Cancer screening and preventative care among long-term cancer survivors in the United Kingdom

BACKGROUND: Long-term cancer survivors in the United Kingdom are mostly followed up in a primary care setting by their general practitioner; however, there is little research on the use of services. This study examines whether cancer survivors receive adequate screening and preventative care in UK primary care. PATIENTS AND METHODS: We identified a cohort of long-term survivors of breast, colorectal and prostate cancer with at least a 5-year survival using the General Practice Research Database, with controls matched for age, gender and practice. We compared adherence with cancer screening and the use of preventative care between cancer survivors and controls. RESULTS: The cancer survivors' cohort consisted of 18 612 breast, 5764 colorectal and 4868 prostate cancer survivors. Most cancer survivors receive cancer screening at the same levels as controls, except for breast cancer survivors who were less likely to receive a mammogram than controls (OR=0.78, 95% CI: 0.66-0.92). Long-term cancer survivors received comparable levels of influenza vaccinations and cholesterol tests, but breast (OR 0.81, 95% CI: 0.74-0.87) and prostate cancer survivors (OR=0.70, 95% CI: 0.57-0.87) were less likely to receive a blood pressure test. All survivors were more likely to receive bone densitometry. CONCLUSION: The provision and uptake of preventive care in a primary care setting in the United Kingdom is comparable between the survivors of three common cancers and those who have not had cancer. However, long-term breast cancer survivors in this cohort were less likely to receive a mammogra

A new auroral phenomenon, the anti-black aurora

Black auroras are small-scale features embedded in the diffuse background aurora, typically occurring post-substorm after magnetic midnight and with an eastward drift imposed. Black auroras show a significant reduction in optical brightness compared to the surrounding diffuse aurora, and can appear as slow-moving arcs or rapidly-moving patches and arc segments. We report, for the first time, an even more elusive small-scale optical structure that has always been observed occurring paired with ∼ 10% of black aurora patches. A patch or arc segment of enhanced luminosity, distinctly brighter than the diffuse background, which we name the anti-black aurora, may appear adjacent to the black aurora. The anti-black aurora is of similar shape and size, and always moves in parallel to the drifting black aurora, although it may suddenly switch sides for no apparent reason. The paired phenomenon always drifts with the same average speed in an easterly direction. From the first dual-wavelength (427.8 nm and 844.6 nm) optical observations of the phenomenon recorded on 12 March 2016 outside Tromsø Norway, we show that the anti-black and black auroras have a higher and lower mean energy, respectively, of the precipitating electrons compared to the diffuse background

Physiological Costs of Repetitive Courtship Displays in Cockroaches Handicap Locomotor Performance

Courtship displays are typically thought to have evolved via female choice, whereby females select mates based on the characteristics of a display that is expected to honestly reflect some aspect of the male’s quality. Honesty is typically enforced by mechanistic costs and constraints that limit the level at which a display can be performed. It is becoming increasingly apparent that these costs may be energetic costs involved in the production of dynamic, often repetitive displays. A female attending to such a display may thus be assessing the physical fitness of a male as an index of his quality. Such assessment would provide information on his current physical quality as well as his ability to carry out other demanding activities, qualities with which a choosy female should want to provision her offspring. In the current study we use courtship interactions in the Cuban burrowing cockroach, Byrsotria fumigata to directly test whether courtship is associated with a signaler’s performance capacity. Males that had produced courtship displays achieved significantly lower speeds and distances in locomotor trials than non-courting control males. We also found that females mated more readily with males that produced a more vigorous display. Thus, males of this species have developed a strategy where they produce a demanding courtship display, while females choose males based on their ability to produce this display. Courtship displays in many taxa often involve dynamic repetitive actions and as such, signals of stamina in courtship may be more widespread than previously thought

Theoretical description of hydrogen bonding in oxalic acid dimer and trimer based on the combined extended-transition-state energy decomposition analysis and natural orbitals for chemical valence (ETS-NOCV)

In the present study we have analyzed hydrogen bonding in dimer and trimer of oxalic acid, based on a recently proposed charge and energy decomposition scheme (ETS-NOCV). In the case of a dimer, two conformations, α and β, were considered. The deformation density contributions originating from NOCV’s revealed that the formation of hydrogen bonding is associated with the electronic charge deformation in both the σ—(Δρσ) and π-networks (Δρπ). It was demonstrated that σ-donation is realized by electron transfer from the lone pair of oxygen on one monomer into the empty \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\rho_{H - O}^*$$\end{document} orbital of the second oxalic acid fragment. In addition, a covalent contribution is observed by the density transfer from hydrogen of H-O group in one oxalic acid monomer to the oxygen atom of the second fragment. The resonance assisted component (Δρπ), is based on the transfer of electron density from the π—orbital localized on the oxygen of OH on one oxalic acid monomer to the oxygen atom of the other fragment. ETS-NOCV allowed to conclude that the σ(O---HO) component is roughly eight times as important as π (RAHB) contribution in terms of energetic estimation. The electrostatic factor (ΔEelstat) is equally as important as orbital interaction term (ΔEorb). Finally, comparing β-dimer of oxalic acid with trimer we found practically no difference concerning each of the O---HO bonds, neither qualitative nor quantitative

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research

The Seventeenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys: Complete Release of MaNGA, MaStar, and APOGEE-2 Data

This paper documents the seventeenth data release (DR17) from the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys; the fifth and final release from the fourth phase (SDSS-IV). DR17 contains the complete release of the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) survey, which reached its goal of surveying over 10,000 nearby galaxies. The complete release of the MaNGA Stellar Library accompanies this data, providing observations of almost 30,000 stars through the MaNGA instrument during bright time. DR17 also contains the complete release of the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment 2 survey that publicly releases infrared spectra of over 650,000 stars. The main sample from the Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS), as well as the subsurvey Time Domain Spectroscopic Survey data were fully released in DR16. New single-fiber optical spectroscopy released in DR17 is from the SPectroscipic IDentification of ERosita Survey subsurvey and the eBOSS-RM program. Along with the primary data sets, DR17 includes 25 new or updated value-added catalogs. This paper concludes the release of SDSS-IV survey data. SDSS continues into its fifth phase with observations already underway for the Milky Way Mapper, Local Volume Mapper, and Black Hole Mapper surveys