Antihypertensive drug reduction for treated hypertensive patients during the summer

Seasonal winter–summer variation in blood pressure (BP) has been reported, but there are few reports on the reduction of antihypertensive medication during the summer. We aimed to investigate the prevalence and details of drug reduction during the summer among outpatients. Among 667 patients, 90 patients (13.5%) had their medication reduced during the summer. The highest rate of drug reduction was for diuretics (17.5%). The patients whose medications were reduced (Group R) took a larger number of drugs and more frequently took diuretics compared with the subjects whose medications were unchanged (N = 559; with no reduction or increase in drugs, Group UC). Moreover, both the office BP and morning home BP of the patients in Group R were significantly lower compared with those of the patients in Group UC. These results suggest that doctors tend to reduce antihypertensive drugs to avoid an excessive decrease in BP especially in patients receiving combination therapy including diuretics

Survey on Grid Resource Allocation Mechanisms

Grid is a distributed high performance computing paradigm that offers various types of resources (like computing, storage, communication) to resource-intensive user tasks. These tasks are scheduled to allocate available Grid resources efficiently to achieve high system throughput and to satisfy user requirements. The task scheduling problem has become more complex with the ever increasing size of Grid systems. Even though selecting an efficient resource allocation strategy for a particular task helps in obtaining a desired level of service, researchers still face difficulties in choosing a suitable technique from a plethora of existing methods in literature. In this paper, we explore and discuss existing resource allocation mechanisms for resource allocation problems employed in Grid systems. The work comprehensively surveys Gird resource allocation mechanisms for different architectures (centralized, distributed, static or dynamic). The paper also compares these resource allocation mechanisms based on their common features such as time complexity, searching mechanism, allocation strategy, optimality, operational environment and objective function they adopt for solving computing- and data-intensive applications. The comprehensive analysis of cutting-edge research in the Grid domain presented in this work provides readers with an understanding of essential concepts of resource allocation mechanisms in Grid systems and helps them identify important and outstanding issues for further investigation. It also helps readers to choose the most appropriate mechanism for a given system/application

Streptococcus suis

Streptococcus suis is an important pathogen causing economic problems in the pig industry. Moreover, it is a zoonotic agent causing severe infections to people in close contact with infected pigs or pork-derived products. Although considered sporadic in the past, human S. suis infections have been reported during the last 45 years, with two large outbreaks recorded in China. In fact, the number of reported human cases has significantly increased in recent years. In this review, we present the worldwide distribution of serotypes and sequence types (STs), as determined by multilocus sequence typing, for pigs (between 2002 and 2013) and humans (between 1968 and 2013). The methods employed for S. suis identification and typing, the current epidemiological knowledge regarding serotypes and STs and the zoonotic potential of S. suis are discussed. Increased awareness of S. suis in both human and veterinary diagnostic laboratories and further establishment of typing methods will contribute to our knowledge of this pathogen, especially in regions where complete and/or recent data is lacking. More research is required to understand differences in virulence that occur among S. suis strains and if these differences can be associated with specific serotypes or STs