Coping and Management Techniques Used by Chronic Low Back Pain Patients Receiving Treatment From Chiropractors.

OBJECTIVES:The purpose of this study was to describe coping strategies (eg, mechanisms, including self-treatment) that a person uses to reduce pain and its impact on functioning as reported by patients with chronic low back pain who were seen by doctors of chiropractic and how these coping strategies vary by patient characteristics. METHODS:Data were collected from a national sample of US chiropractic patients recruited from chiropractic practices in 6 states from major geographical regions of the United States using a multistage stratified sampling strategy. Reports of coping behaviors used to manage pain during the past 6 months were used to create counts across 6 domains: cognitive, self-care, environmental, medical care, social activities, and work. Exploratory analyses examined counts in domains and frequencies of individual items by levels of patient characteristics. RESULTS:A total of 1677 respondents with chronic low back pain reported using an average of 9 coping behaviors in the prior 6 months. Use of more types of behaviors were reported among those with more severe back pain, who rated their health as fair or poor and who had daily occurrences of pain. Exercise was more frequent among the healthy and those with less pain. Female respondents tended to report using more coping behaviors than men, and Hispanics more than non-Hispanics. CONCLUSION:Persons with chronic back pain were proactive in their coping strategies and frequently used self-care coping strategies like those provided by chiropractors in patient education. In alignment with patients' beliefs that their condition was chronic and lifelong, many patients attempted a wide range of coping strategies to relieve their pain

Why does the Engel method work? Food demand, economies of size and household survey methods

Estimates of household size economies are needed for the analysis of poverty and inequality. This paper shows that Engel estimates of size economies are large when household expenditures are obtained by respondent recall but small when expenditures are obtained by daily recording in diaries. Expenditure estimates from recall surveys appear to have measurement errors correlated with household size. As well as demonstrating the fragility of Engel estimates of size economies, these results help resolve a puzzle raised by Deaton and Paxson (1998) about differences between rich and poor countries in the effect of household size on food demand

The Treatment of Activated PI3Kδ Syndrome

Activated phosphoinositide 3-kinase δ syndrome (APDS), also known as PASLI disease (p110d-activating mutation causing senescent T cells, lymphadenopathy, and immunodeficiency) are combined immunodeficiencies resulting from gain-of-function mutations in the genes (PIK3CD and PIK3R1) encoding the subunits of phosphoinositide 3-kinase δ (PI3Kδ) and were first described in 2013. These mutations result in the hyperactivation of the PI3K/AKT/mTOR/S6K signally pathways. In this mini-review we have detailed the current treatment options for APDS. These treatments including conventional immunodeficiency therapies such as immunoglobulin replacement, antibiotic prophylaxis, and hematopoietic stem cell transplant. We also discuss the more targeted therapies of mTOR inhibition with sirolimus and selective PI3Kδ inhibitors

Gluino Contribution to the 3-loop QCD beta function in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model

We deduce the gluino contribution to the three-loop QCD \beta function within the minimal supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) from its standard QCD expression. The result is a first step in the computation of the full MSSM three-loop \beta function. In addition, in the case of a light gluino it provides the strong three-loop SUSY correction to the extrapolation of the strong coupling constant from the low energy regime to the Z region and up to the squark threshold.Comment: 11 pages, RevTex, 4 Postscript figur

Treating patients as persons : a capabilities approach to support delivery of person-centered care

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Measuring organisational readiness for patient engagement (MORE) : an international online Delphi consensus study

Date of Acceptance: 28/01/2015. © 2015 Oostendorp et al.; licensee BioMed Central. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise statedWidespread implementation of patient engagement by organisations and clinical teams is not a reality yet. The aim of this study is to develop a measure of organisational readiness for patient engagement designed to monitor and facilitate a healthcare organisation’s willingness and ability to effectively implement patient engagement in healthcarePeer reviewedFinal Published versio

Stray-light restoration of full-disk CaII K solar observations: a case study

AIMS: We investigate whether restoration techniques, such as those developed for application to current observations, can be used to remove stray-light degradation effects on archive CaII K full-disk observations. We analyze to what extent these techniques can recover homogeneous time series of data. METHODS:We develop a restoration algorithm based on a method presented by Walton & Preminger (1999). We apply this algorithm to data for both present-day and archive CaII K full-disk observations, which were acquired using the PSPT mounted at the Rome Observatory, or obtained by digitization of Mt Wilson photographic-archive spectroheliograms. RESULTS:We show that the restoring algorithm improves both spatial resolution and photometric contrast of the analyzed solar observations. We find that the improvement in spatial resolution is similar for analyzed recent and archive data. On the other hand, the improvement of photometric contrast is quite poor for the archive data, with respect to the one obtained for the present-day images. We show that the quality of restored archive data depends on the photographic calibration applied to the original observations. In particular, photometry can be recovered with a restoring algorithm if the photographic-calibration preserves the intensity information stored in the original data, principally outside the solar-disk observations.Comment: 10 pages; 9 figure

Properties of recent IBAD-MOCVD Coated Conductors relevant to their high field, low temperature magnet use

BaZrO3 (BZO) nanorods are now incorporated into production IBAD-MOCVD coated conductors. Here we compare several examples of both BZO-free and BZO-containing coated conductors using critical current (Ic) characterizations at 4.2 K over their full angular range up to fields of 31 T. We find that BZO nanorods do not produce any c-axis distortion of the critical current density Jc(theta) curve at 4.2 K at any field, but also that pinning is nevertheless strongly enhanced compared to the non-BZO conductors. We also find that the tendency of the ab-plane Jc(theta) peak to become cusp-like is moderated by BZO and we define a new figure of merit that may be helpful for magnet design - the OADI (Off-Axis Double Ic), which clearly shows that BZO broadens the ab-plane peak and thus raises Jc 5-30{\deg} away from the tape plane, where the most critical approach to Ic occurs in many coil designs. We describe some experimental procedures that may make critical current Ic tests of these very high current tapes more tractable at 4.2 K, where Ic exceeds 1000 A even for 4 mm wide tape with only 1 micron thickness of superconductor. A positive conclusion is that BZO is very beneficial for the Jc characteristics at 4.2 K, just as it is at higher temperatures, where the correlated c-axis pinning effects of the nanorods are much more obvious