The aim of this study was to analyze the demographic variables and causes and characteristics of mandibular angle fractures managed at several European departments of maxillofacial surgery.
This ...study was based on a multicenter systematic database that allowed the recording of data from all patients with mandibular angle fractures between January 1, 2013, and December 31, 2017. The following data were recorded: gender, age, etiology, side of angle fracture, associated mandibular fractures, presence of third molar, intermaxillary fixation, and osteosynthesis.
The study included 1,162 patients (1,045 male and 117 female patients). A significant association was found between the presence of a third molar and the diagnosis of an isolated angle fracture (P < .0000005). Furthermore, assaults were associated with the presence of voluptuary habits (P < .00005), a younger mean age (P < .00000005), male gender (P < .00000005), and left-sided angle fractures (P < .00000005).
Assaults and falls actually represent the most frequent causes of angle fractures. The presence of a third molar may let the force completely disperse during the determination of the angle fracture, finding a point of weakness.
A new silicon photomultiplier is fabricated for fast timing applications by SensL Technologies Ltd. This new family of silicon photomultiplier, herein referred to as fast SPM devices, is fabricated ...with a third terminal that has a low output capacitance to improve timing performance. Two fast SPMs (an N-on-P type and a prototype P-on-N type) are assessed for energy and timing performances in scintillation detectors. When coupled with L(Y)SO:Ce crystals, the optimal energy resolutions for the 511 keV photon peak are 13.7% and 13.1%, whereas coincidence resolving times (CRTs) of 184±5 and 157±3 ps are attained with 2 × 2 × 3 mm 3 crystals for the N-on-P and P-on-N devices, respectively. For longer crystals (3 × 3 × 20 mm 3 ) , more relevant for positron emission tomography, the CRTs are 298±9 and 234±6 ps for the two SPM types, respectively, a significant improvement from standard SPM devices.
HIV-positive people who inject drugs (PWID) experience stigma related to their substance use and HIV, with adverse consequences to their health care utilization and mental health. To help affected ...individuals cope with their intersectional stigma and reduce its negative impact on health and health care, we adapted a behavioral stigma coping intervention for this HIV key population.
To conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) testing the ‘Stigma Coping to Reduce HIV risks and Improve substance use Prevention and Treatment’ (SCRIPT) intervention, a community-based, adapted form of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), for PWID living with HIV in St. Petersburg, Russia.
We recruited 100 PWID living with HIV from civil society organizations (CSO) delivering harm reduction and HIV prevention services in St. Petersburg, Russia. We randomized participants 2:1 to receive either the intervention (three adapted ACT sessions in a group format over one month and usual CSO care) or usual CSO care alone. ACT aims to help affected individuals cope with stigma by increasing their psychological flexibility to handle stigma-related negative expectations, emotions and experiences. The primary outcomes were satisfaction with the intervention, and changes in HIV and substance use stigma scores.
Stigma coping interventions targeting HIV-positive PWID outside of formal health care settings may help them confront negativities in their lives originating from intersectional stigma and reduce stigma's impact as a health care barrier.
•HIV-positive people who inject drugs face stigma due to both substance use and HIV.•Interventions are scarce to help this population reduce stigma as care barrier.•We recruited participants outside of the formal health care setting in Russia.•We partnered with multiple organizations to recruit and retain stigmatized people.•We evaluated the intervention's effects on stigma, health care, & health outcomes.
Introduction
Management of body fractures in patients with edentulous atrophic mandibles represents a challenging task due to patient’s age, medical comorbidities, poor bone quality, and vascularity, ...as well as reduced contact area between the fracture ends. The aim of the study was to assess the demographic and clinical variables, the surgical technique, and outcomes of unilateral body fractures of the edentulous atrophic mandible managed at several European departments of oral and maxillofacial surgery.
Methods
This study is based on a systematic computer-assisted database that allowed the recording of data of all patients with fractures of the atrophic edentulous mandible from the involved maxillofacial surgical units across Europe between 2008 and 2017. The following data were recorded for each patient: gender, age, comorbidities, etiology, synchronous body injuries, degree of atrophy of the mandible according to Luhr classification, type of surgical approach and fixation, length of hospitalization, and presence and type of complications.
Results
A total of 43 patients were included in the study: 17 patients’ mandibles were classified as class I according to Luhr, 15 as class II, and 11 as class III. All patients underwent open reduction and internal fixation by extraoral approach in 25 patients, intraoral in 15 patients, and mixed in 3 patients. A single 2.0 miniplate was used in 16 patients, followed by a single 2.4 reconstruction plate in 13 patients, by two 2.0 miniplates, and three 2.0 miniplates. Outcome was considered to be satisfying in 30 patients, with no complications. Complications were observed in 13 cases.
Conclusions
Treatment of unilateral body fractures of the edentulous mandible must still be based on the type of fracture, degree of atrophy, experience of the surgeon, and patients’ preference. An adequate stability can be obtained by different plating techniques that have to be appropriately tailored to every single specific patient.
The purpose of this research is to develop a multi-agent model of an electrical engineering complex for an oil-and-gas-producing enterprise to ensure power balance in its electrical grid by taking ...into account the increase in the incoming part of the balance by introducing small- and medium-capacity-distributed generation facilities using associated petroleum gas. Previously, the structure of a multi-agent system and the principles of agent interaction were developed to allow the dependence between the processes of generation and consumption of electric energy and the technological process during oil and gas production. In this research, the multi-agent approach is based on the application of the developed methodology to ensure power balance in the electrical grid of an oil-and-gas-producing enterprise. The fuel balance during electricity generation under various scenarios of electrical modes in electrical engineering complexes is considered. To test the operability and make an error estimation of the methodology, digital and physical models of an electrical engineering complex with low- and medium-power-distributed generation facilities were developed for an oil-and-gas-producing enterprise. One of the most important factors that determines the efficiency of a ensuring power balance in the electrical grid of an oil-and-gas-producing enterprise is the consideration in the power balance equation the value of power generated through the use of associated petroleum gas produced by oil production facilities.
The paper is focused on the multi-agent approach to modeling of electrotechnical complexes elements to improve control efficiency. To solve the tasks, modeling methods were used in LabVIEW software ...package, which allow to simulate virtual instrument interactions in real time. It is planned to create models organized within the framework of digital substation concept, taking into account the basic principles of IEC 61850 standard. Use this standard in practice for organizing electrotechnical complex agents' interaction will significantly reduce the costs for creating new communication channels. Comparative analysis with real control systems of electrotechnical complexes at the oil and gas production enterprises was carried out in order to assess performance of the developed model.
The critical study of national history became an essential part of German political culture from the 1960s. Scientists, journalists, and politicians mainly focused on the period of the National ...Socialist dictatorship. After the German unification, the Germans made significant efforts to carry out a critical analysis of their history, primarily focusing on the study of the totalitarian regime in East Germany. It was widely covered in the media, discussed at all levels – from local government meetings to the Bundestag and the federal government. The authorities opened the archives of the Ministry of State Security of the GDR, conducted a mass lustration, published thousands of evidence pieces of violations of human and civil rights. This campaign could to some extent be compared to the denazification of the early post-war period. The focus on the negative aspects of its national history and the self-punishment at the time of chancellor G. Kohl in 1991-1998 were replaced by the concept of "national normality" under G. Schroeder in 1998-2005. After A. Merkel came to power, the formation of a collective national memory was consolidated. From then on, the German establishment narrative suggested that the negative associations with the Third Reich and the regime in the GDR should be balanced by the undeniable cultural, civilizational and democratic achievements of Germany in earlier historical periods. Currently, ajustments are still under way in the official approaches to historical events and processes in the philosophical and political dimension, as the collective narrative strives to take into account today's domestic and foreign political realities, primarily the role and place of Germany in the world. So, the main goal of the article is to clarify the modern political interpretation of the national history of Germany through an analysis of the discourse of German politicians
Mammalian prothymosin α, a small (12 kDa) and extremely acidic protein (p
I 3.5), is a member of the growing family of ‘natively’ unfolded proteins. We demonstrate that at low pH (∼3) and high ...concentrations, prothymosin α is capable of forming regular elongated fibrils with flat ribbon structure 4–5 nm in height and 12–13 nm in width as judged from scanning force and electron microscopy. These aggregates induced a characteristic spectral shift of thioflavin T fluorescence and their circular dichroism spectra were indicative of significant β-sheet content, suggesting formation of classical amyloid. Our findings indicate that natively unfolded proteins may have a general propensity to form amyloid fibrils under conditions inducing partially folded conformations.
This article presents an analytical comparison between constituency parsing and dependency parsing – two types of parsing used in the field of natural language processing (NLP). The study introduces ...an algorithm to enhance keyword extraction, employing the noun phrase extraction feature of the parser to filter out unsuitable phrases. This algorithm is implemented using three different parsers: Spacy, AllenNLP and Stazna. The effectiveness of this algorithm was compared with two popular methods (Yake, Rake) on a dataset of English texts. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm with the SpaCy parser is superior to other keyword extraction algorithms in terms of accuracy and speed. For the AllenNLP and Stanza parsers, our algorithm is also more accurate, but requires much longer execution time. The results obtained allow us to evaluate in more detail the advantages and disadvantages of the parsers studied in the work, as well as to determine directions for further research. The running time of the SpaCy parser is significantly less than the other two parsers because parsers that use transitions for deterministic or machine-learned set of actions to build the dependency tree step by step. They are typically faster and require less memory than graph-based parsers, making them more efficient for parsing large amounts of text. On the other hand, AllenNLP and Stanza use graph-based parsing models that rely on millions of features, which limits their ability to generalize and slows down the speed of analysis compared to transition-based parsers. The task of achieving a balance between the accuracy and speed of a linguistic parser is an open topic that requires further research due to the importance of this problem for improving the efficiency of text analysis, especially in applications that require real-time accuracy. To this end, the authors plan to conduct further research into possible solutions to achieve this balance.
Background
Severe acute respiratory syndrome corona virus (SARS‐CoV‐2) infection frequently causes severe and prolonged disease but only few specific treatments are available. We aimed to investigate ...safety and efficacy of a SARS‐CoV‐2‐specific siRNA‐peptide dendrimer formulation MIR 19® (siR‐7‐EM/KK‐46) targeting a conserved sequence in known SARS‐CoV‐2 variants for treatment of COVID‐19.
Methods
We conducted an open‐label, randomized, controlled multicenter phase II trial (NCT05184127) evaluating safety and efficacy of inhaled siR‐7‐EM/KK‐46 (3.7 mg and 11.1 mg/day: low and high dose, respectively) in comparison with standard etiotropic drug treatment (control group) in patients hospitalized with moderate COVID‐19 (N = 52 for each group). The primary endpoint was the time to clinical improvement according to predefined criteria within 14 days of randomization.
Results
Patients from the low‐dose group achieved the primary endpoint defined by simultaneous achievement of relief of fever, normalization of respiratory rate, reduction of coughing, and oxygen saturation of >95% for 48 h significantly earlier (median 6 days; 95% confidence interval CI: 5–7, HR 1.75, p = .0005) than patients from the control group (8 days; 95% CI: 7–10). No significant clinical efficacy was observed for the high‐dose group. Adverse events were reported in 26 (50.00%), 25 (48.08%), and 28 (53.85%) patients from the low‐, high‐dose and control group, respectively. None of them were associated with siR‐7‐EM/KK‐46.
Conclusions
siR‐7‐EM/KK‐46, a SARS‐CoV‐2‐specific siRNA‐peptide dendrimer formulation is safe, well tolerated and significantly reduces time to clinical improvement in patients hospitalized with moderate COVID‐19 compared to standard therapy in a randomized controlled trial.
MIR 19® (siR‐7‐EM/KK‐46) is a siRNA‐peptide dendrimer formulation targeting a conserved sequence in known SARS‐CoV‐2 variants. Patients with moderate COVID‐19 inhaled 3.7 mg/day of siR‐7‐EM/KK‐46 achieved the primary composite endpoint significantly earlier. Significant clinical effect associated with siR‐7‐EM/KK‐46 at dose 3.7 mg/day was also accompanied by a significant reduction in viral load.Abbreviations: CI, confidence interval; COVID‐19, coronavirus disease 2019; Ct, cycle threshold; mg, milligram; MIR 19®, SARS‐CoV‐2‐specific siRNA‐peptide dendrimer formulation; SARS‐CoV‐2, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2; siRNA, small interfering RNA; RdRp, RNA‐dependent RNA polymerase
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