Effect of age, sex and gender on pain sensitivity: A narrative review

© 2017 Eltumi And Tashani. Introduction: An increasing body of literature on sex and gender differences in pain sensitivity has been accumulated in recent years. There is also evidence from epidemiological research that painful conditions are more prevalent in older people. The aim of this narrative review is to critically appraise the relevant literature investigating the presence of age and sex differences in clinical and experimental pain conditions. Methods: A scoping search of the literature identifying relevant peer reviewed articles was conducted on May 2016. Information and evidence from the key articles were narratively described and data was quantitatively synthesised to identify gaps of knowledge in the research literature concerning age and sex differences in pain responses. Results: This critical appraisal of the literature suggests that the results of the experimental and clinical studies regarding age and sex differences in pain contain some contradictions as far as age differences in pain are concerned. While data from the clinical studies are more consistent and seem to point towards the fact that chronic pain prevalence increases in the elderly findings from the experimental studies on the other hand were inconsistent, with pain threshold increasing with age in some studies and decreasing with age in others. Conclusion: There is a need for further research using the latest advanced quantitative sensory testing protocols to measure the function of small nerve fibres that are involved in nociception and pain sensitivity across the human life span. Implications: Findings from these studies should feed into and inform evidence emerging from other types of studies (e.g. brain imaging technique and psychometrics) suggesting that pain in the older humans may have unique characteristics that affect how old patients respond to intervention

Religious influences on human capital variations in imperial Russia

Historical legacies, particularly imperial tutelage and religion, have featured prominently in recent scholarship on political regime variations in post-communist settings, challenging earlier temporally proximate explanations. The overlap between tutelage, geography, and religion has complicated the uncovering of the spatially uneven effects of the various legacies. The author addresses this challenge by conducting sub-national analysis of religious influences within one imperial domain, Russia. In particular, the paper traces how European settlement in imperial Russia has had a bearing on human development in the imperial periphery. The causal mechanism that the paper proposes to account for this influence is the Western communities’ impact on literacy, which is in turn linked in the analysis to the Western Christian, particularly Protestant, roots, of settler populations. The author makes this case by constructing an original dataset based on sub-national data from the hitherto underutilised first imperial census of 1897

Persistence with Anticoagulation for Atrial Fibrillation: Report from the GLORIA-AF Phase III 1-Year Follow-up

Background: We aimed to assess the extent to which drug persistence is better with non-vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulants (NOACs) than vitamin K antagonists (VKAs) in atrial fibrillation (AF) patients and to estimate the difference in therapy persistence depending on NOAC dosing regimen (once daily (QD) vs. twice daily (BID)). Methods: Consecutive patients were followed for 1 year in phase III of the GLORIA-AF registry. Drug persistence was defined as the use of OAC without any discontinuation in >30 days or switching to alternative therapy. Results: Among 21,109 eligible patients in phase III, 17,266 patients who were prescribed OAC at baseline and those who took >= 1 OAC dose were included. The 1-year proportion of patients receiving NOAC and VKA who persisted on treatment was 80% and 75%, respectively. The 1-year persistence with NOACs BID and NOACs QD was 81% and 80%, respectively. Female gender, hypertension, older age, alcohol use, permanent, asymptomatic, and minimally symptomatic AF were associated with better OAC persistence. Region, medication usage predisposing to bleeding, being a current smoker, treatment reimbursement, and proton pump inhibitors were associated with lower OAC persistence. Conclusions: Drug persistence was higher with NOACs (1-year persistence was 80%) than with VKAs (75%). There was little difference in 1-year persistence between NOAC dosing regimens.Thrombosis and Hemostasi

Changes, Evolution and Bugs - Recommendation Systems for Issue Management

Changes in evolving software systems are often managed using an issue repository. This repository may contribute to information overload in an organization, but it may also help navigating the software system. Software developers spend much effort on issue triage, a task in which the mere number of issue reports becomes a significant challenge. One specific difficulty is to determine whether a newly submitted issue report is a duplicate of an issue previously reported, if it contains complementary information related to a known issue, or if the issue report addresses something that has not been observed before. However, the large number of issue reports may also be used to help a developer to navigate the software development project to find related software artifacts, required both to understand the issue itself, and to analyze the impact of a possible issue resolution. This chapter presents recommendation systems that use information in issue repositories to support these two challenges, by supporting either duplicate detection of issue reports or navigation of artifacts in evolving software systems