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Objective: to examine factors associated with cigarette and hookah smoking among Middle Eastern (ME) Arab college women. Participants: 406 adult women of ME Arabic background, currently enrolled in or recently graduated from a US college. Methods: a cross-sectional design, using an anonymous online survey of demographic characteristics, sociocultural factors, and access to health care factors. Data analysis included regression model to identify predictors of smoking behaviors. Results: Smoking rates were 21% and 19% for cigarette and hookah smoking...

PURPOSE: To assess self-reported impairment of work productivity and activities of daily living and the indirect costs of absenteeism in a sample of working patients with uveitis and to examine their association with sociodemographic, occupational, and clinical variables. METHODS: We conducted a cross-sectional, cross-association study. Participants completed the self-administered Work Productivity and Activity Impairment Questionnaire uveitis 2.0 to assess absenteeism, presenteeism, overall work impairment, and impairment in activities of daily living...

Despite its significant progress, cross-modal retrieval still suffers from one-to-many matching cases, where the multiplicity of semantic instances in another modality could be acquired by a given query. However, existing approaches usually map heterogeneous data into the learned space as deterministic point vectors. In spite of their remarkable performance in matching the most similar instance, such deterministic point embedding suffers from the insufficient representation of rich semantics in one-to-many correspondence...

Knowledge tracing (KT) refers to predicting learners' performance in the future according to their historical responses, which has become an essential task in intelligent tutoring systems. Most deep learning-based methods usually model the learners' knowledge states via recurrent neural networks (RNNs) or attention mechanisms. Recently emerging graph neural networks (GNNs) assist the KT model to capture the relationships such as question-skill and question-learner. However, non-pairwise and complex higher-order information among responses is ignored...

Cross-modal hashing (CMH) has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Almost all existing CMH methods primarily focus on reducing the modality gap and semantic gap, i.e., aligning multi-modal features and their semantics in Hamming space, without taking into account the space gap, i.e., difference between the real number space and the Hamming space. In fact, the space gap can affect the performance of CMH methods. In this paper, we analyze and demonstrate how the space gap affects the existing CMH methods, which therefore raises two problems: solution space compression and loss function oscillation...

BACKGROUND: The different clinical presentations of fibromyalgia (FMS) may play independent roles in the unclear etiology of cognitive impairments and depressive symptoms seen in this population. Understanding how these clinical presentations are associated with FMS's clinical and neurophysiological aspects is important when developing effective treatments. AIM: To explore the relationship between memory complaints and depressive symptoms, and the different clinical and neurophysiological characteristics of FMS...

BACKGROUND: There is a close association between diet and abdominal pain, however, relationship between inflammatory diet and characteristics of abdominal pain has not been characterized yet. METHODS: This study analyzed baseline data from the UK Biobank, 3-item DHQ-Abdominal Pain Questionnaire (DHQ-3Q) which including abdominal pain in the past three months, severity of abdominal pain, and frequency of abdominal pain, and data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 2017 to 2020...

OBJECTIVE: To examine the impact of "cross-market" hospital mergers on prices and quality and the extent to which serial acquisitions contribute to any measured effects. DATA SOURCES: 2009-2017 commercial claims from the Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) and quality measures from Hospital Compare. STUDY DESIGN: Event study models in which the treated group consisted of hospitals that acquired hospitals further than 50 miles, and the control group was hospitals that were not part of any merger activity (as a target or acquirer) during the study period...

BACKGROUND: Respiratory diseases, including active tuberculosis (TB), asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), constitute substantial global health challenges, necessitating timely and accurate diagnosis for effective treatment and management. OBJECTIVE: This research seeks to develop and evaluate a noninvasive user-friendly artificial intelligence (AI)-powered cough audio classifier for detecting these respiratory conditions in rural Tanzania. METHODS: This is a nonexperimental cross-sectional research with the primary objective of collection and analysis of cough sounds from patients with active TB, asthma, and COPD in outpatient clinics to generate and evaluate a noninvasive cough audio classifier...

The development of single-system materials that exhibit both multi-color room-temperature phosphorescence (RTP) and thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) with tunable afterglow colors and channels is challenging. In this study, we developed four metal-free carbon dots (CDs) through structural tailoring and achieved panchromatic high-brightness RTP via strong chemical encapsulation in urea. The maximum lifetime and quantum yield reached 2141 ms and 56.55%, respectively. Moreover, CDs-IV@urea, prepared via core-shell interaction engineering, exhibited a dual afterglow of red RTP at 622 nm and green TADF...

IMPORTANCE: Self-report surveys suggest that long-lasting taste deficits may occur after SARS-CoV-2 infection, influencing nutrition, safety, and quality of life. However, self-reports of taste dysfunction are inaccurate, commonly reflecting deficits due to olfactory not taste system pathology; hence, quantitative testing is needed to verify the association of post-COVID-19 condition with taste function. OBJECTIVE: To use well-validated self-administered psychophysical tests to investigate the association of COVID-19 with long-term outcomes in taste and smell function...

IMPORTANCE: Numerous studies have provided evidence for the negative associations of the COVID-19 pandemic with mental health, but data on the use of psychotropic medication in children and adolescents after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic are lacking. OBJECTIVE: To assess the rates and trends of psychotropic medication prescribing before and over the 2 years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in children and adolescents in France. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: This cross-sectional study used nationwide interrupted time-series analysis of outpatient drug dispensing data from the IQVIA X-ponent database...

BACKGROUND: Active participation of cancer patients and their caregivers in decision-making, along with high-quality communication, is crucial in patient-centered cancer management. Although numerous factors affecting patients' communication and decision-making involvement have been identified, it is still unclear which ones are the most prevalent and critical. OBJECTIVE: To identify factors that contribute to high-quality patient-centered communication and decision-making participation from the perspectives of cancer patients, informal caregivers, and/or healthcare professionals...

Numerous studies have described declines in sexual well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic, although experiences of sexual distress during this time appear to be mixed. Previous research has relied on cross-sectional methodology and focused on individuals in relationships. Furthermore, little is known about the frequency of "COVID-safe" sexual behaviors, such as online sexual activities. These gaps in the literature were addressed using a prospective, longitudinal online study examining sexual distress, predictors of sexual distress (i...

PURPOSE OF THE REVIEW: Antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) is a rare systemic autoimmune disorder that can escalate into a 'thrombotic storm' called the catastrophic antiphospholipid syndrome (CAPS), frequently requiring ICU admission for multiple organ failure. This review aims to offer insight and recent evidence on critically-ill APS patients. RECENT FINDINGS: The CAPS classification criteria define this condition as the involvement of at least three organs/systems/tissues within less than a week, caused by small vessel thrombosis, in patients with elevated antiphospholipid antibodies levels...

Recent years have seen increased attention given to identifying and describing the levels of gambling participation that confer a risk of harm in order to generate public health advice regarding lower-risk gambling. However, most of the existing literature has failed to explicitly assess these limits in a prospective manner. The purpose of this study is to employ a methodology consistent with prior investigations to evaluate the level of gambling participation associated with an increased risk of future gambling-related harm...

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to examine the characteristics of assistive device users and influencing factors among disabled elderly in China. METHODS: A total of 13,510 disabled elderly in Sichuan Province were surveyed. Disability was assessed using the Barthel Activities of Daily Living Scale, mental status, sensory perception, and social engagement evaluation. Univariate analysis and logistic regression analysis were employed to identify the impact factors. RESULTS: The prevalence of assistive device utilization among participants was 79...

Schizophrenia (SZ) has been acknowledged as a highly intricate mental disorder for a long time. In fact, individuals with SZ experience a blurred line between fantasy and reality, leading to a lack of awareness about their condition, which can pose significant challenges during the treatment process. Due to the importance of the issue, timely diagnosis of this illness can not only assist patients and their families in managing the condition but also enable early intervention, which may help prevent its advancement...

Neurodegenerative diseases (ND) pose significant challenges for biomedicine in the twenty-first century, particularly considering the global demographic ageing and the subsequent increase in their prevalence. Characterized as progressive, chronic and debilitating, they often result in higher mortality rates compared with the general population. Research agendas and biomedical technologies are shaped by power relations, ultimately affecting patient wellbeing and care. Drawing on the concepts of bio- and necropolitics, introduced by philosophers Foucault and Mbembe, respectively, this perspective examines the interplay between the territoriality and governmentality around demographic ageing, ND and death, focussing on knowledge production as a dispositif of power by highlighting the marginal role that the phenomenon of mortality plays in the ND research landscape...

The introduction of mental health collaborative care (MHCC) is one of the strategies to scale up access to mental health care in primary health care in Brazil. This article investigates an experience of mental health collaborative care in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is a qualitative study involving interviews with physicians and mental health professionals working in primary health care units located in the northern part of the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The aim is to examine the various strategies and negotiations that primary health care professionals deploy to identify mental distress and plan health care interventions...