No abstract

BackgroundWe examined the prevalence of acute kidney injury (AKI) risk factors in the emergency medical unit, generated a modified risk assessment tool and tested its ability to predict AKI.MethodsA total of 1196 patients admitted to medical admission units were assessed for patient-associated AKI risk factors. Subsequently, 898 patients were assessed for a limited number of fixed risk factors with the addition of hypotension and sepsis. This was correlated to AKI episodes.ResultsIn the first cohort, the prevalence of AKI risk factors was 2.1 ± 2.0 per patient, with a positive relationship between age and the number of risk factors and a higher number of risk factors in patients ≥65 years. In the second cohort, 12.3% presented with or developed AKI. Patients with AKI were older and had a higher number of AKI risk factors. In the AKI cohort, 72% of the patients had two or more AKI risk factors compared with 43% of the cohort with no AKI. When age ≥65 years was added as an independent risk factor, 84% of those with AKI had two or more AKI risk factors compared with 55% of those with no AKI. Receiver operating characteristic analysis suggests that the use of common patient-associated known AKI risk factors performs no better than age alone as a predictor of AKI.ConclusionsDetailed assessment of well-established patient-associated AKI risk factors may not facilitate clinicians to apportion risk. This suggests that additional work is required to develop a more sensitive validated AKI-predictive tool that would be useful in this clinical setting.

With the growing number of connected online users producing a tremendous amount of unstructured short-texts daily, understanding and mining these data becomes very useful for individuals, governments and companies for identifying the public users' attitudes towards different entities, such as products, services, events, places, organizations and topics. However, analyzing these short-texts using traditional methods becomes a significant challenge due to the shortness and sparsity nature of short-texts. To address such challenges, the literature introduced a broad spectrum of short-texts mining approaches and applications. Hence, this paper provides a comprehensive survey of this spectrum based on a criterion-based research strategy. The different mining techniques and approaches utilized in shorttexts were highlighted along with their related issues and challenges. This paper surveyed a total of 1575 research papers published in the refereed conferences and journals in the area of short-texts mining were surveyed from 2006 until 2017, from which 187 primary studies were included and analyzed to constitute the source of the present paper. After a careful review of these articles, it is obvious that there are research gaps in other languages than English and Chinese, multi-languages, and in specific domain studies.

Introduction:Voodoo is a mixture of herbs and spices that are sprayed with a synthetic compound that mimics the effects of Cannabis. The widespread over-the-counter availability of these products made these compounds the 2 nd most common frequently used recreational drug after marijuana in teenagers and young adults. This study aimed to investigate the sub chronic toxic effects of Voodoo (Voodoo abuse) on the central nervous system (CNS) in adult male albino rats.Methodology: thirty adult male albino rats were divided into three equal groups; negative control group, positive control group, and Voodoo extract treated group. Behavioral tests, neurotransmitter concentration in brain tissues and histopathological examination of brain tissues were performed.Results: general activity changes, significant decrease in food intake, feces formation and weight gain were reported between control and Voodoo treated group. The behavioral Y maze test revealed significant inhibition of the spontaneous alternation while, locomotor activity and rotarod test revealed significant inhibition of the neuromuscular coordinative function. The neurotransmitters (serotonin, dopamine, adrenaline and noradrenaline) assaying in the brain tissues of Voodoo treated group revealed significant decrease. These neurological changes were supported by the histopathological findings in the form of shrunken cells with dense nuclei and vacuolated cytoplasm in addition to the positive cytoplasmic immunoreaction for caspase -3 in the brain tissues.Conclusion: Voodoo extract was found to have a functional and structural deleterious CNS effect with sub chronic exposure in adult male albino rats.