HIV infection and domestic smoke exposure, but not human papillomavirus, are risk factors for esophageal squamous cell carcinoma in Zambia: a case-control study

(c) 2015 The Authors. Cancer Medicine published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Glucagon-like Peptide 2 Concentrations Vary in Zambian Children During Diarrhoea, in Malnutrition and Seasonally.

OBJECTIVES: Glucagon-like peptide 2 (GLP-2) is a 33 amino acid peptide hormone released from enteroendocrine L-cells following nutrient ingestion. It has been shown to exert trophic effects on the gut. We set out to measure GLP-2 concentrations in blood in children with diarrhoea and malnutrition. METHODS: GLP-2 levels were measured in blood samples collected from 5 different groups of children (n = 324) at different time points: those with acute diarrhoea, during illness and 3 weeks after recovery; persistent diarrhoea and severe acute malnutrition; controls contemporaneous for diarrhoea; stunted children from the community; and controls contemporaneous for the stunted children. Stool biomarkers and pathogen analysis were carried out on the children with stunting. RESULTS: GLP-2 concentrations were higher during acute diarrhoea (median 3.1 ng/mL, interquartile range 2.1, 4.4) than on recovery (median 1.8, interquartile range 1.4, 3.1; P = 0.001), but were not elevated in children with persistent diarrhoea and severe acute malnutrition. In stunted children, there was a progressive decline in GLP-2 levels from 3.2 ng/mL (1.9, 4.9) to 1.0 (0.0, 2.0; P < 0.001) as the children became more stunted. Measures of seasonality (rainfall, temperature,Food Price Index, and Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli) were found to be significantly associated with GLP-2 concentrations in multivariable analysis. We also found a correlation between stool inflammatory biomarkers and GLP-2. CONCLUSIONS: In diarrhoea, GLP-2 levels increased in acute but not persistent diarrhoea. Malnutrition was associated with reduced concentrations. GLP-2 displayed seasonal variation consistent with variations in nutrient availability

Abstract verification and debugging of constraint logic programs

The technique of Abstract Interpretation [13] has allowed the development of sophisticated program analyses which are provably correct and practical. The semantic approximations produced by such analyses have been traditionally applied to optimization during program compilation. However, recently, novel and promising applications of semantic approximations have been proposed in the more general context of program verification and debugging [3],[10],[7]

An assertion language for constraint logic programs

In an advanced program development environment, such as that discussed in the introduction of this book, several tools may coexist which handle both the program and information on the program in different ways. Also, these tools may interact among themselves and with the user. Thus, the different tools and the user need some way to communicate. It is our design principie that such communication be performed in terms of assertions. Assertions are syntactic objects which allow expressing properties of programs. Several assertion languages have been used in the past in different contexts, mainly related to program debugging. In this chapter we propose a general language of assertions which is used in different tools for validation and debugging of constraint logic programs in the context of the DiSCiPl project. The assertion language proposed is parametric w.r.t. the particular constraint domain and properties of interest being used in each different tool. The language proposed is quite general in that it poses few restrictions on the kind of properties which may be expressed. We believe the assertion language we propose is of practical relevance and appropriate for the different uses required in the tools considered

Teaching Orientation and Mobility Skills to Students with Autism and Vision Impairment in Public Schools: A Data-Based Study

Two students with autism, vision impairment, and intellectual disability participated in an orientation and mobility (O&M) intervention to travel in school settings using their folding canes. A multiple-baseline across participants design to determine the effectiveness of the intervention was used. The dependent variable was time taken to travel the specified route. The independent variable was O&M training. Results indicated that both participants took less time to travel during the intervention compared to the baseline. Students with vision impairment and autism can be trained using systematic O&M training. The O&M specialists working with children with autism and vision impairment should collect data and make data-based decisions while providing O&M instruction

Comparison in hyperspectral and multi-spectral remote sensing data for land cover classification in Samara, Russia

The main aim of this study is to evaluate k-nearest neighbor algorithm (KNN) supervised classification with migrating means clustering unsupervised classification (MMC) method on hyperspectral and multispectral imagery to discriminating land-cover classes. Accuracy assessment of the derived thematic maps was based on the analysis of the classification confusion matrix statistics computed for each classification map, using for consistency the same set of validation points. We used Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) Hyperion hyperspectral data to Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Advance Land Imager (ALI) multispectral data. Results indicate that KNN (95, 94, 88 overall accuracy and .91, .89, .85 kappa coefficient for Hyp, ALI, OLI respectively) shows better results than unsupervised classification (93, 90, 84 overall accuracy and .89, .87, .81 kappa coefficient for Hyp, ALI, OLI respectively). In addition, it is demonstrated that the hyperspectral satellite image provides more accurate classification results than those extracted from the multispectral satellite image. The higher classification accuracy by KNN supervised was attributed principally to the ability of this classifier to identify optimal separating classes with low generalization error, thus producing the best possible classes’ separation.This work was supported by the Federal Agency of Scientific Organizations (agreement No 007-ГЗ/Ч3363/26 and science of the Russian Federation; by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research grants (# 16-41-630761; # 16-29-11698, # 17-01-00972)

Monitoring prevention or emergence of HIV drug resistance: results of a population-based foundational survey of early warning indicators in mainland Tanzania

BACKGROUND: In Tanzania, routine individual-level testing for HIV drug resistance (HIVDR) using laboratory genotyping and phenotyping is not feasible due to resource constraints. To monitor the prevention or emergence of HIVDR at a population level, WHO developed generic strategies to be adapted by countries, which include a set of early warning indicators (EWIs). METHODS: To establish a baseline of EWIs, we conducted a retrospective longitudinal survey of 35 purposively sampled care and treatment clinics in 17 regions of mainland Tanzania. We extracted data relevant for four EWIs (ART prescribing practices, patients lost to follow-up 12 months after ART initiation, retention on first-line ART at 12 months, and ART clinic appointment keeping in the first 12 months) from the patient monitoring system on patients who initiated ART at each respective facility in 2010. We uploaded patient information into WHO HIVResNet excel-based tool to compute national and facility averages of the EWIs and tested for associations between various programmatic factors and EWI performance using Fisher’s Exact Test. RESULTS: All sampled facilities met the WHO EWI target (100%) for ART prescribing practices. However, the national averages for patients lost to follow-up 12 months after ART initiation, retention on first-line ART at 12 months, and ART clinic appointment keeping in the first 12 months fell short, at 26%, 54% and 38%, respectively, compared to the WHO targets ≤ 20%, ≥ 70%, and ≥ 80%. Clinics with fewer patients lost to follow-up 12 months after ART initiation and more patients retained on first-line-ART at 12 months were more likely to have their patients spend the longest time in the facility (including wait-time and time with providers), (p = 0.011 and 0.007, respectively). CONCLUSION: Tanzania performed very well in EWI 1a, ART prescribing practices. However, its performance in other three EWIs was far below the WHO targets. This study provides a baseline for future monitoring of EWIs in Tanzania and highlights areas for improvement in the management of ART patients in order not only to prevent emergence of HIVDR due to programmatic factors, but also to improve the quality of life for ART patients

Monitoring of Early Warning Indicators for HIV Drug Resistance in Antiretroviral Therapy Clinics in Zimbabwe

Monitoring human immunodeficiency virus drug resistance (HIVDR) early warning indicators (EWIs) can help national antiretroviral treatment (ART) programs to identify clinic factors associated with HIVDR emergence and provide evidence to support national program and clinic-level adjustments, if necessary. World Health Organization-recommended HIVDR EWIs were monitored in Zimbabwe using routinely available data at selected ART clinics between 2007 and 2009. As Zimbabwe's national ART coverage increases, improved ART information systems are required to strengthen routine national ART monitoring and evaluation and facilitate scale-up of HIVDR EWI monitoring. Attention should be paid to minimizing loss to follow-up, supporting adherence, and ensuring clinic-level drug supply continuit

Independence in CLP Languages

Studying independence of goals has proven very useful in the context of logic programming. In particular, it has provided a formal basis for powerful automatic parallelization tools, since independence ensures that two goals may be evaluated in parallel while preserving correctness and eciency. We extend the concept of independence to constraint logic programs (CLP) and prove that it also ensures the correctness and eciency of the parallel evaluation of independent goals. Independence for CLP languages is more complex than for logic programming as search space preservation is necessary but no longer sucient for ensuring correctness and eciency. Two additional issues arise. The rst is that the cost of constraint solving may depend upon the order constraints are encountered. The second is the need to handle dynamic scheduling. We clarify these issues by proposing various types of search independence and constraint solver independence, and show how they can be combined to allow dierent optimizations, from parallelism to intelligent backtracking. Sucient conditions for independence which can be evaluated \a priori" at run-time are also proposed. Our study also yields new insights into independence in logic programming languages. In particular, we show that search space preservation is not only a sucient but also a necessary condition for ensuring correctness and eciency of parallel execution