Search Results (14,725)

Marginal bone preservation around osseointegrated dental implants continues to represent a critical challenge in modern implant dentistry. To address this issue, subcrestal implant placement along the apico-coronal axis has been proposed as a reliable clinical strategy aimed at reducing the risk of implant thread exposure within the oral environment. In the present study, 38 healthy patients were treated with either bone-level implants (BLG-Control) or implants positioned 2 mm subcrestally (SCG-Test). All implants featured an internal conical connection and a platform-switching design. In addition, implants in the test group were restored using an immediate tissue-level abutment following the one-time abutment (OTA) protocol. Marginal bone modifications (MBMs) were evaluated through standardized radiographic examinations performed at surgery (T0), implant loading (T1), and after 6 (T2), 12 (T3), 24 (T4), and 36 (T5) months of functional loading. MBMs, meaning the overall changes in the radiographic bone structure over time, were categorized as bone loss (BL) when occurring apical to the implant neck, and as bone remodeling (BR) when detected coronally to the implant neck. Clinical parameters, including probing pocket depth (PPD), bleeding on probing (BoP), and plaque index (PI), were also recorded and analyzed throughout the follow-up period. At the 36-month evaluation, mean MBM values were 0.61 mm for the test group and 0.58 mm for the control group. After three years of follow-up, the test group demonstrated a mean PPD of 2.03 mm, compared with 2.78 mm in the control group. Bleeding on probing was recorded at 13% in the test group and 11% in the control group, while plaque index values were 11% and 5%, respectively. Within the limitations of the present investigation, implants placed 2 mm subcrestally and characterized by an internal conical connection combined with platform switching demonstrated favorable clinical and radiographic outcomes over a short- to medium-term observation period of three years. When compared with equicrestally positioned implants, the subcrestal approach seemed to favor the peri-implant hard tissue conditions while reducing the possibility of marginal bone loss below the implant neck. However, one should bear in mind that this clinical behavior applies specifically to the investigated implant design and should be interpreted within the limitations of the present study. Full article

Background/Objectives: Root canal treatment (RCT) may be required after full-coverage crown placement in initially vital teeth due to biological and restorative factors affecting pulp vitality. However, the timing and distribution of clinical variables associated with teeth requiring RCT after crown placement remain insufficiently described. The aim of this study was to evaluate this timing and distribution using retrospective data collected between 2011 and 2024. Methods: This study included 588 vital teeth treated with metal–ceramic or zirconia crowns between 2011 and 2024. Recorded variables were age, gender, tooth type and location, crown material, bruxism, number of abutment teeth, and time to RCT. Statistical analyses were performed using SPSS v25.0, and as data were not normally distributed (Shapiro–Wilk test), Mann–Whitney U, Kruskal–Wallis, and chi-square or Fisher’s exact tests were used (p < 0.05). Results: Of the 588 teeth, 36.1% were from male and 63.9% from female patients, and most crowns were metal–ceramic (80.8%), followed by zirconia (19.2%). Significant associations were observed between tooth group and jaw location (p < 0.001), number of abutment teeth (p < 0.001), and crown material type (p < 0.001). RCT was most frequently recorded during the fifth year after crown placement (52.6% of cases), with a mean time of 4.13 ± 1.79 years. Tooth extraction was observed in 5.3% of teeth. Conclusions: This study provides descriptive information regarding the distribution and timing of RCT in initially vital teeth following fixed prosthodontic restorations. The findings should be interpreted as a characterization of affected cases rather than as evidence of risk factors or predictors of RCT occurrence. Full article

Background/Objectives: Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) interfere with hormonal homeostasis and have been implicated in gynecological malignancy pathogenesis. This narrative review synthesizes current evidence regarding EDC exposure and breast, endometrial, ovarian, and cervical cancers, examining molecular mechanisms, epidemiology, and diagnostic and clinical implications. Methods: We conducted a literature review using PubMed/MEDLINE, Embase, Scopus, and Cochrane databases through April 2026, including systematic reviews, meta-analyses, prospective cohorts, case-control studies, and mechanistic investigations examining EDC-cancer associations. Methodological quality was appraised using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale and AMSTAR-2, with overall certainty of evidence rated using the GRADE framework. Results: Major EDC classes—bisphenol compounds, phthalates, polychlorinated biphenyls, organochlorine pesticides, and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—demonstrate carcinogenic potential through estrogen receptor modulation, epigenetic alterations, oxidative stress, and oncogenic signaling disruption. Breast cancer shows the strongest evidence, with prenatal and early-life DDT/DDE exposure associated with up to a 3.7-fold increased risk. Endometrial cancer demonstrates associations with xenoestrogen mixtures exhibiting non-monotonic dose-responses, whereas ovarian and cervical cancers show emerging but limited associations. Common mechanisms include receptor crosstalk, epigenetic dysregulation with transgenerational effects, oxidative genomic instability, metabolic reprogramming, and cancer stem cell enrichment. Conclusions: Evidence supports EDC contributions to gynecological malignancy through convergent pathways, though causal inference remains constrained by observational epidemiology, long latency periods, and challenges in characterizing real-world mixture exposures. Diagnostic and prevention strategies should integrate EDC exposure into risk-prediction models, leverage multi-omics biomarkers for early detection, and emphasize exposure reduction during critical developmental windows alongside regulatory reform. Full article

With the rapid development of social media and online interactive platforms, online public opinion has become a vital information source for public emotional expression, social risk perception, and decision support. However, public opinion texts are typically characterized by short length, obscure semantics, complex emotional expressions, and strong context dependence, making it difficult for traditional lexicon-based or shallow neural network methods to achieve stable and robust performance in sentiment discrimination tasks. To address these issues, this paper proposes BERT-BiLSTM-MHSA-Capsule (BBMC), hereafter referred to as BBMC, an online public opinion sentiment analysis model based on multi-level semantic feature fusion. The model first utilizes the pretrained language model BERT to extract dynamic semantic representations with context-aware capabilities; subsequently, a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) network is employed to model the bidirectional temporal dependencies within the texts, while a Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA) mechanism is introduced to achieve adaptive focusing on key emotional information. Building upon this, a three-layer cascaded capsule network is constructed to achieve structured modeling of high-order emotional attributes through vector neurons and dynamic routing mechanisms, effectively mitigating the loss of spatial feature information caused by traditional pooling and fully connected structures. Experimental results on a manually annotated online public opinion dataset show that BBMC achieves better performance than the evaluated baseline models in terms of accuracy, recall, and F1-score. These results indicate the empirical effectiveness of the proposed task-oriented feature-integration strategy and capsule-based classification head for online public opinion sentiment analysis. Full article

Reinforced concrete frame structures (RCFSs) subjected to strong seismic excitation may enter a metastable semi-ruin state before global collapse, characterized by severe local damage, degraded stability, and high secondary collapse risk. However, systematic experimental investigations and quantitative identification techniques for this critical transitional state are still lacking in existing seismic engineering literature, forming a notable research gap for post-earthquake safety evaluation. To investigate this critical transition, a Digital Image Correlation (DIC)-assisted shaking table test was conducted on a 1/25-scale RCFS specimen derived from an earthquake-damaged exterior-corridor teaching building, using the Wolong ground motion recorded during the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake as input. DIC was employed to track the full-field evolution of cracking, through-crack development, and concrete cover spalling under incremental seismic loading. Four local damage indices—crack line density (CLD), crack propagation rate (CPR), through-crack ratio (TCR), and concrete spalling ratio (CSR)—were extracted and evaluated with the inter-story drift ratio (IDR) to quantify local-to-global degradation. The results show that visible cracks initiated at PGA = 0.3 g, while accelerated crack propagation occurred at 0.7–0.8 g, with CPR peaks of 1187.5 and 1140 mm/g, respectively. At 0.5–1.0 g, the crack number increased from 13 to 26, total crack length reached 0.443 m, CLD increased to 3.9 × 10⁻⁴, and TCR reached 37.04%. At 1.1–1.5 g, crack development approached saturation, with total crack length of 0.552 m, maximum TCR of 63.6%, and CLD of 4.8 × 10⁻⁴. Under ultimate excitation of 1.6–1.8 g, the crack number stabilized at 33–34, TCR remained around 63%, cumulative spalling area reached 1026 mm², CSR reached 0.015, and the third-floor IDR approached the 1/50 elastoplastic limit. Severe through-cracking, reinforcement exposure, concrete spalling, and residual inclination indicated the onset of the semi-ruin state. The proposed multi-index framework provides quantitative support for semi-ruin-state identification and post-earthquake secondary collapse risk assessment of RCFSs. Full article

Recent evidence shows that multi-hazard events are becoming more frequent across Europe, highlighting the need to move beyond single-hazard approaches and toward integrated risk assessment. Despite recent advances, four key gaps persist: limited quantitative research on hazard interactions; model complexity that restricts large-scale applicability; narrow hazard coverage with insufficient integration of climate change scenarios; and neglect of cumulative impacts from sequential events. This study makes two complementary contributions. First, it proposes a scalable, unified multi-hazard risk assessment framework applicable at regional and European scales. In this framework, multi-hazard considerations are embedded throughout the entire assessment process—from study domain definition and loss metrics, through hazard characterization and conceptual incorporation of dynamic vulnerability, to the probabilistic treatment of hazard interactions and compound effects via a probabilistic, conditional-dependency framework conceptually represented as a Bayesian network. Second, based on the literature review conducted in this study, no prior European study was identified that combines flood, earthquake, and earthquake-triggered landslide hazards at the asset level for educational facilities. Therefore, this work is, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, among the first such quantitative, asset-level multi-hazard risk assessments. The framework is demonstrated for over 1700 school buildings in the Region of Central Macedonia, Greece, using pan-European open-access datasets (ESHM20, ESRM20, JRC, GIRI, and ELSUS v2), making it readily transferable across Europe. By supporting risk-informed prioritization of mitigation and resilience investments, this work is consistent with the broader objectives of the Sendai Framework and the UN Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 11 and SDG 13. Full article

The slopes of Mount Etna (Sicily, Italy) are home to an extraordinary viticultural heritage, comprising several vine genotypes at risk of extinction, whose oenological potential remains largely unexplored. This study aims to provide an aromatic characterization of red wines produced from five old-vine genotypes (Barbarossa Etna, Madama Nera, Moscatella Nera, Minnella Nera, and Terribile), comparing them with local and international cultivars. The wines were produced using standardized microvinification techniques; physicochemical parameters were measured according to OIV methods, volatile aromatic compounds were analyzed using HS-SPME/GC-MS, and sensory analysis was carried out using quantitative descriptive analysis. The wines from old-vine genotypes exhibited physicochemical characteristics in line with Etna DOC standards. The profiling of volatile organic compounds revealed clear cultivar-specific aromatic characteristics, with Moscatella Nera exhibiting the most complex and terpene-rich content. The sensory analysis confirmed a distinctive aroma for each old-vine genotype wine, with substantial differences from traditional and international wines. These results support the oenological significance of these old-vine genotypes and their potential reintroduction into production to enhance the biodiversity and identity of Etna wines. Full article

Ancient timber structures are important carriers of valuable cultural heritage, and their structural safety directly determines whether historic buildings can remain in safe service over time. Cracks represent one of the most widespread and important forms of damage in ancient timber structures. They can directly lead to cross-sectional weakening of structural members, degradation of load-bearing capacity, and the gradual development of overall structural safety risks. To address the limitations of existing crack assessment methods, such as strong subjectivity in weight determination, insufficient accuracy in grade boundary discrimination, and inadequate coupling with mechanical performance, this study proposes a crack safety assessment method for ancient timber structures based on an improved entropy–fuzzy matter-element model. A multi-dimensional evaluation index system is established, incorporating crack geometric characteristics, structural load-bearing capacity, and service time effects. A mechanically driven load-carrying capacity degradation index is introduced to quantitatively characterize the influence mechanism of crack propagation on structural performance deterioration. The entropy weight method is employed to objectively determine the weights of each indicator, and an asymmetric closeness degree is introduced to improve the traditional fuzzy matter-element model, thereby enhancing the stability and accuracy of safety grade classification. A case study of the Bawang Academy, Shenyang Jianzhu University, is conducted. Crack parameters are obtained using image recognition and three-dimensional laser scanning techniques, and a comprehensive structural safety assessment is performed. The results indicate that the proposed method can accurately reflect the actual damage distribution and deterioration level of the structure, providing a reliable theoretical basis and technical support for crack safety evaluation and preventive conservation of ancient timber structures. Full article

Background and Objectives: Rheumatic diseases confer excess cardiovascular risk, yet prognosis after acute coronary syndrome (ACS) in contemporary angiography-treated care remains incompletely characterized, particularly when psychiatric multimorbidity is considered. We evaluated whether documented rheumatic disease was associated with psychiatric comorbidity and post-discharge mortality after ACS. Materials and Methods: We retrospectively analyzed a predefined two-center registry extract of 2950 consecutive patients who underwent coronary angiography for ACS. Documented rheumatic disease was identified from diagnoses recorded in admission history, prior medical records, or discharge documentation and was not re-adjudicated. The primary outcome was post-discharge all-cause mortality. Results: Documented rheumatic disease was present in 106 patients (3.6%). Compared with patients without documented rheumatic disease, exposed patients were older, more often women, more often hypertensive, and more likely to have a documented psychiatric disorder (25.5% vs. 14.1%). Short-term mortality was similar, whereas crude overall long-term mortality was higher (27.4% vs. 19.3%). Among hospital survivors with usable follow-up, post-discharge survival was worse (log-rank p = 0.013). Documented rheumatic disease was associated with higher post-discharge mortality in unadjusted analysis (hazard ratio 1.66, 95% confidence interval 1.11–2.48) and in a prespecified parsimonious model (adjusted hazard ratio 1.56, 95% confidence interval 1.04–2.34); the association attenuated and was no longer statistically significant in a broader exploratory model (adjusted hazard ratio 1.35, 95% confidence interval 0.87–2.07). Documented psychiatric disorder independently predicted mortality. Conclusions: In angiography-treated ACS, documented rheumatic disease was associated with greater psychiatric comorbidity and worse post-discharge survival in a small, documentation-defined, heterogeneous subgroup. Because the signal attenuated in broader exploratory adjustment and exposure ascertainment was documentation-based, the findings should be regarded as hypothesis-generating rather than disease-specific or causal. Full article

Ammonia nitrogen is one of the most common environmental stressors in aquaculture water environments, and its accumulation can induce physiological disturbance, altered ventilation regulation, and abnormal behavioral responses in fish. To achieve non-invasive quantitative characterization of rainbow trout responses to ammonia nitrogen stress, this study developed a computer-vision-based framework for the integrated analysis of locomotor behavior and ventilation activity. Rainbow trout were exposed to four ammonia nitrogen concentrations: 0, 15, 30, and 60 mg/L. A total of 16 rainbow trout were used in this study, with an average body length of 14.0 ± 1.0 cm and an average body weight of 38.65 ± 2.42 g. The fish were assigned to four experimental aquaria, with four fish maintained in one aquarium for each TAN treatment. Stereo videos for locomotor behavior analysis and monocular mouth-region videos for ventilation analysis were simultaneously collected, and the final 5 min of each recording was analyzed. YOLOv11n, multi-object tracking, and stereo vision were used to extract three-dimensional position sequences of rainbow trout and calculate the amount of exercise, average swimming speed, and spatial distribution. Meanwhile, optical-flow analysis was applied to quantify mouth opening–closing motion and estimate ventilation frequency. The results showed that with increasing ammonia nitrogen concentration, rainbow trout locomotor behavior tended to be suppressed, with average swimming speed showing the clearest decrease, whereas ventilation frequency continuously increased. Average swimming speed decreased from 3.83 cm/s in the 0 mg/L group to 1.03 cm/s in the 60 mg/L group, while ventilation frequency increased from 84.91 breaths/min to 133.43 breaths/min. Compared with locomotor indicators, ventilation frequency showed a more stable response to changes in ammonia nitrogen concentration. This study achieved the synchronous quantification of rainbow trout locomotor behavior and ventilation activity, revealing a differentiated response pattern characterized by enhanced ventilation and suppressed locomotor behavior under acute ammonia nitrogen stress. These findings provide a methodological reference for fish stress assessment and risk warning in aquaculture environments. Full article

Harmful gas is a major hazard in underground engineering construction, and accurate prediction of its risk level is essential for tunnel safety. Existing prediction methods for harmful-gas risk in non-coal strata tunnels are limited by empirical scoring, subjective indicator assignment, and insufficient quantitative characterization of reservoir performance. To address these limitations, this study proposes an SSA-CatBoost prediction model for harmful-gas risk levels in non-coal strata tunnels. Eight influencing indicators were selected as input variables. Among them, reservoir performance was quantitatively characterized by measured porosity and permeability, while the other six indicators were quantified using engineering-based scoring criteria. A database containing 138 real harmful-gas tunnel cases was constructed, and CatBoost was used as the base classifier. The Sparrow Search Algorithm was introduced to optimize the hyperparameters of CatBoost. The proposed SSA-CatBoost model achieved an average accuracy of 93.63% in five-fold cross-validation and an accuracy of 92.86% on the independent test set. Compared with CatBoost, SSA-SVM, and SSA-XGBoost, the proposed model showed the highest cross-validation accuracy. Engineering validation further showed that all selected validation samples were correctly classified. In addition, replacing empirical reservoir-performance scoring with measured porosity and permeability improved the recognition performance of adjacent risk levels, with the F1-scores of Level III and Level IV increasing from 0.667 and 0.727 to 0.909, respectively. The novelty of this study lies in integrating measured reservoir-performance parameters into a machine-learning-based harmful-gas risk prediction framework, thereby reducing the subjectivity of conventional scoring systems and improving the quantitative characterization of non-coal strata tunnel gas hazards. Full article

Osteoradionecrosis of the jaw (ORNJ) remains one of the most severe late complications of head and neck radiotherapy. Current evidence suggests that ORNJ is a progressive and biologically heterogeneous disorder driven by microvascular injury, chronic hypoxia, oxidative stress, fibro-atrophic remodeling, impaired bone turnover, immune dysregulation, and systemic susceptibility factors. Within this complex pathogenic network, heat shock protein 27 (HSP27) emerges as a biologically plausible but unexplored mediator. HSP27 regulates multiple stress-response pathways, including redox homeostasis, cytoskeletal stabilization, endothelial protection, apoptosis control, fibroblast activation, and osteoblast–osteoclast function, all of which overlap with key mechanisms implicated in ORNJ. However, no studies have directly investigated HSP27 expression, activation, or functional significance in irradiated mandibular tissues or ORNJ-specific cohorts. This review summarizes current knowledge of ORNJ pathobiology, examines potential mechanistic links with HSP27, and outlines future research priorities involving biomarker development, tissue-level characterization, preclinical modeling, and therapeutic targeting. Integrating HSP27 into ORNJ research may improve understanding of pathogenesis, risk stratification, and the development of novel preventive and therapeutic strategies. Full article

The SP Gas Storage is situated in the SP-Xingcheng structural belt, where volcanic gas reservoirs are widely distributed and characterized by abundant primary microfractures and pore structures. The developed pores and fractures degrade the petrophysical properties of reservoirs and render volcanic basement rocks highly abrasive. In addition, pore-fracture systems alter the internal stress field of formations, which substantially increases the risk of wellbore instability and the collapse of injection and production wells. This poses great challenges to drilling operations and the safe running of the gas storage in this block. To systematically clarify the wellbore instability mechanism of large-diameter wellbores and address the drilling engineering problems in the study area, a dedicated experimental scheme for large-diameter wellbore stability was designed in this work. Laboratory true triaxial tests were conducted on wellbore stability with different borehole sizes, and basic mechanical parameter tests of reservoir rocks were also completed. This study systematically investigates the evolution of rock mechanical parameters and the surrounding stress-reconstruction mechanism induced by pore-forming unloading and identifies the dominant internal mechanism of wellbore instability under large-diameter conditions. A clear distinction is made between the formation stress redistribution caused by stratum exposure and unloading during drilling and formation stress evolution during the subsequent injection and production of the gas storage. On this basis, the fracture initiation threshold, propagation paths, and morphological evolution in thin interbedded sandstone–mudstone reservoirs are further analyzed. Combined with rock mechanical parameters and in situ stress balance conditions, criteria and quantitative evaluation methods for wellbore instability discrimination are finally established. Full article

Background: Public fitness facilities are high-contact environments that facilitate microbial transfer via shared surfaces; however, temporal dynamics and device-specific contamination patterns remain insufficiently characterized. Methods: A repeated-measures observational study was conducted in a fitness facility over five consecutive weekdays (Monday to Friday). A total of 180 surface samples were collected from 12 gym devices, each sampled three times daily (morning, noon, and evening). Surface-associated cultivable bacteria were recovered using culture-based methods followed by MALDI-TOF MS identification. Ecological metrics, including species richness and Shannon diversity, were calculated, and taxa were classified by origin (skin-associated versus environmental). Device-specific contamination profiles were developed using a composite index incorporating pathogen presence, contamination frequency, and persistence. Temporal trends and predictors of contamination were analyzed using mixed-effects regression models. All statistical analyses were performed in R. Results: A total of 248 bacterial isolates were identified, representing 61 species across 32 families, with a predominance of skin-associated taxa (72.2%). Sampling time point was a strong independent predictor of contamination (adjusted OR for noon vs. morning: 7.19; p < 0.001). While overall microbial diversity remained stable across devices (Shannon index, p = 0.44), substantial heterogeneity was observed in pathogen prevalence, multispecies burden, and persistence. The functional trainer and leg extension showed the highest composite risk scores (42.3%), while the ab crunch machine and upper body ergometer demonstrated significantly increasing contamination trends over the sampling period (p < 0.05). Co-occurrence analysis showed nonrandom microbial associations, with the strongest positive links between Micrococcus luteus and Staphylococcus saprophyticus (Φ = 0.76) and Staphylococcus aureus (Φ = 0.61). Conclusions: Gym equipment surfaces harbor predominantly human-associated microbial communities exhibiting dynamic temporal contamination patterns, and on selected devices, increasing the baseline contamination across consecutive cleaning cycles. The findings indicate that contamination patterns on shared fitness equipment are dominated by taxa commonly associated with human skin and support targeted hygiene interventions focused on frequently contacted devices and periods of elevated contamination. Full article

Background/Objectives: Chronic ulcers are common among older and multimorbid hospitalized patients and may reflect systemic vulnerability beyond the local wound condition. Malignancy recorded among secondary diagnoses may identify patients with reduced physiological reserve and increased inpatient risk, but its prognostic significance in hospitalized chronic ulcer populations remains insufficiently characterized. This study aimed to evaluate whether malignancy coded among secondary diagnoses was associated with in-hospital mortality among adults hospitalized with chronic ulcers. Methods: This nationwide retrospective cohort study used anonymized Romanian public-hospital discharge data for adults aged ≥18 years hospitalized with chronic ulcers between 1 January 2017 and 31 December 2022. The index-episode cohort included 69,349 patients generating 116,264 hospitalizations. Exposure was defined as at least one ICD-10 C00–C97 malignant neoplasm code recorded among secondary diagnoses in the relevant analytical hospitalization. The primary outcome was in-hospital mortality. Crude and adjusted odds ratios were estimated using logistic regression models. Results: Overall, 1837 patients had C00–C97 codes recorded among secondary diagnoses, with 73 deaths. In-hospital mortality was 3.97% among exposed patients and 1.78% among unexposed patients, corresponding to a crude odds ratio of 2.28 (95% CI 1.79–2.90). After adjustment for age group, sex, admission type, chronic ulcer category, and hospitalization pattern, malignancy recorded among secondary diagnoses remained associated with mortality (adjusted OR 1.87, 95% CI 1.42–2.45; p < 0.001). Additional adjustment for the number of non-malignant secondary diagnoses yielded similar results (adjusted OR 1.88, 95% CI 1.42–2.47; p < 0.001). Conclusions: Malignancy coded among secondary diagnoses may serve as a pragmatic administrative marker of increased in-hospital mortality risk among patients hospitalized with chronic ulcers. However, residual confounding and the absence of cancer-stage information limit causal interpretation. Full article