background: expansion of bone marrow cavity and decreased cortical and trabecular bone tissues and osteoporosis are resulted from beta-thalassemia. the aim of this study was to assess bone mineral density (bmd) in patients with β thalassemia major and intermedia, and to determine their biochemical and hormonal profiles that may affect bmd. materials and methods: in a cross sectional study from ...

Studies of lattice models of proteins have suggested that the appropriate energy expression for protein design may include nonthermodynamic terms to accommodate negative design concerns. One method, developed in lattice model studies, maximizes a quantity known as the " Z-score," which compares the lowest energy sequence whose ground state structure is the target structure to an ensemble of ran...

Using supervised and unsupervised features individually or together, we (a) detect and filter out noisy workers via Z-score, and (b) weight worker votes for consensus labeling. We evaluate on noisy labels from Amazon Mechanical Turk in which workers judge Web search relevance of query/document pairs. In comparison to a majority vote baseline, results show a 6% error reduction (48.83% to 51.91%)...

Objectives. Children with JIA can experience delayed and restricted growth. The objectives of this study were to investigate the influence of etanercept (ETN) on vertical growth and factors associated with improved growth in patients with JIA over the initial 2 years of treatment. Methods. This analysis was restricted to ETN-treated patients in the British Society for Paediatric and Adolescent ...

BACKGROUND Allograft dysfunction is a common finding early after heart transplant (HT). We sought to assess the recovery of left (LV) and right ventricular (RV) function during the first year after HT in children and young adults using pulsed-wave tissue Doppler imaging. METHODS AND RESULTS We analyzed serially performed echocardiography in 44 pediatric HT recipients (median age: 7.3 years at...

BACKGROUND There is a need for validation of noninvasive alternatives to liver biopsy for the evaluation of fibrosis in children with chronic hepatitis C (CHC). The aim of this study was to evaluate the diagnostic performance of serum biomarkers modified by the body mass index z-score (BMI z-score) for the detection of fibrosis and steatosis in children with CHC. METHODS Thirty children aged ...

BACKGROUND Childhood obesity remains a prominent public health problem. Walkable built environments may prevent excess weight gain. OBJECTIVES We examined the association of walkable built environment characteristics with body mass index (BMI) z-score among a large sample of children and adolescents. METHODS We used geocoded residential address data from electronic health records of 49,770 ...

Identifying community structure in networks is an issue of particular interest in network science. The modularity introduced by Newman and Girvan is the most popular quality function for community detection in networks. In this study, we identify a problem in the concept of modularity and suggest a solution to overcome this problem. Specifically, we obtain a new quality function for community d...

OBJECTIVE Epidemiological studies have shown an association between OA and increased BMD. To explore the nature of this relationship, we examined whether the risk of OA is increased in individuals with high bone mass (HBM), in whom BMD is assumed to be elevated due to a primary genetic cause. METHODS A total of 335,115 DXA scans were screened to identify HBM index cases (defined by DXA scan a...

BACKGROUND Most existing reports indicate that body weight gradually increases following marital status and thereby enhances health status and decreases mortality; however, the association between marital status and the metabolic syndrome (MetS) has not been thoroughly investigated in a longitudinal study. OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to investigate the potential effects of marital st...