The morbidity of urethral stricture disease among male Medicare beneficiaries

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>To date, the morbidity of urethral stricture disease among American men has not been analyzed using national datasets. We sought to analyze the morbidity of urethral stricture disease by measuring the rates of urinary tract infections and urinary incontinence among men with a diagnosis of urethral stricture.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We analyzed Medicare claims data for 1992, 1995, 1998, and 2001 to estimate the rate of dual diagnoses of urethral stricture with urinary tract infection and with urinary incontinence occurring in the same year among a 5% sample of beneficiaries. Male Medicare beneficiaries receiving co-incident ICD-9 codes indicating diagnoses of urethral stricture and either urinary tract infection or urinary incontinence within the same year were counted.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The percentage of male patients with a diagnosis of urethral stricture who also were diagnosed with a urinary tract infection was 42% in 2001, an increase from 35% in 1992. Eleven percent of male Medicare beneficiaries with urethral stricture disease in 2001 were diagnosed with urinary incontinence in the same year. This represents an increase from 8% in 1992.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Among male Medicare beneficiaries diagnosed with urethral stricture disease in 2001, 42% were also diagnosed with a urinary tract infection, and 11% with incontinence. Although the overall incidence of stricture disease decreased over this time period, these rates of dual diagnoses increased from 1992 to 2001. Our findings shed light into the health burden of stricture disease on American men. In order to decrease the morbidity of stricture disease, early definitive management of strictures is warranted.</p

Spontaneous emission enhancement of a single molecule by a double-sphere nanoantenna across an interface

We report on two orders of magnitude reduction in the fluorescence lifetime when a single molecule placed in a thin film is surrounded by two gold nanospheres across the film interface. By attaching one of the gold particles to the end of a glass fiber tip, we could control the modification of the molecular fluorescence at will. We find a good agreement between our experimental data and the outcome of numerical calculations

Sodium intercalation into α- and β-VOSO4

Received: 12.02.2019. Accepted: 19.03.2019. Published: 29.03.2019.Na-ion battery is one of the best alternatives to Li-ion battery. Abundance of sodium on earth is three orders of magnitude higher than lithium, which should make Na-ion battery technology cheaper. But alkaline-ion battery prices, which tend to increase because of the massive world demand, also depend on the choice of electrode materials. Therefore, cost-effective electrode development remains an important subject of research because this will allow Na-ion battery to be even more competitive. Electrochemical performances of anhydrous VOSO4 as electrode for Na-ion battery are reported in this letter. Two anhydrous phases of vanadyl sulfate have been studied. The first one, α-VOSO4, shows that up to 0.8 sodium per formula unit (Na/f.u.) can be intercalated in this phase, and a reversible intercalation of 0.4 Na/f.u. has been observed with a strong polarization. The second one, β-VOSO4, can intercalate up to 0.9 Na/f.u. with a reversible inter- calation of 0.4 Na/f.u. leading to a reversible capacity of 64 mAh/g

Sodium intercalation into α- and β-VOSO4

Received: 12.02.2019. Accepted: 19.03.2019. Published: 29.03.2019.Na-ion battery is one of the best alternatives to Li-ion battery. Abundance of sodium on earth is three orders of magnitude higher than lithium, which should make Na-ion battery technology cheaper. But alkaline-ion battery prices, which tend to increase because of the massive world demand, also depend on the choice of electrode materials. Therefore, cost-effective electrode development remains an important subject of research because this will allow Na-ion battery to be even more competitive. Electrochemical performances of anhydrous VOSO4 as electrode for Na-ion battery are reported in this letter. Two anhydrous phases of vanadyl sulfate have been studied. The first one, α-VOSO4, shows that up to 0.8 sodium per formula unit (Na/f.u.) can be intercalated in this phase, and a reversible intercalation of 0.4 Na/f.u. has been observed with a strong polarization. The second one, β-VOSO4, can intercalate up to 0.9 Na/f.u. with a reversible inter- calation of 0.4 Na/f.u. leading to a reversible capacity of 64 mAh/g

Isolation and characterization of acetylated LM-pectins extracted from okra pods

Pectin was isolated by aqueous extraction at pH 6.0 or 2.0 from okra (Abelmoschus esculentus L.) pods. An isolation protocol was designed to extract pectin and to study the influence of the extraction pH on their composition and physicochemical properties. The extracted pectin was assessed using sugar compositional analysis (neutral sugars, galacturonic acid, acetyl and methyl contents). FT-IR and NMR spectroscopy, size exclusion chromatography (SEC) and dilute solution viscometry were also used to determine the macromolecular characteristics of isolated pectin. The extraction protocols resulted in the isolation of pectin of high purity as evidenced by their high total carbohydrate (70.0–81.8%) and low protein (4.3–6.3%) contents. Samples contained between 46 and 56% galacturonic acid, had broad molecular weight distributions, a low degree of methylation (40.0 and 24.6%) and high degree of acetylation (52.2 and 37.6%). Neutral sugar analysis showed that the pectin extracted at pH 6.0 contained more neutral sugars, particularly, galactose (21.7–25.7 mol%), rhamnose (10.1–13.2 mol%) and arabinose (7.1–7.3 mol%) than that extracted at pH 2.0 indicating variations in fine structure. In addition, molecular parameters of the isolated pectins, such as intrinsic viscosity (2.8–4.4 dL g−1), critical concentration (0.15–0.45 dL g−1) and coil overlap parameter (0.66–1.51), showed that extraction conditions resulted in pectin with different chain morphology. The yield and physico-chemical characteristics of the extracted pectin from okra pods were influenced by the extraction conditions

The DLV System for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

This paper presents the DLV system, which is widely considered the state-of-the-art implementation of disjunctive logic programming, and addresses several aspects. As for problem solving, we provide a formal definition of its kernel language, function-free disjunctive logic programs (also known as disjunctive datalog), extended by weak constraints, which are a powerful tool to express optimization problems. We then illustrate the usage of DLV as a tool for knowledge representation and reasoning, describing a new declarative programming methodology which allows one to encode complex problems (up to $\Delta^P_3$-complete problems) in a declarative fashion. On the foundational side, we provide a detailed analysis of the computational complexity of the language of DLV, and by deriving new complexity results we chart a complete picture of the complexity of this language and important fragments thereof. Furthermore, we illustrate the general architecture of the DLV system which has been influenced by these results. As for applications, we overview application front-ends which have been developed on top of DLV to solve specific knowledge representation tasks, and we briefly describe the main international projects investigating the potential of the system for industrial exploitation. Finally, we report about thorough experimentation and benchmarking, which has been carried out to assess the efficiency of the system. The experimental results confirm the solidity of DLV and highlight its potential for emerging application areas like knowledge management and information integration.Comment: 56 pages, 9 figures, 6 table