The Rise in Disability Recipiency and the Decline in Unemployment

Between 1984 and 2000, the share of non-elderly adults receiving benefits from the Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs rose from 3.1 to 5.3 percent. We trace this growth to reduced screening stringency and, due to the interaction between growing wage inequality and a progressive benefits formula, a rising earnings replacement rate. We explore the implications of these changes for the level of labor force participation among the less skilled and their employment responses to adverse employment shocks. Following program liberalization in 1984, DI application and recipiency rates became two to three times as responsive to plausibly exogenous labor demand shocks. Contemporaneously, male and female high school dropouts became increasingly likely to exit the labor force rather than enter unemployment in the event of an adverse shock. The liberalization of the disability program appears to explain both facts. Accounting for the role of disability in inducing labor force exit among the low-skilled unemployed, we calculate that the U.S. unemployment rate would be two-thirds of a percentage point higher at present were it not for the liberalized disability system.

Moral Hazard and Claims Deterrence in Private Disability Insurance

Exploiting within-firm, over-time variation in plan parameters for nearly 10,000 Long Term Disability (LTD) policies held by US employers, we present the first empirical analysis of the determinants of private LTD spells. We find that a shorter waiting period and a higher replacement rate increase the incidence of LTD spells. Sixty percent of the latter effect is due to the mechanical censoring of shorter spells, with the remainder due to the deterrence of spells that would have continued beyond the waiting period. Deterrence is driven primarily by a reduction in the incidence of shorter duration spells and less severe disabilities

Results of search for magnetized quark-nugget dark matter from radial impacts on Earth

Magnetized Quark Nuggets (MQNs) are a recently proposed dark-matter candidate consistent with the Standard Model and with Tatsumi's theory of quark-nugget cores in magnetars. Previous publications have covered their formation in the early universe, aggregation into a broad mass distribution before they can decay by the weak force, interaction with normal matter through their magnetopause, and first observation consistent MQNs, i.e. a nearly tangential impact limiting their surface-magnetic-field parameter B_o from Tatsumi's values of 0.1 to 10.0 TT to new value of 1.65 TT +/- 21%. The MQN mass distribution and interaction cross section depend strongly on B_o. Their magnetopause is much larger than their geometric dimensions and can cause sufficient energy deposition to form non-meteorite craters, which are reported approximately annually. We report computer simulations of the MQN energy deposition in water-saturated peat, soft sediments, and granite and report results from excavating such a crater. Five points of agreement between observations and hydrodynamic simulations of an MQN impact support this second observation consistent with MQN dark matter and suggest a method for qualifying additional MQN events. The results also redundantly constrain B_o to greater than 0.4 TT.Comment: 30 pages, 13 figures, submitted to Univers

Meta-analysis of 8q24 for seven cancers reveals a locus between NOV and ENPP2 associated with cancer development.

BACKGROUND: Human chromosomal region 8q24 contains several genes which could be functionally related to cancer, including the proto-oncogene c-MYC. However, the abundance of associations around 128 Mb on chromosome 8 could mask the appearance of a weaker, but important, association elsewhere on 8q24. METHODS: In this study, we completed a meta-analysis of results from nine genome-wide association studies for seven types of solid-tumor cancers (breast, prostate, pancreatic, lung, ovarian, colon, and glioma) to identify additional associations that were not apparent in any individual study. RESULTS: Fifteen SNPs in the 8q24 region had meta-analysis p-values < 1E-04. In particular, the region consisting of 120,576,000-120,627,000 bp contained 7 SNPs with p-values < 1.0E-4, including rs6993464 (p = 1.25E-07). This association lies in the region between two genes, NOV and ENPP2, which have been shown to play a role in tumor development and motility. An additional region consisting of 5 markers from 128,478,000 bp - 128,524,000 (around gene POU5F1B) had p-values < 1E-04, including rs6983267, which had the smallest p-value (p = 6.34E-08). This result replicates previous reports of association between rs6983267 and prostate and colon cancer. CONCLUSIONS: Further research in this area is warranted as these results demonstrate that the chromosomal region 8q24 may contain a locus that influences general cancer susceptibility between 120,576 and 120,630 kb.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

Circulating biomarkers during treatment in patients with advanced biliary tract cancer receiving cediranib in the UK ABC-03 trial

BACKGROUND: Advanced biliary tract cancer (ABC) has a poor prognosis. Cediranib, in addition to cisplatin/gemcitabine [CisGem], improved the response rate, but did not improve the progression-free survival (PFS) in the ABC-03 study. Minimally invasive biomarkers predictive of cediranib benefit may improve patient outcomes. METHODS: Changes in 15 circulating plasma angiogenesis or inflammatory-related proteins and cytokeratin-18 (CK18), measured at baseline and during therapy until disease progression, were correlated with overall survival (OS) using time-varying covariate Cox models (TVC). RESULTS: Samples were available from n=117/124 (94%) patients. Circulating Ang1&2, FGFb, PDGFbb, VEGFC, VEGFR1 and CK18 decreased as a result of the therapy, independent of treatment with cediranib. Circulating VEGFR2 and Tie2 were preferentially reduced by cediranib. Patients with increasing levels of VEGFA at any time had a worse PFS and OS; this detrimental effect was attenuated in patients receiving cediranib. TVC analysis revealed CK18 and VEGFR2 increases correlated with poorer OS in all patients (P< 0.001 and P=0.02, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: Rising circulating VEGFA levels in patients with ABC, treated with CisGem, are associated with worse PFS and OS, not seen in patients receiving cediranib. Rising levels of markers of tumour burden (CK18) and potential resistance (VEGFR2) are associated with worse outcomes and warrant validation

Design and Rationale of Safe Pediatric Euglycemia After Cardiac Surgery (SPECS): A Randomized Controlled Trial of Tight Glycemic Control After Pediatric Cardiac Surgery

Objectives: To describe the design of a clinical trial testing the hypothesis that children randomized to tight glycemic control with intensive insulin therapy after cardiac surgery will have improved clinical outcomes compared to children randomized to conventional blood glucose management. Design: Two-center, randomized controlled trial. Setting: Cardiac ICUs at two large academic pediatric centers. Patients: Children from birth to those aged 36 months recovering in the cardiac ICU after surgery with cardiopulmonary bypass. Interventions: Subjects in the tight glycemic control (intervention) group receive an intravenous insulin infusion titrated to achieve normoglycemia (target blood glucose range of 80–110 mg/dL; 4.4–6.1 mmol/L). The intervention begins at admission to the cardiac ICU from the operating room and terminates when the patient is ready for discharge from the ICU. Continuous glucose monitoring is performed during insulin infusion to minimize the risks of hypoglycemia. The standard care group has no target blood glucose range. Measurements and Main Results: The primary outcome is the development of any nosocomial infection (bloodstream, urinary tract, and surgical site infection or nosocomial pneumonia). Secondary outcomes include mortality, measures of cardiorespiratory function and recovery, laboratory indices of nutritional balance, immunologic, endocrinologic, and neurologic function, cardiac ICU and hospital length of stay, and neurodevelopmental outcome at 1 and 3 yrs of age. A total of 980 subjects will be enrolled (490 in each treatment arm) for sufficient power to show a 50% reduction in the prevalence of the primary outcome. Conclusions: Pediatric cardiac surgery patients may recognize great benefit from tight glycemic control in the postoperative period, particularly with regard to reduction of nosocomial infections. The Safe Pediatric Euglycemia after Cardiac Surgery trial is designed to provide an unbiased answer to the question of whether this therapy is indeed beneficial and to define the associated risks of therapy

Automatic extraction of informal topics from online suicidal ideation

Abstract Background Suicide is an alarming public health problem accounting for a considerable number of deaths each year worldwide. Many more individuals contemplate suicide. Understanding the attributes, characteristics, and exposures correlated with suicide remains an urgent and significant problem. As social networking sites have become more common, users have adopted these sites to talk about intensely personal topics, among them their thoughts about suicide. Such data has previously been evaluated by analyzing the language features of social media posts and using factors derived by domain experts to identify at-risk users. Results In this work, we automatically extract informal latent recurring topics of suicidal ideation found in social media posts. Our evaluation demonstrates that we are able to automatically reproduce many of the expertly determined risk factors for suicide. Moreover, we identify many informal latent topics related to suicide ideation such as concerns over health, work, self-image, and financial issues. Conclusions These informal topics topics can be more specific or more general. Some of our topics express meaningful ideas not contained in the risk factors and some risk factors do not have complimentary latent topics. In short, our analysis of the latent topics extracted from social media containing suicidal ideations suggests that users of these systems express ideas that are complementary to the topics defined by experts but differ in their scope, focus, and precision of language.https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144214/1/12859_2018_Article_2197.pd