, pz = 4.8×10–5) and diagnosis of NAFLD (odds ratio OR 1.17 95% CI 1.05–1.3, pz = 0.003) in Caucasian adults. The variant was also positively associated with presence of advanced fibrosis (OR 1.22 95% CI 1.03–1.45, pz = 0.021) in Caucasian adults using a recessive model of inheritance (CC + CT vs. TT). Meta-analysis of data from previous GWAS found the variant to be associated with higher ALT (pz = 0.002) and lower serum triglycerides (pz = 1.5×10–4). rs641738C>T was not associated with fasting insulin and no effect was observed in children with NAFLD.
Our study validates rs641738C>T near MBOAT7 as a risk factor for the presence and severity of NAFLD in individuals of European descent.
Fatty liver disease is a common condition where fat builds up in the liver, which can cause liver inflammation and scarring (including ‘cirrhosis’). It is closely linked to obesity and diabetes, but some genes are also thought to be important. We did this study to see whether one specific change (‘variant’) in one gene (‘MBOAT7’) was linked to fatty liver disease. We took data from over 40 published studies and found that this variant near MBOAT7 is linked to more severe fatty liver disease. This means that drugs designed to work on MBOAT7 could be useful for treating fatty liver disease.
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•Meta-analysis of 42 studies (>1 million participants) to assess the role of rs641738C>T near MBOAT7 in NAFLD.•rs641738C>T positively associated with liver fat, ALT, fibrosis and HCC.•rs641738C>T negatively associated with serum triglycerides.•Consistent associations found in studies of Caucasian populations only.
Background
Atrial fibrillation (AF) ablation is a complex procedure, generally requiring at least one overnight hospital stay. We investigated the safety and feasibility of early mobilization and ...same‐day discharge following streamlined peri‐ablation management for AF.
Methods
From 2014, we offered same‐day discharge to selected patients who underwent uncomplicated AF ablation on the morning lists, with ultrasound‐guided femoral access, uninterrupted warfarin or minimal interruption in novel oral anticoagulants, and reversal of intraprocedural heparin with protamine. Patients were discharged 6‐8 h postprocedure and offered access to a dedicated nurse helpline.
Results
Of 1599 AF ablation cases performed from April 2014 to March 2017, 811 (50.7%) were performed on the morning lists and 169/811 (20.8%) were discharged on the same day. Excluding 26 research cases, 1/143 (0.7%) had transient right phrenic nerve palsy and five (3.5%) cases experienced minor problems that did not preclude same‐day discharge; three (2.1%) needed rehospitalization postdischarge: one for pericarditic chest pain and two for nausea/vomiting. Compared to 642 overnight cases, day‐case procedures were shorter, more likely to be redos, to be performed under sedation rather than general anesthesia, and less likely to involve linear lesions and electrical cardioversion. There were no significant differences in patient age, gender, body mass index, CHA2DS2‐VASc, in preprocedural anticoagulation regimen (warfarin vs novel anticoagulants vs no anticoagulation) and in choice of ablation method (cryoballoon vs radiofrequency).
Conclusions
Selective same‐day discharge after AF ablation is safe and feasible using a streamlined peri‐procedural care protocol. Wider adoption can potentially reduce health‐care costs while improving patient experience.
Ladakhi, the native cattle from Ladakh region of India have developed over the years under natural selection and can survive well at extreme climatic conditions, viz. high altitude, huge barren ...lands, low temperature (≤–20°C) and hypoxic conditions. Even at extreme survival conditions, this cattle provides around 2–5 kg of milk. This highly evolved germplasm might possess unique alleles or combinations of alleles, hence attempt was made to study the frequency of allelic variants at important candidate gene loci affecting dairy traits. The observed distribution pattern of allele frequencies were different from taurine but in accordance with other Indian native cattle breeds indicating maintenance of indicine characteristics and near absence of taurine influence/introgression effect on this naturally evolved germplasm. Further, variant E at κ-CN locus and two novel variants at BTN-3 loci were also observed. The present findings helped to understand the unique Ladakhi cattle population with respect to polymorphism and distribution of various alleles in candidate genes related to milk traits.
To effectively minimize static power for a wide range of applications, power domains for coarse-grained reconfigurable array (CGRA) architectures need to be more fine-grained than those found in a ...typical application-specific integrated circuit. However, the special isolation logic needed to ensure electrical protection between off and on domains makes fine-grained power domains area- and timing-inefficient. We propose a novel design of the CGRA routing fabric that reduces the area overhead of power domain boundary protection from around 9% to less than 1% without incurring any extra timing delay from the isolation cells. Conventional Unified Power Format based flow for power domain boundary protection does not support this design choice. Therefore, we create our own compiler-like passes that iteratively introduce the needed design changes, and formally verify the transformations using methods based on satisfiability modulo theories. These passes also let us optimize how we handle test and debug signals through the off tiles in the CGRA. Using our framework, we add power domains to a CGRA that we designed and taped out. The CGRA has 32 × 16 processing element and memory tiles and 4-MB secondary memory. We address the implementation challenges encountered due to the introduction of fine-grained power domains, including the addressing of the CGRA tiles, the power grid design, well substrate connections, and distribution of global signals. Our CGRA achieves up to 83% reduction in leakage power and 26% reduction in total power versus an identical CGRA without multiple power domains, for a range of image processing and machine learning applications.
Introduction: Low-level laser therapy (LLLT) has been of interest in the clinical application in dentistry. Hence, we evaluated the LLLT on the wound healing in the mandibular surgical extraction. ...Materials and Methods: We conducted a prospective clinical study with 50 male subjects, equally distributed as controls and cases. Routine surgical extraction was done for control group, and in case group, LLLT was applied after the extraction. Evaluation was done for various parameters and after comparison the P value was less than 0.05 which was considered as significant. Results: Significant difference was seen between the groups for the socket depth on 7th day, swelling on 1st, 3rd, and 5th days, and pain on all the days. Conclusion: LLLT can be successfully used for the surgical extractions.
To effectively minimize static power for a wide range of applications, power domains for a coarse-grained reconfigurable array (CGRA) need to be finer-grained than a typical ASIC. However, the ...special isolation logic needed to ensure electrical protection between off and on domains makes fine-grained power domains area- and timing-inefficient. We propose a novel design of the CGRA routing fabric that intrinsically provides boundary protection. This technique reduces the area overhead of boundary protection between power domains for the CGRA from around 9% to less than 1% and removes the delay from the isolation cells. However, with this design choice, we cannot leverage the conventional UPF-based flow to introduce power domain boundary protection. We create compiler-like passes that iteratively introduce the needed design transformations, and formally verify the passes with satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) methods. These passes also allow us to optimize how we handle test and debug signals through the off tiles. We use our framework to insert power domains into an SoC with an ARM Cortex M3 processor and a CGRA with 32 x 16 processing element (PE) and memory tiles and 4MB secondary memory. Depending on the size of the applications mapped, our CGRA achieves up to an 83% reduction in leakage power and 26% reduction in total power versus a CGRA without multiple power domains, for a range of image processing and machine learning applications.
To effectively minimize static power for a wide range of applications, power domains for a coarse-grained reconfigurable array (CGRA) need to be finer-grained than a typical ASIC. However, the ...special isolation logic needed to ensure electrical protection between off and on domains makes fine-grained power domains area- and timing-inefficient. We propose a novel design of the CGRA routing fabric that intrinsically provides boundary protection. This technique reduces the area overhead of boundary protection between power domains for the CGRA from around 9% to less than 1% and removes the delay from the isolation cells. However, with this design choice, we cannot leverage the conventional UPF-based flow to introduce power domain boundary protection. We create compiler-like passes that iteratively introduce the needed design transformations, and formally verify the passes with satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) methods. These passes also allow us to optimize how we handle test and debug signals through the off tiles. We use our framework to insert power domains into an SoC with an ARM Cortex M3 processor and a CGRA with 32 × 16 processing element (PE) and memory tiles and 4MB secondary memory. Depending on the size of the applications mapped, our CGRA achieves up to an 83% reduction in leakage power and 26% reduction in total power versus a CGRA without multiple power domains, for a range of image processing and machine learning applications.
Although an agile approach is standard for software design, how to properly adapt this method to hardware is still an open question. This work addresses this question while building a system on chip ...(SoC) with specialized accelerators. Rather than using a traditional waterfall design flow, which starts by studying the application to be accelerated, we begin by constructing a complete flow from an application expressed in a high-level domain-specific language (DSL), in our case Halide, to a generic coarse-grained reconfigurable array (CGRA). As our under-standing of the application grows, the CGRA design evolves, and we have developed a suite of tools that tune application code, the compiler, and the CGRA to increase the efficiency of the resulting implementation. To meet our continued need to update parts of the system while maintaining the end-to-end flow, we have created DSL-based hardware generators that not only provide the Verilog needed for the implementation of the CGRA, but also create the collateral that the compiler/mapper/place and route system needs to configure its operation. This work provides a systematic approach for desiging and evolving high-performance and energy-efficient hardware-software systems for any application domain.
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