The existence of an upper limit to the human lifespan has been widely debated, with studies offering both supporting and opposing evidence. Using unique individual-level death and population records for individuals aged 90 and older in Belgium and the Netherlands between 1995 and 2022, we provide statistical evidence supporting the existence of an upper limit. A related yet unexplored question is whether this life span limit differs across socio-demographic groups. Our microdata include information on the sex, origin, civil status, type of household, and education level of each individual. Using tools from extreme value theory, we quantify and compare the upper tail of human lifespan distributions across these socio-demographic characteristics. We find that men have a statistically lower maximum lifespan than women and that individuals who are widowed or live in institutional households have a clearly lower maximum lifespan. Finally, individuals of non-Western European origin and those with higher educational attainment exhibit longer maximum lifespans.
At the time of diagnosis, prostate cancer can appear deceptively mild or already display signs of widespread disease. Predicting long-term outcomes is often uncertain. This research focused on measuring CD276/B7-H3, an immune checkpoint protein linked to tumor development, in diagnostic tissue samples from 248 men. Participants included both those with cancer confined to the prostate and those with confirmed metastases. Analysis showed that patients with metastatic disease were more likely to exhibit increased B7-H3 levels. Strong expression of this marker was associated with shorter survival times and was observed alongside higher PSA concentrations and greater tumor aggressiveness based on Gleason grading. These trends remained consistent even when other prognostic factors were taken into account. The results suggest that assessing B7-H3 during the initial biopsy could help clinicians identify high-risk patients earlier. This marker may also represent a new target for treatment strategies in advanced prostate cancer.
This study investigates how graduate students' sense of belonging (SB) influences their intent to persist (IP) in physics and astronomy programs, and how this relationship is shaped by the basic psychological needs that drive motivation-autonomy, competence, and relatedness-as well as gender. Grounded in self-determination theory, the analysis treats these three needs as mediators and gender as a moderator. A quantitative survey was administered to graduate students in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at a large public land-grant R1 Midwestern university in the USA. Using probit regressions, we found that SB significantly predicts IP. Autonomy may play a compensatory role when SB is high, competence amplifies the effect of SB on IP, and relatedness buffers against low SB. Gender moderates the relationship: women report lower IP at low levels of SB but exceed men when SB is strong. These findings underscore the importance of fostering a sense of belonging, academic confidence, and social connection-particularly for women in male-dominated STEM fields.
Ola Ali, Elma Dervic, Guillermo Prieto-Viertel
et al.
Legal systems shape not only the recognition of migrants and refugees but also the pace and stability of their integration. Refugees often shift between multiple legal classifications, a process we refer to as the "legal journey". This journey is frequently prolonged and uncertain. Using a network-based approach, we analyze legal transitions for over 350,000 migrants in Austria (2022 to 2024). Refugees face highly unequal pathways to stability, ranging from two months for Ukrainians to nine months for Syrians and 20 months for Afghans. Women, especially from these regions, are more likely to gain protection; Afghan men wait up to 30 months on average. We also find that those who cross the border without going through official border controls face higher exit rates and lower chances of securing stable status. We show that legal integration is not a uniform process, but one structured by institutional design, procedural entry points, and unequal timelines.
One examines and discusses proposals on whether riders could be replaced in a team during multi-stage races, and how much a team final time at the end of the race would change (be "adjusted") if only the riders having completed the race are taken into account for ranking teams. A few results of the two main multi-stage races, the men Tour de France and the Giro d'Italia, are used as case studies. The impact of disqualification later on, due to doping, much after the end of such a race, is also examined in the case of two Tour de France. The statistical discussion is based on the Kendall-$τ$ coefficients for comparing team ranks at the end of these multi-stages races cases. One observes that there are significant differences in the results of the discussed measures. It is shown that there is much variety in results significance, whence demonstrating many interests of the "adjusted indicators". Moreover, it is argued that the "adjusted" rank indicator would promote more competitive and more attractive daily stages and lead to more valuable race management.
Krishna Patel, Nivedha Sivakumar, Barry-John Theobald
et al.
We investigate fairness dynamics during Large Language Model (LLM) training to enable the diagnoses of biases and mitigations through training interventions like early stopping; we find that biases can emerge suddenly and do not always follow common performance metrics. We introduce two new metrics to evaluate fairness dynamics holistically during model pre-training: Average Rank and Jensen-Shannon Divergence by Parts. These metrics provide insights into the Pythia models' progression of biases in gender prediction of occupations on the WinoBias dataset. By monitoring these dynamics, we find that (1) Pythia-6.9b is biased towards men; it becomes more performant and confident predicting "male" than "female" during training, (2) via early-stopping, Pythia-6.9b can exchange 1.7% accuracy on LAMBADA for a 92.5% increase in fairness, and (3) larger models can exhibit more bias; Pythia-6.9b makes more assumptions about gender than Pythia-160m, even when a subject's gender is not specified.
Elham Bagherian, Sahar Jokari, Parnaz Borjian Boroujeni
et al.
Abstract Background: Intrauterine insemination (IUI) is often the first-line treatment for unexplained infertility. β -Microsemino protein (MSMB) is an abundant protein in seminal plasma that has an inhibitory effect on spontaneous acrosome reaction. Objective: The present study aimed to evaluate MSMB gene variations and protein expression on IUI success rate in unexplained infertile men. Materials and Methods: A case-control study was performed on 100 unexplained infertile Iranian men referred to the Royan Institute, Tehran, Iran for IUI (50 men with IUI positive result [IUI+], and 50 men with IUI negative result [IUI-]). Couples with female infertility factors (such as hormonal disorders, infrequent menstrual period, abnormality in uterus, fallopian tubes, or ovaries) and men with infections of the male accessory glands, hypogonadotropic hypogonadism, clinical varicocele, retractile testis, genital trauma, drug use, or concurrent hormonal treatment Y chromosome microdeletions, and abnormal karyotype were excluded from the study. The polymerase chain reaction sequencing was performed for the promoter and the coding regions of MSMB functional domains. To study the protein expression, the total protein of sperm was extracted, and sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay was performed. Results: 4 variations were detected (rs12770171, rs10993994, rs2075894, and rs4517463). None of them showed significant differences between the IUI+ and IUI- groups. The mean value of protein expression did not show any differences between the groups. Conclusion: In conclusion, there is no association between genetic variations of promoter and coding regions of MSMB functional domains as well as its expression with IUI success in unexplained infertile men.
Yoruba women have gained a reputation as empowered traders, but their empowerment in agriculture has received less attention. This study examines the empowerment of Yoruba men and women cassava producers in Nigeria's Southwest geopolitical zone. It combines data from an Abbreviated Women Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI) survey with results from focus group discussions and key informant interviews. An additional focus is on how norms that foster balanced household gender relations interact with those that produce inequalities. Yoruba men farmers appeared more empowered than their wives in all the domains measured by the A-WEAI in spite of women's high involvement in processing and trade. The fact that the same domains contributed most to men and women's disempowerment points to structural issues that affect men and women unevenly. The study finds signs of emerging shifts in gender norms: women demanded to be acknowledged as farmers and indicated first moves into land ownership. However, the most asymmetric effect of normative constraints experienced by women as a result of unpaid labor, alongside their own income-generating activities tend to neutralize these gains. Hence, the embeddedness of pockets of potentially symmetric institutions in a larger asymmetric patriarchal system of imbalanced resource access and agency does not produce equitable outcomes. Future research should address men's and women's participation in cassava trade and production and their benefits from it more holistically.
Georgina Noel Marchiori, Elio Andrés Soria, María Eugenia Pasqualini
et al.
Background: Cardiovascular risk is modifiable by changes in lifestyle and pharmacological management, with hypertension being a common pathology worldwide. Its treatment must address multiple metabolic targets. Based on the hypothesis that certain antihypertensive medications, such as the commonly used enalapril and losartan, and dietary habits improve hypertension-related changes in carotid structure and cardiometabolic variables, this work aimed to associate these drugs, as well as the Mediterranean diet adherence and non-modifiable biological factors, with changes in carotid intima-media thickness [cIMT] and blood lipids. Methods: Sociodemographic, clinical, biochemical and lifestyle data were collected in a cross-sectional study of 313 subjects under survey due to cardiovascular risk factors, aged 34–83 years (Cordoba, Argentina). Generalised structural equation models were used for analysis. Results: A higher cIMT with age and male sex was confirmed. Women had lower triacylglycerols and saturated fatty acids in serum but higher circulating levels of LDL-C, HDL-C and total cholesterol than men. Also, a higher adherence to the Mediterranean diet was associated with lower triacylglycerols, but higher levels of HDL-C cholesterol and ω-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (ω-3 PUFAs) in serum. A greater adherence to the Mediterranean diet did not affect cIMT. Enalapril was associated with increased serum ω-3 PUFAs levels, but it did not affect other lipid fractions. Moreover, enalapril may control cIMT, whereas losartan may not. Conclusions: Our data demonstrate that the Mediterranean diet and enalapril are associated with a cardioprotective circulating lipid profile in hypertension. Concerning this, enalapril potentially promotes serum ω-3 PUFAs levels beyond its classical antihypertensive effect, which encourages future clinical studies to confirm it.
Nutrition. Foods and food supply, Nutritional diseases. Deficiency diseases
Background: Prostate abscess differs from prostatitis as a complicated infection requiring appropriate early treatment. It typically presents with urinary symptoms plus rectal or pelvic pain in middle-aged or older men. Diabetic, immunosuppressed, or patients with urological procedures are at higher risk for serious infection. If untreated, prostate abscess can progress to critical illness including sepsis and death, thus early diagnosis and treatment is key. Case report: A middle-aged male with diabetes, hypertension, emphysema, and hypothyroidism presented with severe constipation for one week but no urinary symptoms, fever, or vomiting. On examination, he had mild abdominal distension without tenderness, decreased bowel sounds, and a normal external rectal exam. Computed tomography scan demonstrated prostatomegaly and a large 5.2cm prostate abscess with multiple lobulations causing mass effect on the distal colon, thus blood cultures were sent, intravenous antibiotics started, and urology consulted. The patient was admitted for continued antibiotic treatment and underwent surgical transurethral resection with urology the next day. A foley catheter was maintained for seven days, with improvement until hospital discharge 3 days later, with oral antibiotics and close urology clinic follow up. Why should an emergency medicine physician be aware of this?: Prostate abscess is difficult to diagnose clinically and can lead to severe illness without early recognition and treatment. Patients may present with pelvic or rectal pain plus fever or urinary symptoms. Urgent antibiotic therapy is key, and many patients require urology consultation for surgical or procedural management.
Medical emergencies. Critical care. Intensive care. First aid
Introduction: Prostate cancer is a common malignancy affecting men and the second leading cause of cancer related death in India. Numerous molecular biomarkers have been evaluated for their potential role in predicting disease progression, their response to therapy and survival. Erythroblast Transformation Specific (ETS) related Gene (ERG) is one of the newest addition in the existing list of biomarkers of prostate cancer.
Aim: To analyse the expression of ERG in prostatic
adenocarcinoma and to evaluate its association with World
Health Organisation (WHO) grade group.
Materials and Methods: This was a prospective observational study was conducted in the Department of Pathology in association with Department of Urology, IPGME&R, SSKM Hospital, Kolkata, West Bengal, India. The duration of the study was 1.5 years, from January 2019 to June 2020. A total of 267 cases of Transrectal Ultrasound (TRUS) guided tru-cut biopsy was included. Clinical data including preoperative Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) level, Digital Rectal Examination (DRE) were obtained. Histopathological reports were prepared by two pathologists along with Gleason scoring and WHO grading
as per 2014 International Society of Urological Pathology
(ISUP) consensus conference on gleason grading of prostatic carcinoma. Formalin Fixed Paraffin Embedded (FFPE) sections of representative blocks of each tumour was selected for Immunohistochemistry (IHC) study. Only the cases which had more than 10% nuclear staining were considered as positive. Statistical analysis was performed with help of Epi Info (TM) 7.2.2.2 and Chi-square test was used to test the association of different study variables.
Results: The mean age of the study participants was 65.55 years, and the age range was 45-93 years. Among the 80 malignant cases where, ERG immunostaining was assessed, 28 cases (35%) showed positive expression. Among these positive cases, 50% cases were weakly positive, 28.57% showed moderate positivity and 21.43% had strong positive expression. Highest positivity was observed in WHO grade group V (44.83%). The intensity of ERG expression was also higher in high grade group (13) than low grade group cancer patients.
Conclusion: ERG expression in the prostate cancer can be a
prognostic factor as the expression and intensity of expression both increases with higher grade group of cancer.
Work overload and the alteration in family dynamics caused by the COVID-19 pandemic crisis may be increasing family–work conflict, leading to the consequent decrease in meaningful work. Using the structural equation modeling of covariance, this research determines the impact of the pandemic disruption on meaningful work as mediated through family–work conflict. The sample comes from 534 men and 257 women that are full-time employees of seven public manufacturing companies in Bolivia; they were surveyed by filling out a self-report questionnaire at the companies’ locations. Although no significant direct effects were found between COVID-19 disruption and meaningful work (standardized beta = 0.038, Z = 0.756, <i>p</i> = 0.450), there is an indirect effect when the relationship is measured through the family–work life conflict variable (standardized beta = −0.138, Z = −6.119, <i>p</i> < 0.001). Implications for business management are discussed.
Political institutions and public administration (General)
The advancement of computer-aided detection systems had a significant impact on clinical analysis and decision-making on human disease. Lung cancer requires more attention among the numerous diseases being examined because it affects both men and women, increasing the mortality rate. LeNet, a deep learning model, is used in this study to detect lung tumors. The studies were run on a publicly available dataset made up of CT image data (IQ-OTH/NCCD). Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) were employed in the experiment for feature extraction and classification. The proposed system was evaluated on Iraq-Oncology Teaching Hospital/National Center for Cancer Diseases datasets the success percentage was calculated as 99.51%, sensitivity (93%) and specificity (95%), and better results were obtained compared to the existing methods. Development and validation of algorithms such as ours are important initial steps in the development of software suites that could be adopted in routine pathological practices and potentially help reduce the burden on pathologists.
Gabriel Pádua da Silva, Edson Donizetti Verri, Marcelo Palinkas
et al.
Stroke is a neurological deficit of cerebrovascular origin that promotes physical impairments of adult individuals. The present study is aimed to demonstrate whether hemorrhagic stroke affects the maximum molar bite force. The prospective study carried in Centro Universitario Claretiano de Batatais, Brazil, determined the distribution of the sample into two groups: hemorrhagic stroke group (n=18, median age, 62.5 years) and disease-free group (n=18, median age, 62.0 years), with 10 men and 8 women in each group. Subjects were paired one-to-one (age and body mass index). The dynamometer was used to measure the maximum molar bite force (right and left). All analyses were performed with a significance level of 5% (Student’s t-test). Differences were found on the right (p=0.048) and left (p=0.042) molar bite force, with lower bite force (both sides) in hemorrhagic stroke group. The study suggests that hemorrhagic stroke negatively affects the maximum molar bite force and necessitates changes in food intake to nutritious and softer consistency foods.
Frauke von Bieberstein, Anna-Corinna Kulle, Stefanie Schumacher
Hand hygiene is one of the key low-cost measures proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to contain the spread of COVID-19. In a field study conducted during the pandemic in June and July 2020 in Switzerland, we captured the hand disinfection behavior of customers in five stores of a large retail chain (n = 8,245). The study reveals considerable differences with respect to gender and age: Women were 8.3 percentage points more likely to disinfect their hands compared to men. With respect to age, we identified a steep increase across age groups, with people age 60 years and older disinfecting their hands significantly more often than younger adults (>+16.7 percentage points) and youth (>+ 31.7 percentage points). A validation study conducted in December 2020 (n = 1,918) confirmed the gender and age differences at a later point in the pandemic. In sum, the differences between gender and age groups are substantial and should be considered in the design of protective measures to ensure clean and safe hands.
Emotional volatility is a human universal. Yet there has been no large-scale scientific study of predictors of that phenomenon. Building from previous works, which had been ad hoc and based on tiny samples, this paper reports the first large-scale estimation of volatility in human emotional experiences. Our study draws from a large sample of intrapersonal variation in moment-to-moment happiness from over three million observations by 41,023 UK individuals. Holding other things constant, we show that emotional volatility is highest among women with children, the separated, the poor, and the young. Women without children report substantially greater emotional volatility than men with and without children. For any given rate of volatility, women with children also experience more frequent extreme emotional lows than any other socio-demographic group. Our results, which are robust to different specification tests, enable researchers and policymakers to quantify and prioritise different determinants of intrapersonal variability in human emotions.
Generating spoken word embeddings that possess semantic information is a fascinating topic. Compared with text-based embeddings, they cover both phonetic and semantic characteristics, which can provide richer information and are potentially helpful for improving ASR and speech translation systems. In this paper, we review and examine the authenticity of a seminal work in this field: Speech2Vec. First, a homophone-based inspection method is proposed to check the speech embeddings released by the author of Speech2Vec. There is no indication that these embeddings are generated by the Speech2Vec model. Moreover, through further analysis of the vocabulary composition, we suspect that a text-based model fabricates these embeddings. Finally, we reproduce the Speech2Vec model, referring to the official code and optimal settings in the original paper. Experiments showed that this model failed to learn effective semantic embeddings. In word similarity benchmarks, it gets a correlation score of 0.08 in MEN and 0.15 in WS-353-SIM tests, which is over 0.5 lower than those described in the original paper. Our data and code are available.
In this article, we particularly address the problem of assessing the impact of clinical stage and age on the specific survival times of men with breast cancer when cure is a possibility, where there is also the interest of explaining this impact on different quantiles of the survival times. To this end, we developed a quantile regression model for survival data in the presence of long-term survivors based on the generalized distribution of Gompertz in a defective version, which is conveniently reparametrized in terms of the q-th quantile and then linked to covariates via a logarithm link function. This proposal allows us to obtain how each variable affects the survival times in different quantiles. In addition, we are able to study the effects of covariates on the cure rate as well. We consider Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to develop a Bayesian analysis in the proposed model and we evaluate its performance through a Monte Carlo simulation study. Finally, we illustrate the advantages of our model in a data set about male breast cancer from Brazil.
Leon G. Martens, Jiao Luo, Fleur L. Meulmeester
et al.
The antioxidant vitamin E (α-tocopherol, α-TOH) protects lipids from oxidation by reactive oxygen species. We hypothesized that lifestyle factors associate with vitamin E metabolism marked by urinary α-tocopheronolactone hydroquinone (α-TLHQ) and α-carboxymethyl-hydroxychroman (α-CEHC levels), as potential reflection of lipid oxidation. We conducted a cross-sectional study in the Netherlands Epidemiology of Obesity Study. Serum α-TOH, and urinary α-TLHQ and α-CEHC were quantified by liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry. Information on the lifestyle factors (sleep, physical activity (PA), smoking and alcohol) were collected through questionnaires. Multivariable linear regression analyses were performed to assess the associations between the lifestyle factors and α-TOH measures. A total of 530 participants (46% men) were included with mean (SD) age of 56 (6) years. Of the examined lifestyle factors, only poor sleep was associated with a higher serum α-TOH (mean difference: 4% (95% CI: 1, 7%)). Current smoking was associated with higher urinary α-CEHC (32%: (14%, 53%)), with evidence of a dose–response relationship with smoking intensity (low pack years, 24% (2, 52%); high pack years, 55% (25, 93%)). Moderate physical activity was associated with a lower α-TLHQ relative to α-CEHC (−17%: (−26, −6%), compared with low PA). Only specific lifestyle factors associate with vitamin E metabolism. Examining serum α-TOH does not provide complete insight in vitamin E antioxidant capacity.