Association of Sleep Duration with Chronic Diseases in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC)-Potsdam Study

Background: In view of the reduced number of hours devoted to sleep in modern western societies the question arises what effects might result from sleep duration on occurrence of chronic diseases. Methods: Data from 23 620 middle-aged participants of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC)-Potsdam study, that were recruited between 1994–1998, were analyzed by using Cox proportional hazard regression to examine the association between self-reported sleep duration at baseline and incidence of chronic diseases, such as diabetes, myocardial infarction, stroke, and cancer. Results: During a mean follow-up period of 7.8 years 841 incident cases of type 2 diabetes, 197 cases of myocardial infarction, 169 incident strokes, and 846 tumor cases were observed. Compared to persons sleeping 7-,8 h/day, participants with sleep duration of,6 h had a significantly increased risk of stroke (Hazard Ratio (HR) = 2.06, 95

Contextual TV dataset

If you use this dataset please cite the following papers: Primary citation Miklas S. Kristoffersen, Sven E. Shepstone, and Zheng-Hua Tan. The Importance of Context When Recommending TV Content: Dataset and Algorithms. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 22(6), 1531-1541. Secondary citation Miklas S. Kristoffersen, Sven E. Shepstone, and Zheng-Hua Tan. A Dataset for Inferring Contextual Preferences of Users Watching TV. In UMAP ’18: 26th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization

Can teaching veterinary and animal-science students about animal welfare affect their attitude toward animals and human-related empathy?

Attitudes toward animals are important in influencing how animals are treated. Few studies have investigated attitudes toward animals in veterinary or animal-science students, and no studies have compared attitudes to animals before and after a course teaching animal welfare and ethics. In this study, students enrolled in veterinary (first-year) or animal-science (first- and third-year) programs completed a questionnaire on attitudes toward different categories of animals before and after the course. Higher attitude scores suggest a person more concerned about how an animal is treated. Normally distributed data were compared using parametric statistics, and non-normally distributed data were compared using non-parametric tests, with significance p<.05. Attitudes toward pets (45.5–47.6) were higher than those toward pests (34.2–38.4) or profit animals (30.3–32.1). Attitude scores increased from before to after the course in the veterinary cohort on the Pest (36.9 vs. 38.4, respectively, n=27, p<.05) and Profit (30.3 vs. 32.1, respectively, n=28, p<.05) subscales, but not in the animal-science cohorts. Attitude scores in all categories were higher for women than for men. Currently having an animal was associated with higher pet scores (46.8 vs. 43.8, ns=120 and 13, respectively, p<.05), and having an animal as a child was associated with higher profit scores (31.0 vs. 26.6, ns=129 and 8, respectively, p<.05). Students electing to work with livestock had lower scores on the Pest and Profit subscales, and students wanting to work with wildlife had significantly higher scores on the Pest and Profit subscales. This study demonstrates attitudinal changes after an animal-welfare course, with significant increases in veterinary but not animal-science students.Susan J. Hazel, Tania D. Signal, Nicola Taylo

Nonperturbative Strange Sea in Proton Using Wave Functions Inspired by Light Front Holography

We use different light-front wave functions (two inspired by the AdS/QCD formalism), together with a model of the nucleon in terms of meson–baryon fluctuations to calculate the nonperturbative (intrinsic) contribution to the s(x)−s¯(x) asymmetry of the proton sea. The holographic wave functions for an arbitrary number of constituents, recently derived by us, give results quite close to known parametrizations that appear in the literature

IMPACT OF ENDOCRINE DISORDERS IN CRITICALLY ILL PATIENTS

Patients presenting with different critical illnesses often display secondary endocrine systemic conditions. In another respect, patients registered in intensive care units (ICUs) might present major clinical findings that are attributable to the precipitating illness and might mask underlying primary endocrine diseases. In this chapter we will analyze two specific conditions, dysglycemia and low-T3 syndrome (lowT3S), often occurring in different critical ill patients. In the last years several studies reported that dysglycemia is an independent risk factor of mortality for critically ill patients. Dysglycemia, including stress-induced hyperglycemia, hypoglycemia, or serum blood fluctuation, has a poor prognostic impact especially in subjects who did not know to have diabetes before admission in ICU. As far as lowT3S is concerned, it is also known as non-thyroidal illness syndrome and indicates a condition in which an impairment in thyroid function can be detected in the absence of appropriate changes in TSH levels. In this chapter we will analyze the underlining mechanisms and consequences for both dysglycemia and lowT3S in different critical illnesses and the most appropriate therapeutic approache