SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “FOUNDATIONS”

Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.

SourceResearch connectionFrom yearThrough year

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 649 records · Page 36Linked to original sources

PubMed1996

Peacekeeping and peacemaking: the conceptual foundations of a plan to reduce violence and improve the quality of life in a midsized community in Jamaica.

Thomas Jefferson noted that social ills breed economic ills and vice versa. An endless regress can occur with violence and mayhem as a chorus: Every community in the world has its own thresholds and patterns of violence, and communities experience varied levels of deterioration of safety with a reciprocal increase in violence. The United States, having undergone 200 years of social evolution as an independent nation, has a spiraling problem with violence. Jamaica, with only recent independence from British sovereignty, is an ideal crucible for the study of evolution of violence in a very young democracy and, hopefully, to identify problems and provide some solutions. Having gained independence from British rule in 1962, Jamaica immediately demonstrated a facile experimentation with forms of government that differed dramatically from what had been previously experienced under the rather rigid, autocratic British administration. In its 33 years of independence, this country has gone through some extraordinary shifts. An initial courtship with Communist theory led to a destructive liaison with Fidel Castro's version of Marxism. During this brief interlude, the intellectual ideals of equality and peace came into direct contrast with facts of a failing Communist regime. During this period, there was a steady exodus of wealthy Jamaican families for whom heavy taxation threatened financial ruin. The prime minister, the Honorable Michael Manley, a highly sophisticated left-wing intellectual liberal, soon realized the political cost of the alliance with his Caribbean neighbor, Fidel Castro, who was then and is now dedicated to old-fashioned, state-controlled Communism. He attempted to return to a free-market democracy with financial foundations that were, by then, very shaky. To succeed in a project to reduce violence and improve the quality of life, the entire community needs to be involved. From our work in countries where community projects were primarily financed by federal and state agencies, we were aware that the participation of private citizens in projects was essential for success. Commitment has an added intensity when personal time and funding is involved. Prime Minister Manley enthusiastically embraced and inspired this project, believing that it embodied the fundamental principles of democratic involvement to which he was committed. When the authors personally presented their plan to him, he accepted it immediately and with an obvious personal sense of urgency. Illness led him to resign the post of Prime Minister in 1993, but his successor, Mr. P.J. Patterson, has continued in the same committed, democratic mode.

Developing Countries↗

PubMed1997

A land filled with mosquitoes: Fred L. Soper, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the anopheles gambiae invasion of Brazil.

The success of Fred Soper and the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Division in eradicating the anopheles gambiae mosquito from Northeast Brazil was a significant watershed in the history of malaria control. It revived faith in vector control strategies and paved the way for the application of eradication methods in the fight against malaria following World War II. Yet Soper's achievement needs to be re-examined from a wider analytical perspective that takes account of the longer epidemiological history of malaria in northeast Brazil and the wider social and economic context within which malaria occurred. This wider perspective suggests that the origins of the 1938/39 malaria epidemic were much more complex than Soper acknowledged. By focusing narrowly on the anopheles gambiae mosquito and its eradication. Soper failed to understand this broader context. This myopia, in turn, permitted Soper to make claims for both the scale of his achievement and its importance for the future of malaria control which were unjustified.

Animals↗

PubMed2003

Re-establishing psychodynamic theory as foundational knowledge for psychiatric/mental health nursing.

Psychiatric nursing care is based on an interpersonal process that relies on the therapeutic use of self in the service of patient care. Despite acknowledgment of the importance of the relationship, there has been little attention paid to the knowledge embedded in psychodynamic theory that can provide a basis for understanding the nurse-patient relationship. This paper argues that nurses need to understand and apply such theory if they are to pursue the assertion that the relationship with the patient is the foundation of their practice. The authors discuss the essential components of psychodynamic theory and their application to nursing as well as the possible reasons for the loss of interest in such theory.

Clinical Competence↗

PubMed2004

Shifts in the philosophical foundations of psychiatry since Jaspers: implications for psychopathology and psychotherapy.

Jaspers' AllgemeinePsychopathologie, the General Psychopathology, published in 1923, had a profound influence on the development of psychiatry. Central to it was the attempt to give the new psychiatry a philosophical foundation, the key element in which was the dichotomy between meaningful and causal connections. This dichotomy was superimposed on the earlier mind-body distinction, and both converged on the conclusion that mind and meaning were problematic from the point of view of science. The inevitable splits came to a head in the 1960's, with attacks on the one side by the other: medical psychiatry was attacked for systematically stripping madness of its meaning and hence dehumanising it, while psychoanalysis, the champion of meaning, was rounded upon for being unscientific. At the same time however there was emerging a new paradigm that effectively deconstructed the problematic, namely, the cognitive or information-processing paradigm. This paradigm has made it possible to construct a unified bio-psycho-social science of psychopathology. In psychotherapy, the shift has been away from the view that meaning is non-causal, a matter only of existential significance or of hermeneutic interpretation, towards the working assumption that it is crucially involved in aetiology, as in the new cognitive behaviour therapy paradigm.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Hormetic dose-response relationships in immunology: occurrence, quantitative features of the dose response, mechanistic foundations, and clinical implications.

This article provides an assessment of the occurrence of immune-system-related hormetic-like biphasic dose-response relationships. Such dose-response relationships are extensive, with over 90 different immune response-related endpoints reported, induced by over 70 endogenous agonists, over 100 drugs, and over 40 environmental contaminants. Such hormetic responses were reported in over 30 animal models, over a dozen mammalian and human cell lines. These findings demonstrate that immune-system-related hormetic-like biphasic dose-response relationships are common and highly generalizable according to model, endpoint, and chemical class. The quantitative features of the dose response are generally consistent with previously published examples of hormetic dose responses for other biological endpoints. These findings were generally recognized and explicitly discussed by the original authors, often with consideration given to possible mechanistic foundations as well as numerous clinical implications. Despite the recognition by individual authors of the hormetic nature of these observed responses, the overall widespread nature of immune-related hormetic responses has been only little appreciated, with a general lack of insight into the highly generalizable nature of this phenomenon as well as the complex regulatory networks affecting biological switching mechanisms that result in the hormetic responses.

Adaptation, Physiological↗

PubMed2007

Ethological study of manual laterality in naturalistic housed chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) from the Mona Foundation Sanctuary (Girona, Spain).

During recent years, handedness of nonhuman primates has been the subject of several studies, especially focused on our closest relatives: the chimpanzees. These studies have dealt with both wild and captive chimpanzees, and they seem to point to divergent conclusions, which have been interpreted as a by-product of the human influence in the captive samples. Here we present the results of a study of 10 chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). In the past, they were trained in circus and marketing tasks (humanised behaviours), until they were confiscated and accepted into the Mona Foundation (in northeast Spain) in 2000, where they live in a semi-naturalistic environment. This study has been performed through observational bouts without systematic human influence, recording the actions carried out by chimpanzees when performing spontaneous activities. Our results indicate that chimpanzees that were under strong human influence in the past show the same trend in handedness as those living in freedom: few significant lateralities were observed among either individuals or tasks. So, laterality may not be influenced by humanisation. However, this conclusion must be taken as preliminary because very few individuals were studied.

Animals↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Recent medical evidence for torture and human rights abuse in Sierra Leone: a report for the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture.

A study was carried out using the case notes of all Sierra Leoneans referred to the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture between 1996 and 1998 for medical reports. Data were abstracted on the type and extent of torture reported, and the cases were followed up to the present day to ascertain how long the United Kingdom asylum and immigration process had taken to process their claims. In the sample of 36 cases there were 68 reported incidents of torture or human rights abuse. Sixty-nine per cent (18/26) of the women in the sample had been raped at least once, and 72% (26/36) of the sample had been beaten at least once. The average time for the minimum due process of the asylum claim to be processed was 44 months (3.7 years). On 31 January 1999, 61% of the sample (22 people) were still involved in the asylum process. Waiting times must be reduced and safeguards imposed so that those who have suffered torture can be rapidly identified and referred for medical treatment, care and documentation.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Sin and bioethics: why a liturgical anthropology is foundational.

The project of articulating a coherent, canonical, content-full, secular morality-cum-bioethics fails, because it does not acknowledge sin, which is to say, it does not acknowledge the centrality of holiness, which is essential to a non-distorted understanding of human existence and of morality. Secular morality cannot establish a particular moral content, the harmony of the good and the right, or the necessary precedence of morality over prudence, because such is possible only in terms of an ultimate point of reference: God. The necessity of a rightly ordered appreciation of God places centrally the focus on holiness and the avoidance of sin. Because the cardinal relationship of creatures to their Creator is worship, and because the cardinal corporate act of human worship is the Liturgy, morality in general and bioethics in particular can be understood in terms of the conditions necessary, so as worthily to enter into Eucharistic liturgical participation. Morality can be summed up in terms of the requirements of ritual purity. A liturgical anthropology is foundational to an account of the content-full morality and bioethics that should bind humans, since humans are first and foremost creatures obliged to join in rightly ordered worship of their Creator. When humans worship correctly, when they avoid sin and pursue holiness, they participate in restoring created reality.

Bioethical Issues↗

PubMed2006

James Drane's More Humane Medicine: a new foundation for twenty-first century bioethics?

James Drane's More Humane Medicine: A Liberal Catholic Bioethics is an outstanding contribution to the study of bioethics in our day. Catholics and others who are interested in the issues discussed here will benefit from this masterful treatment. The author opens with a set of definitions, starting with what he means by a "more humane medicine." Drane contends that a more humane medicine has become necessary and desired, but not because the traditional medical ethic as "a self-declared and self-imposed ethic, outlining what noble service to others entails" is no longer valid. Rather he defines it as an advance on the traditional ethic; a "new foundation" based on a "lived set of obligations derived from a felt commitment to other persons ... an ethics based on the relationship between doctors and patients and essentially an ethics of virtue." Drane's work is a "liberal Catholic Bioethics" in which he challenges his own faith tradition, the Roman Catholic Church, on such topics as sexuality, birth control, abortion, cloning, stem cell research, aging and dying, and euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. The present article is a critical essay that analyzes the author's statements and conclusions.

Bioethical Issues↗

PubMed2004

Performance improvement in the long-term-care setting: building on the foundation of infection control.

Infection control programs were among the first organized efforts to improve the quality of healthcare delivered to patients and are an excellent model for the development of other healthcare performance improvement activities. Whether labeled as infection control, quality improvement, or patient safety, performance improvement initiatives share similar methods and principles. The quality of care in long-term-care facilities (LTCFs) has been scrutinized for years and has received renewed attention with the recent initiation of public reporting of quality measures by Medicare. This article reviews the principles of performance improvement, discusses the importance of employing evidence-based interventions, and emphasizes the value of local performance improvement in LTCFs. Residents of LTCFs remain at high risk for the development of nosocomial infections, and among performance improvement initiatives, infection control is recommended as a high priority for all LTCFs. Fortunately, infection control contains the essential elements for performance improvement, and a successful infection control program can provide the foundation for expanding performance improvement throughout the LTCF. There is still much that needs to be done to determine the best clinical practices for LTCFs, and this should remain a priority for future research. Furthermore, efforts should continue to apply these principles at the local level to ensure that all residents of LTCFs receive the best care possible.

Aged↗

PubMed2002

The status of the seventh report in the series Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiations and a revised dosimetry for the Radiation Effects Research Foundation's A-bomb studies.

Results of a National Academies workshop and feasibility study led US Governmental agencies to request the Board on Radiation Effects Research of the National Research Council to commence a risk assessment study in 1998 as the seventh report in the series Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiations (BEIR VII). Originally targeted for completion in the autumn of 2001, the study Potential Health Effects of Exposure to Low Dose, Low-LET Ionizing Radiation was extended until the autumn of 2003 at the request of the sponsors. Two factors contributing to this decision are discussed: a revised dosimetry to update DS86 for the Radiation Effects Research Foundation's A-bomb-survivor studies and the potential for new information to become available from low-dose studies that are under way. Epidemiological and biological data since BEIR V are being considered by a BEIR VII committee composed of 17 members. The committee's statement of task is reviewed along with the major recommendations of the recent National Research Council report on the status of DS86--recommendations that are being implemented by US and Japan dosimetry working groups.

Humans↗

PubMed2025

Foundation model based multimodal transformer framework for survival analysis in HER2 stratified breast cancer.

Objective. To improve survival prediction for HER2-positive breast cancer by integrating histopathological, molecular, and clinical data using a multimodal transformer framework.Approach. We propose a multimodal transformer framework for breast cancer survival prediction using HER2 stratified (SurvMBC), a foundation model-enhanced architecture that fuses three data modalities: whole-slide images, clinical narratives, and molecular features. Tumor microenvironment features are extracted using a pathology language and image pre-training (PLIP), clinical narratives are processed with BioBERT, and miRNA expression plus DNA methylation data are embedded using Gen2Vec. These representations are integrated through a cross-modal transformer with attention mechanisms for survival prediction.Main results. The model was evaluated on 1,095 HER2-positive breast cancer patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas. SurvMBC achieved a concordance index (C-index) of 0.857 (95% CI: 0.834, 0.880), a low integrated Brier score, and a strong inverse negative binomial log-likelihood. Risk stratification based on model outputs significantly separated high- and low-risk groups (log-rankp< 0.01) and showed strong associations with tumor stage, grade, and hormone receptor status (allp< 0.05).Significance. SurvMBC demonstrates the effectiveness of multimodal fusion in addressing tumor heterogeneity and improving prognostic accuracy. The attention-based integration enables context-aware learning of survival-relevant features across modalities, supporting individualized risk stratification and risk-adaptive treatment planning for HER2 stratified breast cancer patients.

Breast Neoplasms↗

PubMed2004

Consciousness and quantum information processing: uncovering the foundation for a medicine of light.

Great progress has been made by Russian and German researchers in recent years (Popp, Voeikov, and others) to examine the biophysical aspects of biophotonic processes in humans. This paper suggests that there is a many-body reality to the way biophysical light interacts with the human self-organization of information that may be achieved by means of biomolecular, metabolic, or neural communication. These systems may merge as mobile energy relay systems similar to what is seen as qi processes in acupuncture science, suggesting a "holomovement" that seeks to confirm itself and increasingly retrieves and uses only the information that serves its exchanges with the environment. This coevolution of evolutionary process levels, expressed in process terms, can be seen as a foundation for a Medicine of Light integrating hidden variables in consciousness studies with functional differentiation and new findings in the biologic sciences.

Acupuncture Therapy↗

PubMed1999

Ethical foundations of client-centered care in family planning.

Biomedical ethics provides the foundation for a model of client-centered care that can assure the good quality of family planning and other reproductive health services in developed and developing countries. Client concerns mirror the four ethical principles of autonomy, justice, beneficence, and nonmaleficence. Autonomy reflects clients' desire for full information and respect from providers so that they can exercise their right to make their own informed decisions. Justice, for clients, means fair treatment and ready access to services, regardless of one's socioeconomic status, education, ethnic group, or residence. Beneficence means that providers possess the technical competence and understanding needed to act in the best interest of their clients, as clients expect. Nonmaleficence translates into client concerns about safety--that no harm will come to them as a result of seeking services. Putting these ethical principles into practice requires changing providers' attitudes from paternalistic to client centered. Assessments of client satisfaction can help family planning programs identify and respond to client values and even raise client expectations about the care they should receive. Managers also can contribute to good quality care by meeting providers' professional needs for training, supervision, supplies, record keeping, and so on. Family planning programs around the world are focusing on these ethical concerns to emphasize respect for client values, appropriate decision making, broader access to services, and basic safety issues. Although they use a variety of techniques, all these quality assurance and improvement initiatives share an ethically based, client-centered philosophy.

Adult↗

PubMed1988

Foundations of immunohistochemistry. A practical review.

In this review of immunohistochemical methods, an emphasis is placed on the historic development of enzyme-linked procedures that are applicable to antigen localization in routinely processed tissues. As the technology of immunohistochemistry has improved, a bewildering montage of antibodies, bridges, labels, and chromogens has evolved. Each has its apparent advantages, yet each also has certain limitations. Admittedly, a comprehensive review of these different methods is beyond the scope of this forum, and several immunohistochemical techniques in current use will not be discussed in detail. Still, the principles of horseradish peroxidase-linked procedures, as described in this review, form the foundation of contemporary diagnostic immunohistology. They provide not only a powerful method of antigen detection, but also a model with which to compare recent and future innovations.

Antibodies↗

PubMed2026

Accelerating inference in genomic and proteomic foundation models via speculative decoding.

MOTIVATION: Genomic and protein foundation models (GFMs and PFMs) have demonstrated strong performance in learning the language of DNA and proteins, but their use in large-scale sequence generation is limited by the latency of autoregressive decoding. Because every token triggers a forward pass of a large Transformer, whose inference is relatively slow, long-sequence generation quickly becomes costly. RESULTS: In this work we adapt speculative decoding to a representative GFM: the DNA model DNAGPT and two representative PFMs: ProGen2 and ProtGPT2. We implement a probabilistic variant of speculative decoding, in which a lightweight draft model proposes short token spans and a larger target model verifies or corrects them in parallel, while preserving the target model's sampling distribution. Across all three models we systematically study the effect of speculation window length, temperature, draft architecture and prompt length, and we benchmark tokens per second over multiple runs per configuration. Speculative decoding yields consistent speedups over standard key-value cached decoding, with maximum observed speedup reaching 100% increase, while average gains across models ranging between 20% and 40% (e.g. 1.2×-1.4×), without changing the underlying target model predictions. Our results show that speculative decoding is a practical and model-agnostic strategy for accelerating genomic and proteomic sequence generation without sacrificing prediction quality. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: All code and results are freely available at https://github.com/Georgakopoulos-Soares-lab/BioSpecDec.

Genomics↗

PubMed1995

Prevention of bacterial endocarditis: current practice in The Netherlands. Netherlands Heart Foundation.

A working party of the Netherlands Heart Foundation has formulated guidelines which are simple and uniform in order to encourage maximum compliance. They have been widely publicised among medical and dental practitioners as well as patients. Cardiac conditions requiring or not requiring prophylaxis have been identified. Specific regimens for dental procedures, genito-urinary and gastrointestinal procedures, and drainage of infected tissue have been recommended. A case-control study revealed that compliance with recommendations was low even though patients were aware of the need. While prophylaxis may be worthwhile for the individual, it is concluded that even strict adherence will do little to decrease the incidence of endocarditis in the Netherlands.

Anti-Bacterial Agents↗

PubMed2003

Alternative genetic foundations for a key social polymorphism in fire ants.

Little is known about the genetic foundations of colony social organization. One rare example in which a single major gene is implicated in the expression of alternative social organizations involves the presumed odorant-binding protein gene Gp-9 in fire ants. Specific amino acid substitutions in this gene invariably are associated with the expression of monogyny (single queen per colony) or polygyny (multiple queens per colony) in fire ant species of the Solenopsis richteri clade. These substitutions are hypothesized to alter the abilities of workers to recognize queens and thereby regulate their numbers in a colony. We examined whether these same substitutions underlie the monogyny/polygyny social polymorphism in the distantly related fire ant S. geminata. We found that Gp-9 coding region sequences are identical in the polygyne and monogyne forms of this species, disproving our hypothesis that one or a few specific amino acid replacements in the protein are necessary to induce transitions in social organization in fire ants. On the other hand, polygyne S. geminata differs genetically from the monogyne form in ways not mirrored in the two forms of S. invicta, a well-studied member of the S. richteri clade, supporting the conclusion that polygyny did not evolve via analogous routes in the two lineages. Specifically, polygyne S. geminata has lower genetic diversity and different gene frequencies than the monogyne form, suggesting that the polygyne form originated via a founder event from a local monogyne population. These comparative data suggest an alternative route to polygyny in S. geminata in which loss of allelic variation at genes encoding recognition cues has led to a breakdown in discrimination abilities and the consequent acceptance of multiple queens in colonies.

Alleles↗