A Fine-Grained Approach to "Double-Barreled" Adjectives

Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Place of Morphology in a Grammar (1992), pp. 312-32

Mismatch-based delayed thrombolysis: a meta-analysis

<p><b>Background and Purpose</b>: Clinical benefit from thrombolysis is reduced as stroke onset to treatment time increases. The use of "mismatch" imaging to identify patients for delayed treatment has face validity and has been used in case series and clinical trials. We undertook a meta-analysis of relevant trials to examine whether present evidence supports delayed thrombolysis among patients selected according to mismatch criteria.</p> <p><b>Methods</b>: We collated outcome data for patients who were enrolled after 3 hours of stroke onset in thrombolysis trials and had mismatch on pretreatment imaging. We selected the trials on the basis of a systematic search of the Web of Knowledge. We compared favorable outcome, reperfusion and/or recanalization, mortality, and symptomatic intracerebral hemorrhage between the thrombolyzed and nonthrombolyzed groups of patients and the probability of a favorable outcome among patients with successful reperfusion and clinical findings for 3 to 6 versus 6 to 9 hours from poststroke onset. Results are expressed as adjusted odds ratios (a-ORs) with 95% CIs. Heterogeneity was explored by test statistics for clinical heterogeneity, I2 (inconsistency), and L’Abbé plot.</p> <p><b>Results</b>: We identified articles describing the DIAS, DIAS II, DEDAS, DEFUSE, and EPITHET trials, giving a total of 502 mismatch patients thrombolyzed beyond 3 hours. The combined a-ORs for favorable outcomes were greater for patients who had successful reperfusion (a-OR=5.2; 95% CI, 3 to 9; I2=0%). Favorable clinical outcome was not significantly improved by thrombolysis (a-OR=1.3; 95% CI, 0.8 to 2.0; I2=20.9%). Odds for reperfusion/recanalization were increased among patients who received thrombolytic therapy (a-OR=3.0; 95% CI, 1.6 to 5.8; I2=25.7%). The combined data showed a significant increase in mortality after thrombolysis (a-OR=2.4; 95% CI, 1.2 to 4.9; I2=0%), but this was not confirmed when we excluded data from desmoteplase doses that were abandoned in clinical development (a-OR=1.6; 95% CI, 0.7 to 3.7; I2=0%). Symptomatic intracerebral hemorrhage was significantly increased after thrombolysis (a-OR=6.5; 95% CI, 1.2 to 35.4; I2=0%) but not significant after exclusion of abandoned doses of desmoteplase (a-OR=5.4; 95% CI, 0.9 to 31.8; I2=0%).</p> <p><b>Conclusions</b>: Delayed thrombolysis amongst patients selected according to mismatch imaging is associated with increased reperfusion/recanalization. Recanalization/reperfusion is associated with improved outcomes. However, delayed thrombolysis in mismatch patients was not confirmed to improve clinical outcome, although a useful clinical benefit remains possible. Thrombolysis carries a significant risk of symptomatic intracerebral hemorrhage and possibly increased mortality. Criteria to diagnose mismatch are still evolving. Validation of the mismatch selection paradigm is required with a phase III trial. Pending these results, delayed treatment, even according to mismatch selection, cannot be recommended as part of routine care.</p&gt

Effects of a 500-Mile Backpacking Hike on the Performance of a Competitive Powerlifter

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of a long-distance backpacking trip and a high protein diet on body composition, strength, power, and aerobic performance. A single participant (male, aged 29 years) hiked 34 days on the Colorado Trail. Dependent variables were assessed pre-hike and post-hike and included body mass, body fat percentage, bone mineral density, maximum oxygen consumption (VO2max), resting metabolic rate (RMR), total cholesterol, triglycerides, high density lipoprotein (HDL), low density lipoprotein (LDL). Cardiovascular dependent variables included resting heart rate, systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP). Other performance outcomes included strength in squat, bench press, and deadlift, and vertical leap. Resting heart rate and a journal documenting a breakdown of calories expended and calories consumed were recorded daily while on the hike. The average daily duration of a hike was 8:43 ± 1:45 hours. The participant’s mass decreased by 2.5 kg (4% of body weight), body fat decreased by 1.2%, RMR decreased by 5 kcal/day, and VO2max increased by 8.7 mL/kg/min (17%). Among metabolic variables, total cholesterol increased by 18 mg/dL (10%); triglyceride concentration decreased by 23 mg/dL (29%); HDL decreased by 1 mg/dL (2%), and; LDL increased by 24 mg/dL (23%). With regard to cardiovascular variables, resting heart rate decreased from 85 bpm to 67 bpm (21%), SBP decreased by 39 mmHg (27%), and DBP decreased by 2 mmHg (3%). Among performance variables, maximal squat performance decreased by 29.5 kg (19%), maximal bench press performance decreased by 18.2 kg (16%), maximal deadlift decreased 31.7 kg (17%), and vertical jump distance decreased 13 cm (14%). The average daily dietary variables were as follows: average calories consumed = 4000 ± 463 kcal/day; average calories expended from hiking and metabolic rate combined = 5188 ±1197 kcal/day; average daily caloric deficit = -1165 ± 1070 kcal/day; average carbohydrate intake = 501 ± 78 g/day; average protein intake = 143 ± 19 g/day; average fat intake = 154 ± 25g/day. The magnitude and duration of an extended backpacking trip can lead to a reduction in strength and power. A diet high in protein did not prevent the loss of lean body mass

Meeting Forest Restoration Challenges: Using the Target Plant Concept

Meeting forest restoration challenges relies on successful establishment of plant materials (e.g., seeds, cuttings, rooted cuttings, or seedlings, etc.; hereafter simply “seedlingsâ€). The Target Plant Concept (TPC) provides a flexible framework that nursery managers and their clients can use to improve the survival and growth of these seedlings. The key tenets of the TPC are that (1) more emphasis is placed on how seedlings perform on the outplanting site rather than on nursery performance, (2) a partnership exists between the nursery manager and the client to determine the target plant based on site characteristics, and (3) that information gleaned from post-planting monitoring is used to improve subsequent plant materials. Through the nursery manager–client partnership, answers to a matrix of interrelated questions define a target plant to meet the reforestation or forest restoration objectives. These questions focus on project objectives; site characteristics, limiting factors, and possible mitigation efforts; species and genetic criteria; stocktype; outplanting tools and techniques; and outplanting window. We provide examples from the southeastern United States, Hawai‛i, and Lebanon on how the TPC process has improved performance of seedlings deployed for reforestation and forest restoration

Exercise augments the nocturnal prolactin rise in exercise-trained men

The objective of this study was to profile over a 24 h period the prolactin responses of exercise-trained men on a day involving rest with no exercise in comparison to a day involving exercise training sessions

The Rhodococcus equi virulence protein VapA disrupts endolysosome function and stimulates lysosome biogenesis

Rhodococcus equi (R. equi) is an important pulmonary pathogen in foals that often leads to the death of the horse. The bacterium harbors a virulence plasmid that encodes numerous virulence-associated proteins (Vaps) including VapA that is essential for intracellular survival inside macrophages. However, little is known about the precise function of VapA. Here, we demonstrate that VapA causes perturbation to late endocytic organelles with swollen endolysosome organelles having reduced Cathepsin B activity and an accumulation of LBPA, LC3 and Rab7. The data are indicative of a loss of endolysosomal function, which leads cells to upregulate lysosome biogenesis to compensate for the loss of functional endolysosomes. Although there is a high degree of homology of the core region of VapA to other Vap proteins, only the highly conserved core region of VapA, and not VapD of VapG, gives the observed effects on endolysosomes. This is the first demonstration of how VapA works and implies that VapA aids R. equi survival by reducing the impact of lysosomes on phagocytosed bacteria

Dissociating speech perception and comprehension at reduced levels of awareness

We used functional MRI and the anesthetic agent propofol to assess the relationship among neural responses to speech, successful comprehension, and conscious awareness. Volunteers were scanned while listening to sentences containing ambiguous words, matched sentences without ambiguous words, and signal-correlated noise (SCN). During three scanning sessions, participants were nonsedated (awake), lightly sedated (a slowed response to conversation), and deeply sedated (no conversational response, rousable by loud command). Bilateral temporal-lobe responses for sentences compared with signal-correlated noise were observed at all three levels of sedation, although prefrontal and premotor responses to speech were absent at the deepest level of sedation. Additional inferior frontal and posterior temporal responses to ambiguous sentences provide a neural correlate of semantic processes critical for comprehending sentences containing ambiguous words. However, this additional response was absent during light sedation, suggesting a marked impairment of sentence comprehension. A significant decline in postscan recognition memory for sentences also suggests that sedation impaired encoding of sentences into memory, with left inferior frontal and temporal lobe responses during light sedation predicting subsequent recognition memory. These findings suggest a graded degradation of cognitive function in response to sedation such that higher-level semantic and mnemonic processes can be impaired at relatively low levels of sedation, whereas perceptual processing of speech remains resilient even during deep sedation. These results have important implications for understanding the relationship between speech comprehension and awareness in the healthy brain in patients receiving sedation and in patients with disorders of consciousness

On the segmentation and classification of hand radiographs

This research is part of a wider project to build predictive models of bone age using hand radiograph images. We examine ways of finding the outline of a hand from an X-ray as the first stage in segmenting the image into constituent bones. We assess a variety of algorithms including contouring, which has not previously been used in this context. We introduce a novel ensemble algorithm for combining outlines using two voting schemes, a likelihood ratio test and dynamic time warping (DTW). Our goal is to minimize the human intervention required, hence we investigate alternative ways of training a classifier to determine whether an outline is in fact correct or not. We evaluate outlining and classification on a set of 1370 images. We conclude that ensembling with DTW improves performance of all outlining algorithms, that the contouring algorithm used with the DTW ensemble performs the best of those assessed, and that the most effective classifier of hand outlines assessed is a random forest applied to outlines transformed into principal components