Publications by authors named "M R Mascarenhas"

Bananas and plantains are important staple food crops affected by biotic and abiotic stresses. The gene editing technique via Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats associated with the Cas protein (CRISPR/Cas) has been used as an important tool for development of cultivars with high tolerance to stresses. This study sought to develop a protocol for the construction of vectors for gene knockout.

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Background: Myofascial release (MFR) is a form of massage therapy that involves identifying and releasing restrictions in the fascia and muscles. MFR-like techniques have shown improvement in abdominal pain, distention, constipation, and quality of life (QoL) in adults. Therefore, MFR may be helpful in patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a disorder of gut-brain interaction or functional gastrointestinal disorder, mainly presenting with prolonged abdominal pain, bloating, and altered defecation patterns, leading to impairment in QoL.

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Objective: To estimate prevalence and analyze factors associated with body image dissatisfaction among Brazilian adolescent school students.

Methods: Cross-sectional study with data from the 2019 National School Health Survey (PeNSE). Prevalence of self-reported body image dissatisfaction and respective 95% confidence intervals (95%CI) and its association with individual characteristics were estimated via odds ratios (OR) and 95% CI using logistic regression.

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Article Synopsis
  • Capsule endoscopy (CE) is a minimally invasive procedure used to examine the gastrointestinal tract, but it can be time-consuming and has limited diagnostic effectiveness in the upper GI tract.
  • Researchers developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model using convolutional neural networks (CNN) to automatically detect various types of pleomorphic lesions from a large dataset of CE images, evaluating its performance against expert classifications.
  • The AI model demonstrated high diagnostic accuracy across different areas of the GI tract, with the best results being 96.6% accuracy for gastric lesions and 97.6% for small bowel lesions, suggesting that AI tools could significantly enhance the effectiveness of capsule panendoscopy.
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Objective: To analyze the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the Maternal Mortality Ratio in Brazil from 2018 to 2021.

Method: Ecological time series study, which analyzed the trend and spatial distribution of maternal deaths from 2018 to 2021, with data obtained from the Mortality and Live Birth Information System. The Maternal Mortality Ratio values were subjected to Prais-Winsten linear regression analysis using Stata program, version 14.

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