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This study explores the sustainable development and application of bio-based surfactants derived from renewable resources. It introduces the surfactant blends rMix and N-Mix, derived from sugar beet pulp, offering eco-friendly alternatives for various applications. These blends exhibit good solubility, foamability, and surface tension reduction, comparable to commercial surfactants. Notably, the surfactants exhibit mildness towards the skin, as demonstrated by their significantly lower skin irritation potential compared to pet-rochemically-derived surfactants SDS and SLES, highlighting their suitability for skin-sensitive applications. Furthermore, viscosity studies suggest their compatibility in formulation mixtures, offering alternatives to the surfactant cocamido-propyl betaine (CAPB). Sustainability considerations are addressed for the development of the surfactants, emphasizing the importance of solvent and catalyst recycling, alongside life cycle assessments for environmental impact analysis. Although optimization and scale- up efforts are necessary to enable direct comparison with industrial standards, these surfactants hold potential as sustainable ingredients with good performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Monitoring the implementation of new interventions, as in this study Non-violent Resistance (NVR) for the use in residential youth care settings, is mandatory in order to evaluate, adjust and refine the implementation process where necessary. Objective: As there is no instrument for such monitoring of NVR available, the authors developed a new questionnaire, named "Reaction to Unacceptable Behavior Inventory", (in short: RUBI). Method: This questionnaire was completed by staff of four different residential settings in the Netherlands, at different stages of the NVR implementation process. The staff members reported on the practice of their colleagues. Results: The results are promising, as they show good reliability, inter-item correlations and other psychometric features for the included items. Furthermore, the results show that the RUBI seems to discriminate between trained and untrained teams, defending its use in future implementation processes and implementation research. Conclusions: The RUBI is the first attempt to create an instrument which can be used for monitoring change during implementation of NVR, and for evaluating the degree of difference or compatibility between NVR and existing practice before implementation. Longitudinal research is needed to strengthen the documentation of validity and reliability of the RUBI in different settings, countries, and cultures. This should also be extended to the final and follow-up stages of implementation. In the future, redundant and insensitive items should be removed and standards for interpreting scale scores should be developed.

Background: Primary salivary gland carcinomas (SGC) are rare neoplasms that present therapeutic challenges especially in recurrent tumors. The aim of this study was to investigate the incidence and distribution of tumor recurrence, associated risk factors, and survival. Methods: This analysis includes data from 318 patients treated for SGC between 1992 and 2020. Survival analysis was performed using the Kaplan–Meier method. Univariate and multivariate analyses were used to identify risk factors associated with recurrence. Results: 21.7% of the patients developed recurrent disease after a mean of 38.2 months. In multivariate analysis, positive‐resection margins, vascular invasion, and tumor localization in the submandibular gland and small salivary glands were independent factors for recurrence. The 5‐year overall survival was 67%, the 5‐year disease‐free survival was 54%. Conclusion: Tumor recurrence in SGC occurred in one out of five patients. In highly aggressive entities and patients with risk factors, treatment intensification should be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daniel Boakye1,2, Viola Walter1, Uwe M Martens3, Jenny Chang-Claude4, Michael Hoffmeister1, Lina Jansen1,*, Hermann Brenner1,5,6,* 1Division of Clinical Epidemiology and Aging Research, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany; 2Medical Faculty Heidelberg, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany; 3SLK-Clinics, Cancer Center Heilbronn-Franken, Heilbronn, Germany; 4Unit of Genetic Epidemiology, Division of Cancer Epidemiology, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany; 5Division of Preventive Oncology, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT), Heidelberg, Germany; 6German Cancer Consortium (DKTK), German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Hermann BrennerDivision of Clinical Epidemiology and Aging Research, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Im Neuenheimer Feld 581, Heidelberg 69120, GermanyTel +49 622 142 1300Fax +49 622 142 1302Email h.brenner@dkfz.deIntroduction: Propensity score methods are increasingly used to address confounding related to treatment selection in observational studies. Studies estimating the effect of chemotherapy in colon cancer (CC) patients, however, often lacked information on pertinent comorbidities and functional status (FS). We assessed to what extent comorbidities and FS impact treatment decisions in colorectal cancer patients and explain the benefit of chemotherapy in stage III CC patients.Methods: Stage II-III colorectal cancer patients diagnosed in 2003–2014 and recruited into a population-based study were included (N=1102). Associations of comorbidity and FS with treatment patterns were examined with multivariable logistic regression. The contribution of lower comorbidity and higher FS to the benefit of chemotherapy was estimated with propensity score weighted Cox models in 430 stage III CC patients who were followed over a median time of 4.7 years.Results: In stage II (high-risk) and III CC patients, Charlson comorbidity scores 1, 2 and 3+ were associated with 57%, 66% and 70% lower odds of chemotherapy use, respectively. In combination with older age and poor FS, comorbidity was associated with 97% and 83% decreased odds of adjuvant chemotherapy use in CC and rectal cancer patients, respectively. In stage III CC patients, lower comorbidity and higher FS explained 38% and 24% of the overall and disease-specific survival benefits of chemotherapy, respectively. Selection bias was observed even in the comprehensive models, as chemotherapy was still associated with substantially higher non-disease-specific survival (hazard ratio (HR): 0.66; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.46–0.92), especially in patients

Janick Weberpals,1 Lina Jansen,1 Geert Silversmit,2 Julie Verbeeck,2 Lydia van der Geest,3 Pauline AJ Vissers,3 Vesna Zadnik,4 Hermann Brenner1,5,6 1Division of Clinical Epidemiology and Aging Research, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany; 2Belgian Cancer Registry (BCR), Brussels, Belgium; 3Netherlands Comprehensive Cancer Organization (IKNL), Utrecht, The Netherlands; 4Epidemiology and Cancer Registry, Institute of Oncology Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia; 5Division of Preventive Oncology, National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) and German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany; 6German Cancer Consortium (DKTK), German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany Purpose: The Mantel–Byar method is the gold standard analytical approach to avoid immortal time bias, but requires information on the time between start of follow-up and exposure initiation. Alternatively, a modified landmark approach might be used to mitigate the amount of immortal time bias, which assumes exposure initiation at a predefined landmark time. In the context of an expected positive association between adjuvant chemotherapy (ACT) and overall survival among resected pancreatic cancer (PCa) patients, this study aims to empirically assess the performance of this approach relative to the Mantel–Byar method.Patients and methods: Data from resected PCa patients diagnosed between 2003 and 2014 and registered in the national cancer registries of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Slovenia were used to estimate the association between ACT and overall survival using a Cox proportional hazards model by country and overall. Results derived from the immortal time bias (misclassifying the time to ACT initiation), Mantel–Byar method, and conventional and modified landmark analyses with assumed cutoff times of ACT initiation at 9, 12 and 15 weeks post-diagnosis were compared.Results: In total, 5,668 patients with a total of 10,921 person-years of follow-up were eligible. All analytical approaches showed a significant survival benefit for resected PCa patients who received ACT, but immortal time bias analyses led to strong overestimation of ACT benefits compared to the Mantel–Byar method (immortal time bias: overall HR [95% CI] 0.68 [0.62–0.75] vs Mantel–Byar method: 0.82 [0.71–0.93]), whereas the conventional landmark approach generally provided rather conservative estimates (0.86 [0.75–1.00], 15 weeks landmark). HRs derived from modified landmark analyses depended on the cutoff time, but were similar compared to the Mantel–Byar method at 15 weeks (0.81 [0.70–0.94]).Conclusion: A modified landmark approach might be a valid alternative to the Mantel–Byar method if no time of treatment information is available. The performance depends on the chosen cutoff time. Keywords: immortal time bias, landmark analysis, pancreatic cancer, chemotherapy, population-based

Agitation is a commonly found behavioral condition in persons with advanced dementia. It requires continuous monitoring to gain insights into agitation levels to assist caregivers in delivering adequate care. The available monitoring techniques use cameras and wearables which are distressful and intrusive and are thus often rejected by older adults. To enable continuous monitoring in older adult care, unobtrusive Wi-Fi channel state information (CSI) can be leveraged to monitor physical activities related to agitation. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no realistic CSI datasets available for facilitating the classification of physical activities demonstrated during agitation scenarios such as disturbed walking, repetitive sitting–getting up, tapping on a surface, hand wringing, rubbing on a surface, flipping objects, and kicking. Therefore, in this paper, we present a public dataset named Wi-Gitation. For Wi-Gitation, the Wi-Fi CSI data were collected with twenty-three healthy participants depicting the aforementioned agitation-related physical activities at two different locations in a one-bedroom apartment with multiple receivers placed at different distances (0.5–8 m) from the participants. The validation results on the Wi-Gitation dataset indicate higher accuracies ( F 1 -Scores ≥ 0.95 ) when employing mixed-data analysis, where the training and testing data share the same distribution. Conversely, in scenarios where the training and testing data differ in distribution (i.e., leave-one-out), the accuracies experienced a notable decline ( F 1 -Scores ≤ 0.21 ). This dataset can be used for fundamental research on CSI signals and in the evaluation of advanced algorithms developed for tackling domain invariance in CSI-based human activity recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]