Financing healthcare services: a qualitative assessment of private health insurance schemes in Ghana by Angela Asante, Richard A. Bonney, Peter Twum

“…However, 12 licensed Private Health Insurance Schemes (PHISs) offer complementary services, enhancing healthcare access and quality through additional coverage and service delivery. This study aimed to assess the operations and performance of PHIS in Ghana. …”
Get full text

Antibacterial and Cytotoxic Evaluation of <i>Lespedeza cuneata</i> Extract Against Periodontal Pathogens and Human Gingival Cells: A Novel Option for Periodontal Therapy by Hyo-Ju Yoon, Gyoo-Cheon Kim, Seoul-Hee Nam

“…Background: This study aims to evaluate the antibacterial effect of <i>Lespedeza cuneata</i> extract on <i>Porphyromonas gingivalis</i> (<i>P. gingivalis</i>), a principal bacterium in periodontal disease, and its impact on human gingival fibroblasts (HGFs). Methods: Dried <i>Lespedeza cuneata</i> was extracted using 70% ethanol, concentrated, and freeze-dried to obtain the <i>Lespedeza cuneata</i> extract in powder form. …”
Get full text

Characterization of Lactobacillus spp. as Probiotic and Antidiabetic Potential Isolated from Boza, Traditional Fermented Beverage in Turkey by Chandana Kumari V. B., Sujay Huligere, Jayanthi M. K., Khang Wen Goh, Sudhanva M. Desai, Kalabharthi H. L., Ramith Ramu

“…They exhibited significant resistance to gastrointestinal and intestinal fluids, also indicating their potential for adhesion. Additionally, the isolates showed a significant antibacterial activity, particularly against Micrococcus luteus. …”
Get full text

A scoping review key elements and effects of cardiovascular disease management programs based on community-based participatory research. by Juhyeon Yang, Bohyun Park

“…Regarding application of the CBPR principles, community partners participated only in executing the research, not in analysing and interpreting research results. In addition, among the 21 studies selected were 6 randomised controlled trials, all of which showed a significant positive effect in experimental groups compared to control groups.…”
Get full text

Rhus Verniciflua Stokes Inhibits PD-1 Expression and Induces Anticancer Effects by Enhancing T Cell Function by Seoyoung Kim PhD, Young-Kwan Lee PhD, Wang-Jun Lee MD, PhD, Hyoun Jong Moon MD, PhD, Sanghun Lee KMD, PhD

“…Specifically, T cells treated with 100 µg/mL of RVS showed a 20.6% increase in cytotoxicity against MCF-7 cells and a 36.2% increase against MDA-MB231 cells compared to the control. Additionally, RVS treatment led to a significant reduction in PD-1 expression on T cells. …”
Get full text

Influence of Vanadium 4+ and 5+ Ions on the Differentiation and Activation of Human Osteoclasts by Matthias A. König, Oliver P. Gautschi, Hans-Peter Simmen, Luis Filgueira, Dieter Cadosch

“…The aim of this study was to investigate whether vanadium (V) ions induce differentiation of monocytic OC precursors into osteoresorptive multinucleated cells. In addition, the influence of V ions on the activation and function of in vitro generated OC was observed. …”
Get full text

Determination of Ischemia Onset Based on Automatically Generated Spectralis SD-OCT Values in Acute Central Retinal Artery Occlusion by Maria Casagrande, Robert Kromer, Daniel A. Wenzel, Sven Poli, Martin S. Spitzer, Vasyl Druchkiv, Maximilian Schultheiss, Spyridon Dimopoulos

“…In conclusion, the automatic measurement of RRTI also allows the differentiation of CRAOs within a possible therapeutic time window ≤4.5 hours and CRAOs ≥4.5 hours with a high sensitivity and specificity. Additionally, it offers quicker, easier, and a user-independent assessment of ischemia onset, helping to set a base for establishing automatic indices generated by the OCT machines.…”
Get full text

Rhododendron diversity conservation in global botanic gardens: a case study of Maddenia species by Ling Hu, Marion MacKay, Susan E. Gardiner, Jennifer A. Tate

“…We recommend that wild collections of endemic species of subsection Maddenia should be established in all 10 countries of origin and that data should be shared internationally for metacollections. In addition to proposing priorities, our case study highlights the challenges facing data and collection management to help achieve effective ex situ conservation for Rhododendron species.…”
Get full text

Data-Driven Synchronization Analysis of a Bouncing Crowd by Jun Chen, Huan Tan, Katrien Van Nimmen, Peter Van den Broeck

“…A group size of 48 persons is considered in the experiment whereby the individual body motions are registered synchronously by means of a 3D motion capture system. …”
Get full text

Peculiarities of procedural decision-making during pre-trial investigation of high-profile offences a sexual nature committed against children by T. H. Fomina, O. V. Pchelina

“…It has been noted that for a comprehensive, complete and impartial pre-trial investigation of high-profile criminal offences, including sexual offences committed against children, the need to establish an investigative team is provided for at the regulatory level. In addition, the law provides for the possibility for an investigating judge or court to decide to conduct criminal proceedings in a closed court session during the entire trial or a separate part of it in the case of a criminal offence against sexual freedom and sexual inviolability of a person (Article 27(2)(2) of the CPC of Ukraine). …”
Get full text

Plastic harmful ingredients reduce the level of neurofilament light chain protein by Long Li, Xiaoxiu Ma, Junwei Liu, Yongli Wu

“…Furthermore, a significant dose-response relationship was observed between MEHHP and NFL, while Butyl paraben and Mono (Hydroxy-Isononyl) Ester exhibited a distinct ''inverted U-shaped'' nonlinear pattern with NFL. Additionally, Weighted Quantile Sum model allowed us to identify the mixed effects of all 24 plastic hazardous ingredients, with Mono(2-Ethyl-5-Oxohexyl) Phthalate, Mono-isobutyl phthalate, Mon butyl Phthalate, Propyl paraben and Triclosan occupying prominent positions. …”
Get full text

Efficacy and safety of various regional nerve blocks for postoperative analgesia in paediatric patients undergoing developmental dysplasia of the hip surgery: a protocol for system... by Lei Yang, Yu Zhang, Chen Fu, Wang Junxia, Zhijun Qin

“…Introduction Alleviating postoperative pain from developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) surgery is beneficial for paediatric patients. …”
Get full text

Genome sequencing and comparison of five Tilletia species to identify candidate genes for the detection of regulated species infecting wheat by Hai D. T. Nguyen, Tahera Sultana, Prasad Kesanakurti, Sarah Hambleton

“…To facilitate the development of additional molecular assays for diagnostics, we generated whole genome data for multiple strains of the two regulated wheat pathogens and their closest relatives. …”
Get full text

Treatment of Aortic and Iliac Artery Aneurysms with Multilayer Flow Modulator: Single Centre Experiences by Cengiz Ovalı, Aykut Şahin, Murat Eroğlu, Sinan Balçın, Sadettin Dernek, Mustafa Behçet Sevin

“…The present results should be confirmed with additional future studies conducted with larger patient groups for longer periods.…”
Get full text

Lip forgery detection via spatial-frequency domain combination by Jiaying LIN, Wenbo ZHOU, Weiming ZHANG, Nenghai YU

“…In recent years, numerous “face-swapping” videos have emerged in social networks, one of the representatives is the lip forgery with speakers.While making life more entertaining for the public, it poses a significant crisis for personal privacy and property security in cyberspace.Currently, under non-destructive conditions, most of the lip forgery detection methods achieve good performance.However, the compression operations are widely used in practice especially in social media platforms, face recognition and other scenarios.While saving pixel and time redundancy, the compression operations affect the video quality and destroy the coherent integrity of pixel-to-pixel and frame-to-frame in the spatial domain, and then the degradation of its detection performance and even misjudgment of the real video will be caused.When the information in the spatial domain cannot provide sufficiently effective features, the information in the frequency domain naturally becomes a priority research object because it can resist compression interference.Aiming at this problem, the advantages of frequency information in image structure and gradient feedback were analyzed.Then the lip forgery detection via spatial-frequency domain combination was proposed, which effectively utilized the corresponding characteristics of information in spatial and frequency domains.For lip features in the spatial domain, an adaptive extraction network and a light-weight attention module were designed.For frequency features in the frequency domain, separate extraction and fusion modules for different components were designed.Subsequently, by conducting a weighted fusion of lip features in spatial domain and frequency features in frequency domain, more texture information was preserved.In addition, fine-grained constraints were designed during the training to separate the inter-class distance of real and fake lip features while closing the intra-class distance.Experimental results show that, benefiting from the frequency information, the proposed method can enhance the detection accuracy under compression situation with certain transferability.On the other hand, in the ablation study conducted on the core modules, the results verify the effectiveness of the frequency component for anti-compression and the constraint of the dual loss function in training.…”
Get full text

Interaction of α-Cembrenediol with Human Serum Albumin Based on Spectroscopic and Computational Analyses by Xian-Kun Su, Zhen-Chun Sun, Chang-You Zhao, Hui Yang, Tian-Ming Zhao, Chao Ma, Guo-Fei Zhu

“…However, knowledge of the absorption, transport, and release of α-cembrenediol in drug metabolism within the body is currently limited. Therefore, we aimed to gain a comprehensive understanding of the in vivo transport, distribution, and elimination mechanisms of α-cembrenediol and investigate the interaction between α-cembrenediol and HSA. …”
Get full text

Modeling of genetic processes underlying the development of resistance to fipronil in the Colorado potato beetle (Leptinotarsa decemlineata Say) by K. A. Kitaev, I. S. Mardanshin, E. V. Surina, T. I. Leontieva, M. B. Udalov, G. V. Benkovskaya

“…The factor of differentiated mortality during the winter was additionally introduced into the model. The use of phenetic markers of nonspecific resistance to environmental factors allowed us to compute the model with mediated intergenic interactions. …”
Get full text

Effects of limited introgressions from Triticum timopheevii Tausch. into the genome of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) on physiological and biochemical traits under normal water... by T. A. Pshenichnikova, A. V. Permyakov, S. V. Osipova, M. D. Permyakova, E. G. Rudikovskaya, V. V. Verchoturov

“…In flag leaves of 821 line, an increased transpiration rate and stomatal conductance (1.6 times the value in optimal watering and 1.2 times the value under water deficit) and, correspondingly, reduced water use efficiency were found compared to the initial cultivar. Additionally, the actual effectiveness and electron transport rate of photosystem II and chlorophyll and carotenoid content were reduced as well as the total antioxidant capacity (approximately three-fold) under water stress. …”
Get full text

Biomechanical and Biological Multidisciplinary Strategies in the Orthodontic Treatment of Patients with Periodontal Diseases: A Review of the Literature by Gaia Viglianisi, Alessandro Polizzi, Teresa Lombardi, Mariacristina Amato, Cristina Grippaudo, Gaetano Isola

“…To optimize outcomes, periodontal considerations such as gingival biotype, attachment levels, and bone support must be integrated into treatment planning. Additionally, adjunctive periodontal therapies such as selective alveolar decortication and regenerative procedures are explored as valuable tools to enhance periodontal support and optimize treatment outcomes. …”
Get full text

A Medication Management App (Smart-Meds) for Patients After an Acute Coronary Syndrome: Pilot Pre-Post Mixed Methods Study by Frederic Ehrler, Liliane Gschwind, Hamdi Hagberg, Philippe Meyer, Katherine Blondon

“…However, the narrative component of the app did not receive favorable feedback from participants. …”
Get full text