A candidate panel of eight urinary proteins shows potential of early diagnosis and risk assessment for diabetic kidney disease in type 1 diabetes.

Diabetic kidney disease (DKD) poses a significant health challenge for individuals with diabetes. At its initial stages, DKD often presents asymptomatically, and the standard for non-invasive diagnosis, the albumin-creatinine ratio (ACR), employs discrete categorizations (normal, microalbuminuria, macroalbuminuria) with limitations in sensitivity and specificity across diverse population cohorts. Single biomarker reliance further restricts the predictive value in clinical settings. Given the escalating prevalence of diabetes, our study uses proteomic technologies to identify novel urinary proteins as supplementary DKD biomarkers. A total of 158 T1D subjects provided urine samples, with 28 (15 DKD; 13 non-DKD) used in the discovery stage and 131 (45 DKD; 40 pDKD; 46 non-DKD) used in the confirmation. We identified eight proteins (A1BG, AMBP, AZGP1, BTD, RBP4, ORM2, GM2A, and PGCP), all of which demonstrated excellent area-under-the-curve (AUC) values (0.959 to 0.995) in distinguishing DKD from non-DKD. Furthermore, this multi-marker panel successfully segregated the most ambiguous group (microalbuminuria) into three distinct clusters, with 80% of subjects aligning either as DKD or non-DKD. The remaining 20% exhibited continued uncertainty. Overall, the use of these candidate urinary proteins allowed for the better classification of DKD and offered potential for significant improvements in the early identification of DKD in T1D populations.

Reliability and Construct Validity Assessment of Wong and Law Emotional Intelligence Scale and Satisfaction With Life Scale in the Indian Hospitality Industry.

Background: Organizations today require employees who are well at managing emotional intelligence and using their emotions in a constructive process. The present study considered the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) and Wong and Law Emotional Intelligence Scale (WLEIS) for the study. WLEIS has four factors: self-emotional appraisal (SEA), other's emotional appraisal (OEA), regulation of emotion (ROE), and use of emotions (UOE). These scales help to manage emotions that result in satisfaction with life. Purpose: The purpose of the study is to validate WLEIS and SWLS because this scale has been validated across many countries but very few studies have been conducted in the Indian context. Apart from that, the current study also incorporated SWLS to validate constructs and measurement models. Methods: A sample of 238 participants working in the hospitality industry have been considered for the study. Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were used to validate all the constructs and measurement models. Results: The three factors of WLEIS and SWLS showed Cronbach's α more than 0.8 that showed excellent internal consistency except for SEA. The results of exploratory factor analysis found that eigenvalue ranged from 2.8 to 5.9, and the total variance explained by constructs was 65.9%. Confirmatory factor analysis showed average variance explained of each construct to be 0.5, and composite reliability to be more than 0.7, which shows excellent construct validity of scales in the Indian hospitality sector. The study also validates measurement research model of WLEIS and SWLS on the basis of model fit index (chi-square/df = 4.83, RMSEA = 0.10, GFI = 0.94, and CFI = 0.90). Conclusion: The strong validity and reliability of the WLEIS and SWLS have proved that neuroscience can apply these scales to measure emotional intelligence in order to understand others' emotions and apply emotions in a constructive process that may lead to satisfaction with life.

Assessment of cognitive and psychomotor domains regarding biomedical waste management and hand hygiene among various categories of health-care professionals at a tertiary care center in Northern India.

BACKGROUND: Health care-associated infections (HAIs) are associated with high morbidity, mortality, and costs in the health-care sector. Large proportions of HAIs are preventable by following infection prevention activities such as hand hygiene (HH) and biomedical waste management (BMWM). AIM: The aim was to evaluate the effectiveness of a structured teaching session on the cognitive and psychomotor domains of BMWM and HH practices in a tertiary health-care institute. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Every participant was evaluated for pretest knowledge assessment using a prestructured format along with skill demonstration. The training included interactive sessions, open discussion, and demonstration of various skills with the active participation of various participants by trained faculty and infection control nursing officers. On completion, every participant underwent posttest evaluation. RESULTS: During 11-month study period, 450 health-care professionals (HCPs) participated in the training program. Cognitive domain score increased from 16.3 ± 2.4 to 21.3 ± 2.0 from pre- to post-test, respectively. In psychomotor domain, pre- and post-test scores for HH were 8.3 ± 3.5 and 14.3 ± 1.4, for BMWM, the corresponding values were 8.6 ± 2.1 and 9.8 ± 0.7, respectively. Overall change in the mean (± standard deviation) score between pre- and post-test for various domains of assessment was 5.0 (±2.7), 6.0 (±3.5), 1.1 (±1.8), and 12.2 (±5.3) for knowledge, HH skill demonstration, BMW segregation skill, and cumulative assessment, respectively. CONCLUSION: The initiation of a structured training program can result in a significant increase in participants' cognitive and psychomotor domains of learning, which may have an indirect impact on the prevention of HAIs.

Monte Carlo Processing on a Chip (MCoaC)-preliminary experiments toward the realization of optimal-hardware for TOPAS/Geant4 to drive discovery.

Amongst the scientific frameworks powered by the Monte Carlo (MC) toolkit Geant4 (Agostinelli et al., 2003), the TOPAS (Tool for Particle Simulation) (Perl et al., 2012) is one. TOPAS focuses on providing ease of use, and has significant implementation in the radiation oncology space at present. TOPAS functionality extends across the full capacity of Geant4, is freely available to non-profit users, and is being extended into radiobiology via TOPAS-nBIO (Ramos-Mendez et al., 2018). A current "grand problem" in cancer therapy is to convert the dose of treatment from physical dose to biological dose, optimized ultimately to the individual context of administration of treatment. Biology MC calculations are some of the most complex and require significant computational resources. In order to enhance TOPAS's ability to become a critical tool to explore the definition and application of biological dose in radiation therapy, we chose to explore the use of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chips to speedup the Geant4 calculations at the heart of TOPAS, because this approach called "Reconfigurable Computing" (RC), has proven able to produce significant (around 90x) (Sajish et al., 2012) speed increases in scientific computing. Here, we describe initial steps to port Geant4 and TOPAS to be used on FPGA. We provide performance analysis of the current TOPAS/Geant4 code from an RC implementation perspective. Baseline benchmarks are presented. Achievable performance figures of the subsections of the code on optimal hardware are presented; Aspects of practical implementation of "Monte Carlo on a chip" are also discussed.

Effect of Doxorubicin on Squamous Cell Carcinoma of Skin: Assessment by MRI Relaxometry at 4.7T.

Squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) of skin has no standard treatment regimen, resulting in recurrences/metastasis. Although, doxorubicin (Dox), an anthracycline antibiotic has demonstrated some degree of efficacy. Molecular imaging can help in assessment of treatment response and prognosis of SCCs. MRI data showed that spin-spin relaxation (T2) time was longer (138 ± 2 msec) in Dox treated Test-II and there is no significant difference in spin-lattice relaxation (T1) time with respective controls. These findings further corroborated with the histology, proliferation index, apoptotic index, and HMGA1 protein expression. Thus, MRI may be a useful tool for monitoring treatment response noninvasively for skin tumor prognosis.

Scoring satisfaction among patients, attending ART Centre of a medical college in North-West India.

Patient satisfaction is a measurable concept comprising multidimensional elements such as access to care, quality of the provider patient interpersonal relationship and affordability of care. This further influences the decisions to seek care and outcomes of diseases. Although stigma and discrimination are potential barriers to effective implementation of the antiretroviral therapy (ART) programme, higher satisfaction levels of patients are also crucial for treatment adherence. A hospital-based cross-sectional study was conducted at the ART centre of IG Medical College, Shimla from November 2008 through May 2009. Three hundred and eighty four consecutive adult (≥18 years) patients attending the ART centre and on ART who consented to participate in the study were enrolled. Of the 384 patients, 209 (54.4%) were males. Majority were in the age bracket of 25-44 years. About 61.6% of the patients were satisfied to the services being provided. Mean Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire (PSQ) scores were the highest for technical quality of care and lowest for financial aspects. About 69.4% of the patients were satisfied towards their care provider. Although a majority of the patients were satisfied, several areas of patient care need improvement.

Assessment of rainwater use and greywater reuse in high-rise buildings in a brownfield site.

This study describes the use of rainwater and greywater (originated from bathroom only) for provision of non-contact indoor and outdoor use in high-rise buildings. A brownfield development site in Box Hill suburb of Melbourne was selected as case study site for this investigation. The performance of alternative servicing options was compared with conventional water supply, stormwater and wastewater servicing. A water balance model UVQ (Urban Volume and Quality) was applied to determine storage capacities and to evaluate the percentage reduction in water supplying, stormwater run-off and wastewater disposal, as well as volumes of rainwater use and greywater reuse. In this study, the impact of variation in collection area (600 m(2) and 900 m(2)) and appliance discharge volumes was examined. A number of demand management options were also investigated. The results of this study indicate greywater reuse is more suited than rainwater use for this development because of the steady, constant supply of greywater compared to the highly fluctuating, storm-event supply of rainwater and the high population density creating comparatively large volumes of greywater.