Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on growth determinants in premature neonates: observational study in a secondary health service in Carapicuíba, São Paulo (2020-2023).

Introduction: Prematurity is a factor that contributes to the increase in infant morbidity and mortality and is associated with factors determining child growth, such as nutritional deficits, mainly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Objective: To evaluate the factors determining the growth of premature neonates treated at a secondary health service during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Method: Observational retrospective and prospective cohort study of premature patients followed at the follow-up clinic in the municipality of Carapicuíba from February 2020 to December 2023.

Apply the Laws, if They are Good: Moral Evaluations Linearly Predict Whether Judges Should Enforce the Law.

What should judges do when faced with immoral laws? Should they apply them without exception, since "the law is the law?" Or can exceptions be made for grossly immoral laws, such as historically, Nazi law? Surveying laypeople (N = 167) and people with some legal training (N = 141) on these matters, we find a surprisingly strong, monotonic relationship between people's subjective moral evaluation of laws and their judgments that these laws should be applied in concrete cases. This tendency is most pronounced among individuals who endorse natural law (i.e.

Patient-level cost analysis of intensive care unit acquired infections: A prospective cohort study.

Introduction: Hospital-associated infections (HAIs) are associated with increased mortality and prolonged hospital length-of-stay (LOS). Although some studies have shown that HAIs are associated with increased costs, these studies only used cost estimates, were carried out in a small number of centres, or only in high-income countries.

Methods: We carried out a prospective cohort study in ten Brazilian intensive care units (ICUs) selected from a collaborative platform study (IMPACTO MR).

The effect of birth timing manipulation around carnival on birth indicators in Brazil.

This paper studies the patterns and consequences of birth timing manipulation around the carnival holiday in Brazil. We document how births are displaced around carnival and estimate the effect of displacement on birth indicators. We show that there is extensive birth timing manipulation in the form of both anticipation and postponement that results in a net increase in gestational length and reductions in neonatal and early neonatal mortality, driven by postponed births that would otherwise happen through scheduled c-sections.

The impact of gestational weight gain on fetal and neonatal outcomes: the Araraquara Cohort Study.

Background: Gestational weight gain (GWG) is an important indicator for monitoring maternal and fetal health.

Objective: To evaluate the effect of GWG outside the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) on fetal and neonatal outcomes.

Study Design: A prospective cohort study with 1642 pregnant women selected from 2017 to 2023, with gestational age ≤ 18 weeks and followed until delivery in the city of Araraquara, Southeast Brazil.

Stochastic Volatility Models with Skewness Selection.

This paper expands traditional stochastic volatility models by allowing for time-varying skewness without imposing it. While dynamic asymmetry may capture the likely direction of future asset returns, it comes at the risk of leading to overparameterization. Our proposed approach mitigates this concern by leveraging sparsity-inducing priors to automatically select the skewness parameter as dynamic, static or zero in a data-driven framework.

Probabilistic Nearest Neighbors Classification.

Analysis of the currently established Bayesian nearest neighbors classification model points to a connection between the computation of its normalizing constant and issues of NP-completeness. An alternative predictive model constructed by aggregating the predictive distributions of simpler nonlocal models is proposed, and analytic expressions for the normalizing constants of these nonlocal models are derived, ensuring polynomial time computation without approximations. Experiments with synthetic and real datasets showcase the predictive performance of the proposed predictive model.

Machine Learning for the Detection and Diagnosis of Anomalies in Applications Driven by Electric Motors.

Manufacturing systems are becoming increasingly flexible, necessitating the adoption of new technologies that allow adaptations to a turbulent and complex modern market. Consequently, modern concepts of production systems require horizontal and vertical integration, extending across value networks and within a factory or production shop. The integration of these environments enables the acquisition of a substantial amount of data containing information pertaining to production, processes, and equipment located on the shop floor.

The impacts of political activity on fires and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest: An analysis of social media and satellite data.

Social media has become a one-stop shop for consuming news and expressing political views. Politics has become increasingly emotional, and the ensuing polarization has created echo chambers that favor narratives and stories that repeat only one point of view. In this article, we investigated the role of political activity through Twitter (now 'X') engagement as a predictor of destructive fires and deforestation in the Brazilian Legal Amazon (BLA).

The status of the human gene catalogue.

Scientists have been trying to identify every gene in the human genome since the initial draft was published in 2001. In the years since, much progress has been made in identifying protein-coding genes, currently estimated to number fewer than 20,000, with an ever-expanding number of distinct protein-coding isoforms. Here we review the status of the human gene catalogue and the efforts to complete it in recent years.

Price setting in the Brazilian private health insurance sector.

Brazil's private health insurance market is the second largest in the world, behind only the United States, making it a valuable source of real-world evidence. This paper documents how physicians' inpatient reimbursement fees vary in the country and explores the relationship between these fees and the market share of health providers and health insurance companies. We implement a fixed-effects panel regression and take advantage of an unprecedented database that contains national administrative records of inpatient procedures paid by health insurance companies in 2016.

The status of the human gene catalogue.

Scientists have been trying to identify all of the genes in the human genome since the initial draft of the genome was published in 2001. Over the intervening years, much progress has been made in identifying protein-coding genes, and the estimated number has shrunk to fewer than 20,000, although the number of distinct protein-coding isoforms has expanded dramatically. The invention of high-throughput RNA sequencing and other technological breakthroughs have led to an explosion in the number of reported non-coding RNA genes, although most of them do not yet have any known function.

Law, Coercion and Folk Intuitions.

In discussing whether legal systems are necessarily coercive, legal philosophers usually appeal to thought experiments involving angels or other morally driven beings who need no coercion to organise their social lives. Such appeals have invited criticism. Critics have not only challenged the relevance of such thought experiments to our understanding of legal systems; they have also argued that, contrary to the intuitions of most legal philosophers, the 'man on the Clapham Omnibus' would not hold that there is law in a society of angels because the view that law is necessarily coercive 'enjoys widespread support among laypersons'.

How transgressor's moral identity leads to high-quality apologies: The positive effects of guilt.

Comprehensive apologies are effective strategies to solve interpersonal conflict and promote reconciliation. However, transgressors tend to avoid providing comprehensive apologies because it is more threatening to do so. As a result, transgressors usually offer perfunctory apologies and hinder their own chances of being forgiven.

Antivirals for adult patients hospitalised with SARS-CoV-2 infection: a randomised, phase II/III, multicentre, placebo-controlled, adaptive study, with multiple arms and stages. COALITION COVID-19 BRAZIL IX - REVOLUTIOn trial.

Background: Repurposed drugs for treatment of new onset disease may be an effective therapeutic shortcut. We aimed to evaluate the efficacy of repurposed antivirals compared to placebo in lowering SARS-CoV2 viral load of COVID-19 patients.

Methods: REVOLUTIOn is a randomised, parallel, blinded, multistage, superiority and placebo controlled randomised trial conducted in 35 centres in Brazil.

Barriers to employing digital technologies for a circular economy: A multi-level perspective.

Industry 4.0 and digital technologies might significantly impact resource optimization in a smart circular economy. However, adopting digital technologies is not easy due to barriers that may arise during this process.

Long non-coding RNAs: definitions, functions, challenges and recommendations.

Genes specifying long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) occupy a large fraction of the genomes of complex organisms. The term 'lncRNAs' encompasses RNA polymerase I (Pol I), Pol II and Pol III transcribed RNAs, and RNAs from processed introns. The various functions of lncRNAs and their many isoforms and interleaved relationships with other genes make lncRNA classification and annotation difficult.

The effects of a national policy to reduce c-sections in Brazil.

In this paper, we assess the effects of a national policy implemented in Brazil to avoid unnecessary cesareans. The policy has a supply-side component that prohibits elective c-sections before the 39th gestational week and a demand-side awareness component. Since the policy is not binding for cases with a strong medical c-section indication, we use births of breech- and transverse-positioned babies as a counterfactual for births of cephalic-positioned babies in a difference-in-differences framework.

Rule is a dual character concept.

Recent experimental work revealed that rule violation judgments are sensitive to morality. For instance: when someone blamelessly violates a rule's text, about half of the participants say that the rule was violated, with the remainder saying that it wasn't. Why is that so? Current evidence is compatible with three distinct explanations.

Forecasting Covid-19 in the United Kingdom: A dynamic SIRD model.

Making use of a state space framework, we present a stochastic generalization of the SIRD model, where the mortality, infection, and underreporting rates change over time. A new format to the errors in the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered-Dead compartments is also presented, that permits reinfection. The estimated trajectories and (out-of-sample) forecasts of all these variables are presented with their confidence intervals.

Racial social norms among Brazilian students: Academic performance, popularity, and racial identification.

Studies in the United States have shown that minority students might face a trade-off between better academic performance and peer acceptance, which has been termed "acting White." This paper investigates racial differences in the relationship between grades and popularity in five Brazilian schools. Popularity is measured using friendship ties among students, assigning a higher value to students more central in the network.

The Brazilian Family Health Strategy and adult health: Evidence from individual and local data for metropolitan areas.

Previous studies have found that the expansion of primary health care in Brazil following the country-wide family health strategy (ESF), one of the largest primary care programs in the world, has improved health outcomes. However, these studies have relied either on aggregate data or on limited individual data, with no fine-grained information available concerning household participation in the ESF or local supply of ESF services, which represent crucial aspects for analytical and policy purposes. This study analyzes the relationship between the ESF and health outcomes for the adult population in metropolitan areas in Brazil.