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Nutritional Status of Women with Breast Cancer Undergoing Chemotherapy: A Descriptive Study
No full textBackground: Breast cancer and treatment-related side effects can negatively affect nutritional status, which can have deleterious effects on health outcomes. Research is minimal on nutritional status during intravenous chemotherapy. There are inconsistent assessments of nutritional status, making optimizing nutritional status challenging.
Objectives: Study aimed to determine feasibility and acceptability of the study protocol, describe nutritional status and health outcomes, examine relationships between nutritional status and health outcomes, and determine cofactors that may predict nutritional status in women with breast cancer at two timepoints surrounding chemotherapy.
Methods: A longitudinal, descriptive, correlational study included menopausal women with early-stage breast cancer starting chemotherapy. Anthropometrics, biomarkers, and questionnaires were collected. Descriptive statistics were used to describe nutritional status and health outcome variables, correlations were used to examine the relationships between nutritional status and health outcomes, and regression was used to determine cofactors that may predict nutritional status.
Results: Thirty participants completed the study. Anthropometrics and the Patient-generated Subjective Global Assessment (PG-SGA) changed during the study indicating worsening nutritional status. Health-related quality of life (HRQOL) improved, although physical function was found to be inconclusive. Improved nutritional status was associated with improved health outcomes, and income, education, comorbidities, performance status, and dietary intake may predict nutritional status.
Conclusions: Nutritional status worsened during chemotherapy. Nutritional assessments should be systematically added to practice to better evaluate nutritional status and associated cofactors. Results suggest a need for social workers, dietitians, and care coordinators earlier in care to improve nutritional status and health outcomes
Building a Culture of Preparedness: Using Community Emergency Response Teams to Promote Preparedness Behavior
Get PDFCommunities throughout the nation use the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) program to supplement the disaster response after hazard events as well as help build a culture of preparedness. Currently, practitioners and academics have limited knowledge about how CERTs promote enhanced preparedness postures. To address that knowledge gap, 20 CERT program managers were interviewed in this study to improve the general understanding of how CERTs contribute to developing a preparedness culture. The results identify program activities, objectives, and measures. In addition, this study introduces the Preparedness Behavior Change Model and collects feedback on its usefulness, which suggests it has a high degree of understandability as well as perceived and intended utility. Furthermore, this study aligns CERT program activities with the stages of preparedness behavior. Lastly, this study discusses the implications of the present research and its limitations, as well as identifies emerging areas for future research
mutual realm
Get PDFmutual realm is a container for my many meandering thoughts on speculative futures, present-day-truth-telling, and the everyday construction of histories. Informed by systems of belief and power that humans have created to grapple with the unknown, the writing illustrates how storytelling builds worlds, assigning value to things by inscribing them with desire. In parts fact and fantasy, sculpture is considered as a form of sorting, making known the ways in which my experience of living between publics whose methods for demarcating boundaries, communally agreed upon superstitions, and algorithms for assigning meaning have marked my unconscious and affect my daily trajectories. In this text as in my work, space exists in myriad forms– as a blueprint, a dream, or a real and lived experience
Smear Layer Removal by Irrigation Adjuncts: a Scanning Electron Microscopy Study
No full textPurpose: This study aimed to compare the intracanal smear layer removal ability of two adjunctive irrigation modalities: the AdvErL EVO laser, the GentleWave® Procedure, and their combination, after minimally invasive canal instrumentation.
Methods: Forty molars were accessed, the mesiobuccal canals of maxillary and mandibular molars were prepared up to apical size 25.04 using rotary instrumentation, then irrigated using: conventional needle irrigation (CNI), laser-assisted irrigation (LAI), the GentleWave® Procedure (GWP), and LAI followed by GWP (LAI+GWP). The teeth were then decoronated and split longitudinally. One-half of each root was selected for preparation and analysis under scanning electron microscope. Blinded evaluators rated the randomized images on a 4-point scale. Interrater agreement was assessed using Kappa statistic. Nonparametric Kruskal-Wallis test was used to test for associations between the rating and the irrigation method. Post hoc pairwise comparisons were assessed using the Dwass, Steel, Critchlow-Flinger method.
Results: The median rating for CNI = 4, LAI = 3, GWP = 2, LAI+GWP = 1.5. The latter three groups resulted in more smear layer removal than conventional needle irrigation, but there was no statistical significance among them (p\u3c 0.05).
Conclusion: There was no difference between the AdvErL EVO laser, the GentleWave® Procedure, and their combination, in smear layer removing ability. They all outperformed conventional needle irrigation
A Prospective, Observational Clinical Study Evaluating Marginal Bone Levels and Volumetric Changes of Subcrestally Placed Platform Switch Dental Implants – Preliminary 1 Year Follow Up Data
No full textPurpose
This prospective cohort study evaluated marginal bone levels (MBL) stability and peri-implant tissue volumetric changes around platform-switched implants over 12 months post-loading. The null hypothesis was that crestal bone levels would be stable over one year period and soft-tissue parameters would have a positive correlation to 3D volumetric changes with high patient satisfaction.
Methods/Materials
This study is a prospective observational study designed to assess implant survival rates and crestal bone changes over one year. A total of 35 patients, each requiring at least one implant to replace a missing posterior tooth, met the inclusion criteria and participated in the study. Medical and dental history, Cone Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) analysis, periapical radiographs, and digital impressions were collected at baseline. Clinical parameters were also collected including gingival index (GI) and plaque index (PI). Standardized radiographs were further taken at implant placement, prosthetic phase, and at one-year follow-up for the evaluation of crestal bone changes. Digital impressions taken at baseline, prosthetic phase and at one-year follow-up were superimposed in specific metrology software for volumetric analysis. Implant survival rate was assessed via absence of implant mobility, and pain, with implant being in function. Patient-reported outcomes were measured through the administration of surveys at the one-year follow-up. Crestal bone changes were evaluated through a paired t-test. Logistic regression was utilized to evaluate the local and systemic factors that influenced crestal bone changes. Associations between complications and patient-reported outcomes were inferred.
Results
A total of 34 patients were recruited and 25 were included in the analysis after 2 patients failed and 1 voluntarily withdrew. The results demonstrated clinically significant MBL changes from T1-T2 and T1-T3, but not from T2-T3, with an average loss of 0.60–0.65 mm, stabilizing at 0.08 mm below the implant platform. Notably, baseline bone levels were the strongest predictor of MBL changes (p\u3c 0.002). Volumetric analysis using 3D optical scanning revealed significant dimensional changes in peri-implant soft tissues, primarily occurring coronally on the buccal aspect (p=0.0008) and more apically on the lingual (p=0.0019). Implant survival was 94.1% with 100% of the implants for the cohort followed for 1 year maintaining peri-implant health. There were 0 implants that were diagnosed with periimplantitis over the course of the study. Patient satisfaction was high with 88.9% for ‘excellent’, 11.1% for ‘good’, and 0% for ‘poor’.
Conclusion
Rehabilitation of single posterior edentulous sites using subcrestally placed platform switched implants yield high implant survival, favorable crestal bone levels and volumetric peri-implant tissue stability over a period of 1-year with a high-rate of peri-implant health observed while maintaining excellent patient satisfaction
Sunlight, Veiled
Get PDFSunlight, Veiled is a narrative short film exploring themes of displacement, class, and identity through the lens of an Iranian intern navigating a morally ambiguous company party in the United States. This written component traces the evolution of the project from development through post-production, while reflecting on the personal and political frameworks that shaped the creative process. Through cinematic references, cultural analysis, and production insight, the paper aims to contextualize the film within a diasporic experience and a growing awareness of social power dynamics. It also reflects on the challenges of filmmaking as an outsider, where self-doubt, cultural translation, and shifting expectations constantly redefine what it means to tell a relatable story
watchpeopledie.tv
Get PDFThe thesis piece is a performance called watchpeopledie.tv performed four times at the Anderson Gallery in the Hidden Galleries. There are two rooms in the gallery. The first room is where the audience enters. There is a line on the floor marking that the audience is not to move further into the first room or into the second room. The audio consists of verbatim comments sourced from videos of violence against trans people from the website watchpeopledie.tv, a website in which users post real videos of shootings, suicides, car accidents, etc. The main text, which is my thesis writing below, also called watchpeopledie.tv, is an interpretation of these comments. It was included in the space during the performance as a booklet for the audience to read. The performance consists of me sitting naked on a stool, restricting all movement in order to remain completely still, yet trying to get up and leave the frame at the same time. When I do move my presence is disturbed by the walls separating the two rooms, the lines created by physical space/time. The performance lasts 3 hours.
The thesis writing is a performance text documenting and further enacting the thesis performance. It is a text made from performing an erasure poem on the text of the transphobic comments and then commenting on the erased words. It is accompanied by the Introduction, a trimmed transcript of an audio recording in which I describe how I came to make the thesis
Multitask Learning for Named Entity Recognition and Relationship Extraction
Get PDFInformation Extraction (IE) is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), involving the identification of structured information from unstructured text. Two core components of IE—Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE)—are widely used to extract key concepts and the relationships between them across various domains. However, the sequential dependency of RE on the output of NER makes it vulnerable to error propagation: inaccuracies in entity recognition can negatively affect downstream relation extraction.
To mitigate this issue, Multitask Learning (MTL) has been proposed as an approach that jointly models NER and RE, aiming to improve overall performance and reduce error propagation between tasks. In this thesis, we explore the application of MTL to the analysis of chemical reaction patents, comparing its performance to traditional single-task learning models. Furthermore, we evaluate two MTL training strategies—fully simultaneous (MT-FS) and interleaved Round Robin (MT-RR)—to determine which yields more accurate and robust results. Evaluation is performed using standard metrics such as precision, recall, and F1 score.
The results show that MTL models outperform single-task models for NER, particularly on sparse or ambiguous entity types such as Temperature and Time. However, RE performance demonstrates no inherent disadvantage between the use of either of the MTL models or the single-task model. These findings suggest that MTL offers notable advantages for NER and can be competitive for RE when task interaction is carefully managed
God of Baghdad
Get PDFIn a powerful one-act play, a young Army medic rushes to a crowded Baghdad street corner destroyed by an IED hidden in a truck. The human carnage is everywhere; he must choose who will live and who will die. In those moments, in that place, he must be the God of Baghdad.
Articles, stories, and other compositions in this archive were written by participants in the Mighty Pen Project. The program, developed by author David L. Robbins, and in partnership with Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia War Memorial in Richmond, Virginia, offers veterans and their family members a customized twelve-week writing class, free of charge. The program encourages, supports, and assists participants in sharing their stories and experiences of military experience so both writer and audience may benefit