Coronary artery disease, left ventricular hypertrophy and diastolic dysfunction are associated with stroke in patients affected by persistent non-valvular atrial fibrillation: a case-control study

Persistent non-valvular atrial fibrillation (NVAF) is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular events such as stroke, and its rate is expected to rise because of the ageing population. The absolute rate of stroke depends on age and comorbidity. Risk stratification for stroke in patients with NVAF derives from populations enrolled in randomized clinical trials. However, participants in clinical trials are often not representative of the general population. Many stroke risk stratification scores have been used, but they do not include transthoracic echocardiogram (TTE), pulsate wave Doppler (PWD) and tissue Doppler imaging (TDI), simple and non- invasive diagnostic tools. The role of TTE, PWD and TDI findings has not been previously determined. Our study goal was to determine the association between TTE and PWD findings and stroke prevalence in a population of NVAF prone outpatients

Self-Organization of Internet Paths

The Internet consists of a constantly evolving complex hierarchical architecture where routers are grouped into autonomous systems (ASes) that interconnect to provide global connectivity. Routing is generally performed in a decentralized fashion, where each router determines the route to the destination based on the information gathered from neighboring routers. Consequently, the impact of a route update broadcasted by one router may affect many other routers, causing an avalanche of update messages broadcasted throughout the network. In this paper we analyze an extensive dataset with measurements on Internet routes between a set of highly stable testboxes for a period of five years. The measurements provide insight into the coherence between routing events in the Internet and we argue that the routing dynamics exhibit self-organized criticality (SOC). The SOC property provides an explanation for the power-law behavior that we observe in the operational times of routesNetwork Architectures and ServicesElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc