Certain autoimmune disorders, including Sjögren syndrome (SS) and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), are characterized by autoantibodies against the Ro/SSA and La/SSB cellular antigens. Although the implication of these autoantibodies in disease pathogenesis is still unclear, it is believed that the aberrant responses against autoantigens may extend to other proteins that are not yet well defi...

Objective. Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and Sjögren's syndrome (SS) share clinical and immunogenetic features and may occur together. We undertook this study to determine the risk of primary SS among SLE-unaffected relatives of SLE patients and whether or not primary and secondary SS tended to occur in the same families. Methods. We collected clinical and serological data on 2694 SLE pati...

OBJECTIVES Rates of youth suicide in Australian Indigenous communities are 4 times the national youth average and demand innovative interventions. Historical and persistent disadvantage is coupled with multiple barriers to help seeking. Mobile phone applications offer the opportunity to deliver therapeutic interventions directly to individuals in remote communities. The pilot study aimed to eva...

OBJECTIVE Sjögren's syndrome (SS), an autoimmune disease of exocrine glands, typically starts at the time of adrenopause. We undertook this study to test the hypothesis that SS is characterized by an insufficient androgen effect at the target tissue level. METHODS We searched for androgen response elements (AREs) in the cysteine-rich secretory protein 3 (crisp-3) gene. Dehydroepiandrosterone ...

Neighborhood and family social capital and oral health status of children in Iowa. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my committee for their guidance, feedback, and support throughout this process. A master's thesis is a graduate student's first step into the incredible world of research, and so much of that transition is dependent on good guidance and mentorship. I al...

Serial sections of lower lip salivary gland (LSG) biopsies were examined by immunohistochemistry, using a battery of B- and partly T-related antibodies (CD5, CD20, CD21, CD27, CD38, CD45RO, CD79a, Bcl-2 and Bcl-6) in different groups of subjects: healthy controls and clinically verified smoking or nonsmoking cases of primary Sjögren's syndrome (SS). The purpose was to characterize the B-cell pa...

Socioeconomic status (SES) disparities are linked to increased cardiovascular disease risk. Although typically considered an individual or family indicator, SES alternatively can be derived from neighborhood characteristics. Previous research has found both family and neighborhood SES predict laboratory blood pressure responses in youth. The question remains as to whether this SES gradient pred...

This paper presents a novel hybrid ant colony optimization approach called SS_ACO algorithm to solve the vehicle routing problem. The main feature of the hybrid algorithm is to hybridize the solution construction mechanism of the ant colony optimization (ACO) with scatter search (SS). In our hybrid algorithm, we use ACO algorithm and greedy heuristic to generate the initial solutions which are ...

A novel discriminative supervised neighborhood preserving embedding (DSNPE) method is proposed for feature extraction in classifying hyperspectral remote sensing imagery. DSNPE can preserve the local manifold structure and the neighborhood structure. What’s more, for each data point, DSNPE aims at pulling the neighboring points with the same class label towards it as near as possible, while sim...