Cardiovascular risk in patients without known cardiovascular disease

Understanding the risks of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (CVD) allows for better patient education and management. Multiple risk models have been validated in large patient populations and provide insights into the risks associated with CVD. When assessing such risks, we suggest using a model that predicts myocardial infarction, cardiovascular death, and/or cerebrovascular events. In this review, we analyze several risk models and stratify the risks associated with CVD. We suggest that appropriate profiling of patients at-risk of CVD will lead to better physician recognition and treatment of modifiable risk factors, appropriate application of ATP III treatment for hyperlipidemia, and achieving optimal blood pressure control.Understanding the risks of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (CVD) allows for better patient education and management. Multiple risk models have been validated in large patient populations and provide insights into the risks associated with CVD. When assessing such risks, we suggest using a model that predicts myocardial infarction, cardiovascular death, and/or cerebrovascular events. In this review, we analyze several risk models and stratify the risks associated with CVD. We suggest that appropriate profiling of patients at-risk of CVD will lead to better physician recognition and treatment of modifiable risk factors, appropriate application of ATP III treatment for hyperlipidemia, and achieving optimal blood pressure control

Academic achievement : the role of praise in motivating students

The motivation of students is an important issue in higher education, particularly in the context of the increasing diversity of student populations. A social-cognitive perspective assumes motivation to be dynamic, context-sensitive and changeable, thereby rendering it to be a much more differentiated construct than previously understood. This complexity may be perplexing to tutors who are keen to develop applications to improve academic achievement. One application that is within the control of the tutor, at least to some extent, is the use of praise. Using psychological literature the article argues that in motivating students, the tutor is not well served by relying on simplistic and common sense understandings of the construct of praise and that effective applications of praise are mediated by students' goal orientations, which of themselves may be either additive or interactive composites of different objectives and different contexts

Sports review: A content analysis of the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, the Journal of Sport and Social Issues and the Sociology of Sport Journal across 25 years

The International Review for the Sociology of Sport, the Journal of Sport and Social Issues and Sociology of Sport Journal have individually and collectively been subject to a systematic content analysis. By focusing on substantive research papers published in these three journals over a 25-year time period it is possible to identify the topics that have featured within the sociology of sport. The purpose of the study was to identify the dominant themes, sports, countries, methodological frameworks and theoretical perspectives that have appeared in the research papers published in these three journals. Using the terms, identified by the author(s), that appear in the paper’s title, abstract and/or listed as a key word, subject term or geographical term, a baseline is established to reflect on the development of the sub-discipline as represented by the content of these three journals. It is suggested that the findings illustrate what many of the more experienced practitioners in the field may have felt subjectively. On the basis of this systematic, empirical study it is now possible to identify those areas have received extensive coverage and those which are under-researched within the sociology of sport. The findings are used to inform a discussion of the role of academic journals and the recent contributions made by Michael Silk, David Andrews, Michael Atkinson and Dominic Malcolm on the past, present and future of the ‘sociology of sport’

Implementing Groundness Analysis with Definite Boolean Functions

The domain of definite Boolean functions, Def, can be used to express the groundness of, and trace grounding dependencies between, program variables in (constraint) logic programs. In this paper, previously unexploited computational properties of Def are utilised to develop an efficient and succinct groundness analyser that can be coded in Prolog. In particular, entailment checking is used to prevent unnecessary least upper bound calculations. It is also demonstrated that join can be defined in terms of other operations, thereby eliminating code and removing the need for preprocessing formulae to a normal form. This saves space and time. Furthermore, the join can be adapted to straightforwardly implement the downward closure operator that arises in set sharing analyses. Experimental results indicate that the new Def implementation gives favourable results in comparison with BDD-based groundness analyses

Moving from crime and punishment to success and reward: Transitioning from technical to educational research

Copyright © 2019: Sarah Dart, Kim Blackmore, Keith Willey, Anne Gardner, Smitha Jose, Raj Sharma, Sloan Trad, Lesley Jolly:. Many engineering academics interested in quality teaching and learning dabble with educational research. Some go further leaving their technical research field behind to embark head-long into what for many is an initially bewildering and conceptually challenging domain. Often peers perceive this transition as a crime (giving up on real engineering) liable to be punished with reduced access to funding and institutional recognition for one's research. The Australasian Association for Engineering Education (AAEE) has been sponsoring a Winter School in Engineering Education Research Methods since 2011, to help engineering academics change their transition story from one of crime and punishment to success and reward. While helpful, this transition is not a simple matter of learning new techniques but of altering one's perspective and habits of thinking and behaviour. Many participants find this both challenging and at least initially, a lonely pursuit. In this paper, participants in the 2018 school ask the question "what enables and hinders the transition to educational research"

Managing for change: October 11, 1989

Bi-weekly newsletter of University Hospital's Change Project, provided to managers at the hospital

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

Developing a Brief Behavior Rating Scale for Progress Monitoring of Depression in School Settings

Frequent formative assessment of students’ functioning, or progress monitoring, is a critical component of multi-tiered systems of support as data inform data-driven decisions about response to treatment. Progress monitoring tools for students’ academic and behavioral functioning are readily available and widely researched; however, despite the documented prevalence of depressive disorders among youth and that schools have been put forth as an ideal location for the delivery of mental health services, there are currently no progress monitoring tools to examine students’ response to interventions that target depression. To address this gap, this study sought to develop a progress monitoring assessment of students’ depressive symptoms using an empirically informed model for creating Brief Behavior Rating Scales (BBRS). Using this model, a four-item BBRS of depressive symptoms (BBRS-D) was created from the item pools of the Beck Depression Inventory for Youth (BDI-Y) and Children’s Depression Inventory (CDI) administered during a treatment study of depression in female youth; the resulting short scale corresponds well to the full-length assessments (i.e., r = .65 and r = .59); however, the BBRS-D possessed lower than adequate internal consistency (α = .50

Evidence for Reduced Drug Susceptibility without Emergence of Major Protease Mutations following Protease Inhibitor Monotherapy Failure in the SARA Trial

BACKGROUND: Major protease mutations are rarely observed following failure with protease inhibitors (PI), and other viral determinants of failure to PI are poorly understood. We therefore characterized Gag-Protease phenotypic susceptibility in subtype A and D viruses circulating in East Africa following viral rebound on PIs. METHODS: Samples from baseline and treatment failure in patients enrolled in the second line LPV/r trial SARA underwent phenotypic susceptibility testing. Data were expressed as fold-change in susceptibility relative to a LPV-susceptible reference strain. RESULTS: We cloned 48 Gag-Protease containing sequences from seven individuals and performed drug resistance phenotyping from pre-PI and treatment failure timepoints in seven patients. For the six patients where major protease inhibitor resistance mutations did not emerge, mean fold-change EC50 to LPV was 4.07 fold (95% CI, 2.08-6.07) at the pre-PI timepoint. Following viral failure the mean fold-change in EC50 to LPV was 4.25 fold (95% CI, 1.39-7.11, p = 0.91). All viruses remained susceptible to DRV. In our assay system, the major PI resistance mutation I84V, which emerged in one individual, conferred a 10.5-fold reduction in LPV susceptibility. One of the six patients exhibited a significant reduction in susceptibility between pre-PI and failure timepoints (from 4.7 fold to 9.6 fold) in the absence of known major mutations in protease, but associated with changes in Gag: V7I, G49D, R69Q, A120D, Q127K, N375S and I462S. Phylogenetic analysis provided evidence of the emergence of genetically distinct viruses at the time of treatment failure, indicating ongoing viral evolution in Gag-protease under PI pressure. CONCLUSIONS: Here we observe in one patient the development of significantly reduced susceptibility conferred by changes in Gag which may have contributed to treatment failure on a protease inhibitor containing regimen. Further phenotype-genotype studies are required to elucidate genetic determinants of protease inhibitor failure in those who fail without traditional resistance mutations whilst PI use is being scaled up globally