RISK OF SLEEP DISORDERS IN PATIENTS WITH DECOMPRESSION SICKNESS: A NATIONWIDE, POPULATION-BASED STUDY IN TAIWAN

Background: Decompression sickness (DCS) primarily manifests musculoskeletal pain, cutaneous manifestations, lymphatic symptoms, and neurological symptoms. DCS might affect the central nervous system and induce the stress in the patients, but few studies about the psychiatric morbidity after DCS have been conducted. This study aimed to investigate the association between DCS and the risk of developing psychiatric disorders. Subjects and methods: This study was a population-based, matched cohort design. A total of 738 enrolled patients, with 123 study subjects who had suffered from DCS, and 615 controls matched for sex and age, from the Longitudinal Health Insurance Databank from 2000-2010 in Taiwan, and selected from the National Health Insurance Research Database. After adjusting for the confounding factors, Cox proportional hazards analysis was used to compare the risk of developing psychiatric disorders during the 10 years of follow-up period. Results: Of the study subjects, 10 (8.13%) developed psychiatric disorders when compared to 35 (5.69%) in the control group. The study subjects were more likely to develop psychiatric disorders (crude hazard ratio [HR]: 2.79 (95% CI=1.37-5.69, P<0.01). After adjusting for sex, age, monthly income, urbanization level, geographic region, and comorbidities, the adjusted HR was 3.83 (95% CI=1.60-9.16, P<0.01). Sleep disorders was associated with DCS with the adjusted HR as 5.74 (95% CI=1.04-31.56, P<0.01). Hyperbaric oxygenation therapy was not associated with a lower risk of psychiatric disorders. Conclusions: Patients who suffered from DCS have a 3.8-fold risk of developing psychiatric disorders, and a 5.7-fold risk of sleep disorders. This finding is a reminder for the clinicians that a regular psychiatric follow-up might well be needed for these patients

Temperature Swing Adsorption Process for CO2 Capture Using Polyaniline Solid Sorbent

AbstractTo capture carbon dioxide from power plant flue gas which consists of 15% CO2 and 85% N2, with a temperature swing adsorption (TSA) by using polyaniline solid sorbent as the adsorbent, is explored experimentally and theoretically. First, single component adsorption equilibrium data of carbon dioxide on polyaniline solid sorbent is obtained by using Micro-Balance Thermo D-200. Then isotherm curves and the parameters are obtained by numerical method. The adsorption is expressed by the Langmuir-Freundlich isotherm. After accomplishment of isotherm curves, the breakthrough curve experiment is investigated with single adsorption column. The experiments test the change in adsorbed gas concentration at the outlet by adsorbed gas, CO2, and non-adsorbed gas, helium. Finally, this study accentuates the TSA experiments on CO2 purity and recovery by operation variable discussion which includes feed pressure, adsorption temperature and desorption temperature to find optimal operation condition. The results of optimal operation condition are CO2 purity of 47.65% with a 92.46% recovery

Large meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies identifies five loci for lean body mass

Lean body mass, consisting mostly of skeletal muscle, is important for healthy aging. We performed a genome-wide association study for whole body (20 cohorts of European ancestry with n = 38,292) and appendicular (arms and legs) lean body mass (n = 28,330) measured using dual energy X-ray absorptiometry or bioelectrical impedance analysis, adjusted for sex, age, height, and fat mass. Twenty-one single-nucleotide polymorphisms were significantly associated with lean body mass either genome wide (p < 5 × 10−8) or suggestively genome wide (p < 2.3 × 10−6). Replication in 63,475 (47,227 of European ancestry) individuals from 33 cohorts for whole body lean body mass and in 45,090 (42,360 of European ancestry) subjects from 25 cohorts for appendicular lean body mass was successful for five single-nucleotide polymorphisms in/near HSD17B11, VCAN, ADAMTSL3, IRS1, and FTO for total lean body mass and for three single-nucleotide polymorphisms in/near VCAN, ADAMTSL3, and IRS1 for appendicular lean body mass. Our findings provide new insight into the genetics of lean body mass

Various criteria in the evaluation of biomedical named entity recognition

BACKGROUND: Text mining in the biomedical domain is receiving increasing attention. A key component of this process is named entity recognition (NER). Generally speaking, two annotated corpora, GENIA and GENETAG, are most frequently used for training and testing biomedical named entity recognition (Bio-NER) systems. JNLPBA and BioCreAtIvE are two major Bio-NER tasks using these corpora. Both tasks take different approaches to corpus annotation and use different matching criteria to evaluate system performance. This paper details these differences and describes alternative criteria. We then examine the impact of different criteria and annotation schemes on system performance by retesting systems participated in the above two tasks. RESULTS: To analyze the difference between JNLPBA's and BioCreAtIvE's evaluation, we conduct Experiment 1 to evaluate the top four JNLPBA systems using BioCreAtIvE's classification scheme. We then compare them with the top four BioCreAtIvE systems. Among them, three systems participated in both tasks, and each has an F-score lower on JNLPBA than on BioCreAtIvE. In Experiment 2, we apply hypothesis testing and correlation coefficient to find alternatives to BioCreAtIvE's evaluation scheme. It shows that right-match and left-match criteria have no significant difference with BioCreAtIvE. In Experiment 3, we propose a customized relaxed-match criterion that uses right match and merges JNLPBA's five NE classes into two, which achieves an F-score of 81.5%. In Experiment 4, we evaluate a range of five matching criteria from loose to strict on the top JNLPBA system and examine the percentage of false negatives. Our experiment gives the relative change in precision, recall and F-score as matching criteria are relaxed. CONCLUSION: In many applications, biomedical NEs could have several acceptable tags, which might just differ in their left or right boundaries. However, most corpora annotate only one of them. In our experiment, we found that right match and left match can be appropriate alternatives to JNLPBA and BioCreAtIvE's matching criteria. In addition, our relaxed-match criterion demonstrates that users can define their own relaxed criteria that correspond more realistically to their application requirements

Electroconvulsive Therapy and Risk of Dementia—A Nationwide Cohort Study in Taiwan

Background: Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is an effective treatment for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder, and a temporary memory loss may occur after ECT. However, the association between ECT in patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder, and the risk of dementia is yet to be examined.Objective: This study aimed to clarify as to whether ECT is associated with the risk of dementia after ECT in patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder, using Taiwan's National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD).Methods: A total of 3,796 enrolled participants (schizophrenia, 46.68%; bipolar disorder, 11.77%; and major depressive disorder, 41.55%) with 994 patients who had received ECT and 2,982 controls matched for sex and age, between January 1, and December 31, 2000, were selected from the NHIRD. After adjusting for confounding factors, Fine and Gray's survival analysis was used to compare the risk of developing dementia during the 10 years of follow-up.Results: Of the study patients, 45 (4.53%) of them developed dementia when compared to 149 (5.0%) in the control group. Fine and Gray's survival analysis revealed that the study patients were not associated with an increased risk of dementia [hazard ratio (HR) = 0.612, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.438–1.854, P = 0.325]. After adjusting for sex, age, monthly income, urbanization level, geographic region, and comorbidities, the adjusted HR was 0.633 (95% CI = 0.448 – 1.895, P = 0.304).Conclusion: This study supports that ECT was not associated with the increased risk of dementia in patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder, using the NHIRD

The potential impact of primary headache disorders on stroke risk

Distribution of PHDs. (DOC 55 kb