| 1. |
|
|
| 2. |
|
|
| 3. |
|
|
| 4. |
- Wilkinson, John L., et al.
(författare)
-
Pharmaceutical pollution of the world's rivers
- 2022
-
Ingår i: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. - : Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. - 0027-8424 .- 1091-6490. ; 119:8
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Environmental exposure to active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) can have negative effects on the health of ecosystems and humans. While numerous studies have monitored APIs in rivers, these employ different analytical methods, measure different APIs, and have ignored many of the countries of the world. This makes it difficult to quantify the scale of the problem from a global perspective. Furthermore, comparison of the existing data, generated for different studies/regions/continents, is challenging due to the vast differences between the analytical methodologies employed. Here, we present a global-scale study of API pollution in 258 of the world's rivers, representing the environmental influence of 471.4 million people across 137 geographic regions. Samples were obtained from 1,052 locations in 104 countries (representing all continents and 36 countries not previously studied for API contamination) and analyzed for 61 APIs. Highest cumulative API concentrations were observed in sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia, and South America. The most contaminated sites were in low- to middle-income countries and were associated with areas with poor wastewater and waste management infrastructure and pharmaceutical manufacturing. The most frequently detected APIs were carbamazepine, metformin, and caffeine (a compound also arising from lifestyle use), which were detected at over half of the sites monitored. Concentrations of at least one API at 25.7% of the sampling sites were greater than concentrations considered safe for aquatic organisms, or which are of concern in terms of selection for antimicrobial resistance. Therefore, pharmaceutical pollution poses a global threat to environmental and human health, as well as to delivery of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
|
|
| 5. |
- Abedini, M., et al.
(författare)
-
Customer credit scoring using a hybrid data mining approach
- 2016
-
Ingår i: Kybernetes. - 0368-492X .- 1758-7883. ; 45:10, s. 1576-1588
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Purpose: A crucial decision in financial services is how to classify credit or loan applicants into good and bad applicants. The purpose of this paper is to propose a four-stage hybrid data mining approach to support the decision-making process. Design/methodology/approach: The approach is inspired by the bagging ensemble learning method and proposes a new voting method, namely two-level majority voting in the last stage. First some training subsets are generated. Then some different base classifiers are tuned and afterward some ensemble methods are applied to strengthen tuned classifiers. Finally, two-level majority voting schemes help the approach to achieve more accuracy. Findings: A comparison of results shows the proposed model outperforms powerful single classifiers such as multilayer perceptron (MLP), support vector machine, logistic regression (LR). In addition, it is more accurate than ensemble learning methods such as bagging-LR or rotation forest (RF)-MLP. The model outperforms single classifiers in terms of type I and II errors; it is close to some ensemble approaches such as bagging-LR and RF-MLP but fails to outperform them in terms of type I and II errors. Moreover, majority voting in the final stage provides more reliable results. Practical implications: The study concludes the approach would be beneficial for banks, credit card companies and other credit provider organisations. Originality/value: A novel four stages hybrid approach inspired by bagging ensemble method proposed. Moreover the two-level majority voting in two different schemes in the last stage provides more accuracy. An integrated evaluation criterion for classification errors provides an enhanced insight for error comparisons.
|
|
| 6. |
- Regland, Björn, 1947, et al.
(författare)
-
Treatment of Alzheimer's disease with clioquinol.
- 2001
-
Ingår i: Dementia and geriatric cognitive disorders. - 1420-8008. ; 12:6, s. 408-14
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- As heavy metal ions may be implicated in the formation of senile plaques in Alzheimer-afflicted brains, treatment with clioquinol was tested in 20 patients with Alzheimer's disease. Clioquinol is a chelator that crosses the blood-brain barrier and has greater affinity for zinc and copper ions than for calcium and magnesium ions. Treatment was given for 21 days at doses of 20 mg/day to 10 patients and 80 mg/day to another 10 patients. The study was blind to the dosages but included no controls. Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) investigations revealed a significant increase at day 7 and a decrease at day 21 in Tau protein and growth-associated protein (GAP43). These proteins are increased in Alzheimer's disease and considered as rather stable markers. The initial increase may indicate a temporary cytotoxicity to the brain and/or an increased release into the CSF from stores in the tissue, possibly from senile plaques where the proteins are accumulated. The levels of CSF-Tau protein correlated positively and significantly with the serum levels of copper and also with the serum copper/zinc ratio. Clinical ratings showed slight improvement after 3 weeks treatment with clioquinol in this open study.
|
|
