Postrelease mortality among persons hospitalized during their incarceration

Purpose: Health and mortality of people released from incarceration have received increased attention, and yet little is known about the postrelease experiences of those hospitalized during incarceration. Methods: For persons incarcerated and released from the North Carolina (NC) state prison system between January 1, 2008, and June 30, 2015, we examined postrelease mortality from 2008 to 2016 by history of prison hospitalization. Results: Among 111,479 released persons, 0.9% (n = 1010) were hospitalized during their incarceration, and of those, 10.5% (n = 106) died during follow-up compared with 3.2% (3511/110,469) of other released persons. Those hospitalized in prison had a higher postrelease death rate (adjusted hazard ratio: 2.44), a lower 8-year conditional probability of survival (0.80 vs. 0.94), and were more likely to die from chronic causes (79.2% vs. 51.0%) than other released persons. The postrelease standardized mortality rate among men hospitalized in prison was 3.1 times higher than that of those not hospitalized and 7.1 times the rate of all NC men. Conclusions: People hospitalized during incarceration constitute a particularly vulnerable, yet relatively easily identifiable priority population to focus health interventions supporting continuity of care after prison release. Yet such efforts may be particularly challenging in NC and other Medicaid non-expansion states

Hydrodynamic Approach to Vortex Lifetime in Trapped Bose Condensates

We study a vortex in a two-dimensional, harmonically trapped Bose-Einstein condensate at zero temperature. Through a variational calculation using a trial condensate wave function and a nonlinear Schroedinger Lagrangian, we obtain the effective potential experienced by a vortex at an arbitrary position in the condensate, and find that an off-center vortex will move in a circular trajectory around the trap center. We find the frequency of this precession to be smaller than the elementary excitation frequencies in the cloud. We also study the radiation of sound from a moving vortex in an infinite, uniform system, and discuss the validity of this as an approximation for the trapped case. Furthermore, we estimate the lifetime of a vortex due to imperfections in the trapping potential.Comment: 10 pages, 1 eps figure, submitted to PRA, adjustments in response to referee, one refernce adde

Finitely presented wreath products and double coset decompositions

We characterize which permutational wreath products W^(X)\rtimes G are finitely presented. This occurs if and only if G and W are finitely presented, G acts on X with finitely generated stabilizers, and with finitely many orbits on the cartesian square X^2. On the one hand, this extends a result of G. Baumslag about standard wreath products; on the other hand, this provides nontrivial examples of finitely presented groups. For instance, we obtain two quasi-isometric finitely presented groups, one of which is torsion-free and the other has an infinite torsion subgroup. Motivated by the characterization above, we discuss the following question: which finitely generated groups can have a finitely generated subgroup with finitely many double cosets? The discussion involves properties related to the structure of maximal subgroups, and to the profinite topology.Comment: 21 pages; no figure. To appear in Geom. Dedicat

Generation and evolution of vortex-antivortex pairs in Bose-Einstein condensates

We propose a method for generating and controlling a spatially separated vortex--antivortex pair in a Bose-Einstein condensate trapped in a toroidal potential. Our simulations of the time dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation show that in toroidal condensates vortex dynamics are different from the dynamics in the homogeneous case. Our numerical results agree well with analytical calculations using the image method. Our proposal offers an effective example of coherent generation and control of vortex dynamics in atomic condensates.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Transitions of cardio-metabolic risk factors in the Americas between 1980 and 2014

Describing the prevalence and trends of cardiometabolic risk factors that are associated with non-communicable diseases (NCDs) is crucial for monitoring progress, planning prevention, and providing evidence to support policy efforts. We aimed to analyse the transition in body-mass index (BMI), obesity, blood pressure, raised blood pressure, and diabetes in the Americas, between 1980 and 2014

A century of trends in adult human height

Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, and higher education and earnings. We reanalysed 1472 population-based studies, with measurement of height on more than 18.6 million participants to estimate mean height for people born between 1896 and 1996 in 200 countries. The largest gain in adult height over the past century has occurred in South Korean women and Iranian men, who became 20.2 cm (95% credible interval 17.5-22.7) and 16.5 cm (13.3-19.7) taller, respectively. In contrast, there was little change in adult height in some sub-Saharan African countries and in South Asia over the century of analysis. The tallest people over these 100 years are men born in the Netherlands in the last quarter of 20th century, whose average heights surpassed 182.5 cm, and the shortest were women born in Guatemala in 1896 (140.3 cm; 135.8-144.8). The height differential between the tallest and shortest populations was 19-20 cm a century ago, and has remained the same for women and increased for men a century later despite substantial changes in the ranking of countries

Rising rural body-mass index is the main driver of the global obesity epidemic in adults

Body-mass index (BMI) has increased steadily in most countries in parallel with a rise in the proportion of the population who live in cities 1,2 . This has led to a widely reported view that urbanization is one of the most important drivers of the global rise in obesity 3�6 . Here we use 2,009 population-based studies, with measurements of height and weight in more than 112 million adults, to report national, regional and global trends in mean BMI segregated by place of residence (a rural or urban area) from 1985 to 2017. We show that, contrary to the dominant paradigm, more than 55 of the global rise in mean BMI from 1985 to 2017�and more than 80 in some low- and middle-income regions�was due to increases in BMI in rural areas. This large contribution stems from the fact that, with the exception of women in sub-Saharan Africa, BMI is increasing at the same rate or faster in rural areas than in cities in low- and middle-income regions. These trends have in turn resulted in a closing�and in some countries reversal�of the gap in BMI between urban and rural areas in low- and middle-income countries, especially for women. In high-income and industrialized countries, we noted a persistently higher rural BMI, especially for women. There is an urgent need for an integrated approach to rural nutrition that enhances financial and physical access to healthy foods, to avoid replacing the rural undernutrition disadvantage in poor countries with a more general malnutrition disadvantage that entails excessive consumption of low-quality calories. © 2019, The Author(s)

The first research agenda for the chiropractic profession in Europe

Background: The influence of psychological factors on acute neck pain is sparsely studied. In a secondary analysis of prospectively collected data, this study investigated how several psychological factors develop in the first three months of acute neck pain and how these factors influence self-perceived recovery. Methods: Patients were recruited in various chiropractic practices throughout Switzerland between 2010 and 2014. The follow-up telephone interviews were conducted for all patients by research assistants in the coordinating university hospital following a standardized procedure. The population of this study consisted of 103 patients (68 female; mean age = 38.3 ± 13.8 years) with a first episode of acute (<4 weeks) neck pain. Prior to the first treatment, the patients filled in the Bournemouth Questionnaire (BQ). One week and 1 and 3 months later, they completed the BQ again along with the Patient Global Impression of Change (PGIC). The temporal development (repeated measure ANOVA) of the BQ questions 4 (anxiety), 5 (depression), 6 (fear-avoidance) and 7 (pain locus of control) as well as the influence of these scores on the PGIC were investigated (binary logistic regression analyses, receiver operating curves (ROC)). Results: All psychological parameters showed significant reduction within the first month. The parameter 'anxiety' was associated with outcome at 1 and 3 months (p = 0.013,

Minimum cross-entropy methods for rare-event simulation

We apply the minimum cross-entropy method (MinXEnt) for estimating rare-event probabilities for the sum of i.i.d. random variables. MinXEnt is an analogy of the MaXimum Entropy Principle in the sense that the objective is to minimize a relative (or cross) entropy of a target density h from an unknown density f under suitable constraints. The main idea is to use the solution to this optimization program as the simulation density in importance sampling. We shall see that some eXisting importance sampling methods can be cast in a MinXEnt program, such as the large deviations approach for light tails and the hazard rate twisting for heavy tails. As an eXtension, we shall consider a correlated version of this hazard rate twisted solution which gives better simulation results. The sample generation is based on a Gibbs sampler algorithm. © 2007, Sage Publications. All rights reserved