STUDY QUESTION: What is the profile of miRNAs in seminal plasma of patients with non-obstructive azoospermia (NOA)? SUMMARY ANSWER: miR-141, miR-429 and miR-7-1-3p are significantly increased in seminal plasma of patients with NOA compared with fertile controls. WHAT IS KNOWN ALREADY: There is currently an urgent need to develop a ...

Background:High-voltage overhead power lines (HVOLs) are a source of extremely low-frequency magnetic fields (ELF-MFs), which are classified as possible risk factors for childhood acute leukaemia (AL). The study was carried out to test the hypothesis of an increased AL incidence in children living close to HVOL of 225-400 kV (VHV-HVOL) and ...

It is shown that the solutions of a single-locus diploid model with population control for the spatial and temporal interaction of the three genotypes approach a constant-density equilibrium in which only the more fit allele is present, provided the density dependent birth rate and fitnesses have certain properties. The speed ...

Reduced representation genome-sequencing approaches based on restriction digestion are enabling large-scale marker generation and facilitating genomic studies in a wide range of model and nonmodel systems. However, sampling chromosomes based on restriction digestion may introduce a bias in allele frequency estimation due to polymorphisms in restriction sites. To explore the ...

Over the last years, an intensive worldwide effort is speeding up the developments in the establishment of a global surveillance network for combating pandemics of emergent and re-emergent infectious diseases. Scientists from different fields extending from medicine and molecular biology to computer science and applied mathematics have teamed up for ...

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: To examine the psychometric properties of the Handover Evaluation Scale using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. BACKGROUND: Handover is a fundamental component of clinical practice and is essential to ensure safe patient care. Research indicates a number of problems with this process, with high variability in the ...

We build a Bayesian hierarchical model for relating disease to a potentially harmful exposure, by using data from studies in occupational epidemiology, and compare our method with the traditional group-based exposure assessment method through simulation studies, a real data application, and theoretical calculation. We focus on cohort studies where a ...

Traditional studies about disease dynamics have focused on global stability issues, due to their epidemiological importance. We study a classical SIR-SI model for arboviruses in two different directions: we begin by describing an alternative proof of previously known global stability results by using only a Lyapunov approach. In the sequel, ...

Protozoa of the Leishmania genus are transmitted to humans by the bite of infected sandflies, and are the causative agents of leishmaniasis which ranges from cutaneous to visceral clinical forms. The definitive diagnosis of leishmaniasis has relied traditionally on parasite demonstration, either by microscopy or culture; in the last years, ...

BACKGROUND: Patellofemoral joint (PFJ) malalignment (lateral patella displacement and tilt) has been proposed as a cause of patellofemoral pain. Patella height and/or the morphologic features of the femoral trochlea may predispose one to patella malalignment. QUESTIONS/PURPOSES: The purposes of our study were to assess the associations among patella height, morphologic ...

Indian government has implemented a state of art project "System of Air quality Forecasting And Research (SAFAR)" for assessing the air-quality scenario in Delhi during "Commonwealth Games-2010" which is operational in Delhi. Using a high resolution data of the SAFAR network, we estimate the excess numbers of cases for total, ...

In this paper, we modify the classic Ross-Macdonald model for malaria disease dynamics by incorporating latencies both for human beings and female mosquitoes. One novelty of our model is that we introduce two general probability functions (P (t) and P (t)) to reflect the fact that the latencies differ from ...

Artists' intentions are among the primary data retrieved by art appreciators. However, artistic creation is not always deliberate; artists sometimes fail in their intentions; artists' achievements depend on artworld roles, not only intentions; factors external to the artist contribute to artwork meaning; artworks stand apart from their creators; and interpretation ...

Koenig (J Nerv Ment Dis 196:349-355, 2008) and others have asserted that measures of spirituality used to investigate its association with health seem to present a misleading picture of the relationship because of evidence suggesting that spirituality has become conceptually confounded with well-being. To evaluate this claim, the present study ...

The values of biological parameters related to the life cycles of four populations of Meccus longipennis (Reduviidae: Triatominae) were evaluated. Cohorts of each of the four studied populations from different geographical areas of Mexico were maintained under similar laboratory conditions and then compared. The population from El Saucito de Araujo ...

We constructed population pharmacokinetic (PK) models for the five constituents of daikenchuto (DKT), a traditional Japanese herbal medicine. Data were collected from two randomized PK studies conducted in Japan and the US. Participants received single oral doses of 2.5 g, 5 g, and 10 g of DKT. The plasma concentrations ...

This paper proposes and analyzes a mathematical model on an infectious disease system with a piecewise smooth incidence rate concerning media/psychological effect. The proposed models extend the classic models with media coverage by including a piecewise smooth incidence rate to represent that the reduction factor because of media coverage depends ...

The aim of this study was to investigate the dimensional structure of the Oral Health Impact Profile-14: (OHIP-14). Data was obtained from studies carried out in Rio de Janeiro (N = 504) and Carlos Barbosa (N = 872), in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Exploratory factor analysis ...

The Elemental Psychopathy Assessment (EPA) is a self-report measure designed to assess the basic elements of psychopathy from a Five-Factor Model perspective. Using two large undergraduate samples, the aim of the current study was to further validate this new measure by examining its factor structure and the relations of the ...

The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fourth Edition (WISC-IV) Integrated contains the WISC-IV core and supplemental subtests along with process approach subtests designed to facilitate a process-oriented approach to score interpretation. The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which WISC-IV Integrated subtests measure the constructs they are ...

The psycho-historical account implies two ways of construing the relation of basic exposure to the artistic design stance and artistic understanding. One is empirically dubious and the other does not fit well with the account. The assumption that combining psychology with history requires identifying actual intentions is undermined by the ...

The series of related studies reported here describe the development and validation of the Organizational Stressor Indicator for Sport Performers (OSI-SP). In Study 1, an expert and usability panel examined the content validity and applicability of an initial item pool. The resultant 96 items were analyzed with exploratory factor analyses ...

This study examined the mediating roles of loneliness and intimate communication in the association between alexithymia and marital quality. Guided by a personality-behavioral approach to loneliness and affection exchange theory (AET), two actor-partner interdependence models (APIMs) were examined to test the associations among the variables. Path models (N = 155 ...

The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to investigate the multidimensional nature of ethnic identity exploration and its relevance for a broader sense of identity and well-being. Participants were 3,637 ethnic minority college students who completed survey measures of ethnic identity exploration, general identity coherence, general identity confusion, and well-being. ...

Structural and incremental validity of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV; Wechsler, 2008a) was examined with a sample of 300 individuals referred for evaluation at a university-based clinic. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the WAIS-IV structure was best represented by 4 first-order factors as well as a general intelligence ...

The Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (Version 11; BIS-11; Patton, Stanford, & Barratt, 1995) is a gold-standard measure that has been influential in shaping current theories of impulse control, and has played a key role in studies of impulsivity and its biological, psychological, and behavioral correlates. Psychometric research on the structure of ...

The lactic acid bacteria grown in vacuum-packaged raw beef under 7, 10, 15, and 20 °C has been studied in this paper. Four primary models, the modified Gompertz, logistic, Baranyi, and Huang model were used for data fitting. Statistical criteria such as the bias factor and accuracy factor, mean square error, ...

1. Planning for conservation success requires identifying effective and efficient monitoring strategies but multiple types of uncertainty affect the accuracy and precision of wildlife abundance estimates. Observation uncertainty, a consequence of sampling effort and design as well as the process of observation, is still understudied, with little attention given to ...

Valacta (Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Québec, Canada) is the Canadian Dairy Herd Improvement organization responsible for milk recording in Québec and Atlantic provinces. Up to 14 first-lactation body condition score (BCS) records were collected per cow (average of 2.5 records per cow), allowing the trait to be described by a random regression animal ...

Drosophila has been increasingly used as a model to study hemolymph clotting. Proteomics and bioinformatics identified candidate clotting-factors, several of which were tested using genetics. Mutants and lines with reduced expression of clotting-factors show subtle effects after wounding, indicating that sealing wounds may rely on redundant mechanisms. More striking effects ...

The present study aimed to investigate how motorized vehicle-related factors, road-related factors, and bicyclist-related factors influenced motorists' decisions about initial passing distances and bicyclists' behaviors after the motorists started to pass. A quasi-naturalistic riding method was used for thirty-four participating bicyclists riding an instrumented bicycle in real traffic. The study ...

Schizophrenia is a complex disease, with both genetic and environmental influence. Machine learning techniques can be used to associate different genetic variations at different genes with a (schizophrenic or non-schizophrenic) phenotype. Several machine learning techniques were applied to schizophrenia data to obtain the results presented in this study. Considering these ...

A raster-based method for determining complex view factor patterns is presented (HURES model). The model uses Johnson and Watson's view factor analysis method for fisheye lens photographs. The entire sphere is divided into 13 different view factors: open sky; sunny and shaded building walls, vegetation (trees) and ground surfaces above ...

Adaptation to local environments often occurs through natural selection acting on a large number of loci, each having a weak phenotypic effect. One way to detect these loci is to identify genetic polymorphisms that exhibit high correlation with environmental variables used as proxies for ecological pressures.Here we propose new algorithms ...

OBJECTIVES: To build a comprehensive item pool representing work-relevant physical functioning and to test the factor structure of the item pool. These developmental steps represent initial outcomes of a broader project to develop instruments for the assessment of function within the context of Social Security Administration (SSA) disability programs. DESIGN: ...

Road safety is a major concern in the West, especially in France. Among all the established risk factors for fatal crashes, speed is specific in two ways: every road-user is exposed to it, and it increases not only crash rates but also the severity of crashes. Thus, speed regulation is ...

Rift Valley fever (RVF) is a mosquito-borne viral disease that may produce a considerable impact on the economy in affected countries. In the last decades, the geographic distribution of RVF virus has increased including most of the countries in Africa, Arabia Saudi and Yemen. This situation has raised the concerns ...

SUMMARY: Rare copy number variations (CNVs) are frequent causes of genetic diseases. We developed a graphical software package based on a novel approach that can consistently identify CNVs of all types (homozygous deletions, heterozygous deletions, heterozygous duplications) from exome sequencing data without the need of a paired control. The algorithm ...

The present work describes the application of a non-linear Leslie model for predicting the effects of ionising radiation on wild populations. The model assumes that, for protracted chronic irradiation, the effect-dose relationship is linear. In particular, the effects of radiation are modelled by relating the increase in the mortality rates ...

MOTIVATION: Inference of ancestry using genetic data is motivated by applications in genetic association studies, population genetics and personal genomics. Here, we provide methods and software for improved ancestry inference using genome-wide SNP weights from external reference panels. This approach makes it possible to leverage the rich ancestry information that ...

Intense structuring of plant breeding populations challenge the design of the training set (TS) in genomic selection (GS). An important open question is how the TS should be constructed from multiple related or unrelated small bi-parental families to predict progeny from individual crosses. Here, we used a set of five ...

In this paper, we study the co-embedding problem of how to map different types of patterns into one common low-dimensional space, given only the associations (relation values) between samples. We conduct a generic analysis to discover the commonalities between existing co-embedding algorithms and indirectly related approaches, and investigate possible factors ...

Statistical approaches to evaluate interactions between single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and SNP-environment interactions are of great importance in genetic association studies, as susceptibility to complex disease might be related to the interaction of multiple SNPs and/or environmental factors. With these methods under active development, algorithms to simulate genomic data sets ...

The occurrence of ectotherm disease vectors outside of their previous distribution area and the emergence of vector-borne diseases can be increasingly observed at a global scale and are accompanied by a growing number of studies which investigate the vast range of determining factors and their causal links. Consequently, a broad ...

Objective: The use of haplotypes to impute the genotypes of unmeasured single nucleotide variants continues to rise in popularity. Simulation results suggest that the use of the dosage as a one-dimensional summary statistic of imputation posterior probabilities may be optimal both in terms of statistical power and computational efficiency; however, ...

Background The information in large collections of phylogenetic trees is useful for many comparative genomic studies. Therefore, there is a need for flexible tools that allow exploration of such collections in order to retrieve relevant data as quickly as possible.Results In this paper, we present TPMS (Tree Pattern-Matching Suite), a ...

Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) has emerged in the field of animal behavior as a useful tool for determining and assessing latent behavioral constructs. Because the small sample size problem often occurs in this field, a traditional approach, unweighted least squares, has been considered the most feasible choice for EFA. Two ...

A review of the literature shows that current "standard" laboratory measurements for hemoglobin are subject to numerous factors that affect both accuracy and reliability. In addition, total hemoglobin concentration measurements are subject to numerous factors that affect the "true" hemoglobin value. This article discusses both the physiologic factors that influence ...

Human kidneys produce more than 4 million litres of virtually protein-free primary urine in a lifetime. In healthy individuals, the sieving process is accomplished by the glomerular filter without the smallest sign of clogging, even in old age. How nature accomplishes this extraordinary task is a mystery, but unravelling the ...

In this article, several well-known data-driven causality methods are revisited and comparatively evaluated. These are the Granger-Geweke Causality (GGC), the Partial Directed Coherence (PDC), the Directed Transfer Function (DTF) and the Direct Directed Transfer Function (dDTF). The robustness of the four causality measures against two degradation factors is quantitatively evaluated. ...