Influence of anneal atmosphere on ZnO-nanorod photoluminescent and morphological properties with self-powered photodetector performance

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Coping with metastatic melanoma: the last year of life.

BackgroundFew longitudinal studies have concurrently investigated cognitive appraisal, coping and psychological adjustment in patients with terminal cancer. This study aimed to (i) consider patterns of change in these variables during the last year of life and (ii) consider covariates associated with patients' psychological adjustment.Methods and patientsQuestionnaires were sent to a cohort of stage IV melanoma patients seen at the Sydney Melanoma Unit between 1991 and 1996, approximately every 3 months, for up to 2 years. A sub-sample of 110 patients completed at least one questionnaire in the last year of life. Repeated measures linear regression was used to model cognitive appraisal, coping and psychological adjustment.ResultsIn the last year of life, patients' cognitive appraisal of their disease remained relatively stable, whereas their use of active coping strategies increased (p=0. 04). There was some deterioration in psychological adjustment, particularly in patients' ability to minimize the impact of cancer on daily life (p=0.03), but this effect did not remain significant when patients' level of tiredness was included in the model. Cognitive appraisal, coping style and quality of life indicators were all associated with psychological adjustment.ConclusionThese findings suggest that while patients work hard to actively cope with their disease, they experience increasing levels of tiredness, and deterioration in their mood and ability to function in their daily lives

Pain and learning in primary school: a population-based study.

Despite the frequency of pain among children, little is known about its effects on learning and school outcomes. The objective of this study was to quantify the association of pain and academic achievement while taking into account the presence of co-occurring emotional symptoms. A population-based stratified random sample of 1239 students aged 8 to 9 years from primary schools in Melbourne, Australia, was recruited for the Childhood to Adolescence Transition Study. Children indicated sites of pain that had lasted for a day or longer in the past month using a pain manikin. Depressive- and anxiety-related symptoms were assessed using child-reported items. National assessment results for reading and numeracy were used to measure academic achievement. Sixty-five percent of children reported pain in at least 1 body site and 16% reported chronic pain. Increasing number of pain sites was associated with poorer reading scores in a dose-response fashion (β = -3.1; 95% confidence interval -4.9 to -1.3; P < 0.001). The association was only partly attenuated when adjusting for emotional symptoms (β = -2.6; 95% confidence interval -4.5 to -0.8; P < 0.001) and was not moderated by emotional symptoms. Children with chronic pain were a year behind their peers in both reading and numeracy. Among primary school students, pain was associated with lower reading scores even after adjusting for the presence of emotional symptoms. Although population-based longitudinal studies will be required to ascertain consistency and possible causality, grounds exist for considering pain and emotional symptoms in the assessment of children with reading difficulties

Validation of the diabetes, hypertension and hyperlipidemia (DHL) knowledge instrument in Malaysia

BACKGROUND: Patient's knowledge on diabetes, hypertension and hyperlipidaemia and its medications can be used as one of the outcome measures to assess the effectiveness of educational intervention. To date, no such instrument has been validated in Malaysia. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate the validity and reliability of the Diabetes, Hypertension and Hyperlipidemia (DHL) knowledge instrument for assessing the knowledge of patients with type 2 diabetes in Malaysia. METHODS: A 28-item instrument which comprised of 5 domains: diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, medications and general issues was designed and tested. One point was given for every correct answer, whilst zero was given for incorrect answers. Scores ranged from 0 to 28, which were then converted into percentage. This was administered to 77 patients with type 2 diabetes in a tertiary hospital, who were on medication(s) for diabetes and who could understand English (patient group), and to 40 pharmacists (professional group). The DHL knowledge instrument was administered again to the patient group after one month. Excluded were patients less than 18 years old. RESULTS: Flesch reading ease was 60, which is satisfactory, while the mean difficulty factor(SD) was 0.74(0.21), indicating that DHL knowledge instrument was moderately easy. Internal consistency of the instrument was good, with Cronbach's alpha = 0.791. The test-retest scores showed no significant difference for 26 out of the 28 items, indicating that the questionnaire has achieved stable reliability. The overall mean(SD) knowledge scores was significantly different between the patient and professional groups 74.35(14.88) versus 93.84(6.47), p < 0.001. This means that the DHL knowledge instrument could differentiate the knowledge levels of participants. The DHL knowledge instrument shows similar psychometric properties as other validated questionnaires. CONCLUSIONS: The DHL knowledge instrument shows good promise to be adopted as an instrument for assessing diabetic patients' knowledge concerning their disease conditions and medications in Malaysia

Modularity of gene-regulatory networks revealed in sea-star development

Evidence that conserved developmental gene-regulatory networks can change as a unit during deutersostome evolution emerges from a study published in BMC Biology. This shows that genes consistently expressed in anterior brain patterning in hemichordates and chordates are expressed in a similar spatial pattern in another deuterostome, an asteroid echinoderm (sea star), but in a completely different developmental context (the animal-vegetal axis). This observation has implications for hypotheses on the type of development present in the deuterostome common ancestor

Boosting Long-term Memory via Wakeful Rest: Intentional Rehearsal is not Necessary, Automatic Consolidation is Sufficient.

<div><p>People perform better on tests of delayed free recall if learning is followed immediately by a short wakeful rest than by a short period of sensory stimulation. Animal and human work suggests that wakeful resting provides optimal conditions for the consolidation of recently acquired memories. However, an alternative account cannot be ruled out, namely that wakeful resting provides optimal conditions for intentional rehearsal of recently acquired memories, thus driving superior memory. Here we utilised non-recallable words to examine whether wakeful rest boosts long-term memory, even when new memories could not be rehearsed intentionally during the wakeful rest delay. The probing of non-recallable words requires a recognition paradigm. Therefore, we first established, via Experiment 1, that the rest-induced boost in memory observed via free recall can be replicated in a recognition paradigm, using concrete nouns. In Experiment 2, participants heard 30 non-recallable non-words, presented as ‘foreign names in a bridge club abroad’ and then either rested wakefully or played a visual spot-the-difference game for 10 minutes. Retention was probed via recognition at two time points, 15 minutes and 7 days after presentation. As in Experiment 1, wakeful rest boosted recognition significantly, and this boost was maintained for at least 7 days. Our results indicate that the enhancement of memory via wakeful rest is <i>not</i> dependent upon intentional rehearsal of learned material during the rest period. We thus conclude that consolidation is <i>sufficient</i> for this rest-induced memory boost to emerge. We propose that wakeful resting allows for superior memory consolidation, resulting in stronger and/or more veridical representations of experienced events which can be detected via tests of free recall and recognition.</p></div

Primary health care services for the aged in the United Arab Emirates: a comparison of two models of care

Aim: To compare the quality of aged care provided by two different models of primary health care services in the United Arab Emirates. Methods: Cross sectional survey by chart review of 200 consecutive people aged 65 years and over attending two primary health care centers located in adjacent suburbs and serving populations with similar characteristics; a resource intensive center (RIC) and the other a resource thrifty center (RTC). Quality indicators were blood pressure levels in hypertensives and glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c) levels in diabetics. Results: There was no variation in age, sex or number of visits per year between the clinics. Osteoarthritis, hypertension, and diabetes were the most common diagnoses at both. The people attending the RIC had a substantially higher level of comorbidity (RIC=1.19±1.18, RTC=0.63 ± 0.68, p < 0.001), the average systolic and diastolic blood pressure for those diagnosed with hypertension was in the normal range at the RIC (138.5 ± 19.8/77.1 ± 9.9), whereas it was significantly higher and in the elevated range at the RTC (149.5 ± 17.7/85.2 ± 9.1, p < 0.001) and the HbA1c was significantly lower at the RIC (7.7 ± 1.4) than at the RTC (9.5 ± 2.0, p < 0.001). Conclusions:The quality of health outcomes for the two chronic diseases, hypertension and diabetes, appeared significantly higher at the RIC, when compared with the RTC. However, there may have been significant selection bias. Further studies are needed to determine if the RIC improves quality measures in other aspects of chronic disease care and provides a more cost effective health care service

Chaste: an open source C++ library for computational physiology and biology

Chaste - Cancer, Heart And Soft Tissue Environment - is an open source C++ library for the computational simulation of mathematical models developed for physiology and biology. Code development has been driven by two initial applications: cardiac electrophysiology and cancer development. A large number of cardiac electrophysiology studies have been enabled and performed, including high performance computational investigations of defibrillation on realistic human cardiac geometries. New models for the initiation and growth of tumours have been developed. In particular, cell-based simulations have provided novel insight into the role of stem cells in the colorectal crypt. Chaste is constantly evolving and is now being applied to a far wider range of problems. The code provides modules for handling common scientific computing components, such as meshes and solvers for ordinary and partial differential equations (ODEs/PDEs). Re-use of these components avoids the need for researchers to "re-invent the wheel" with each new project, accelerating the rate of progress in new applications. Chaste is developed using industrially-derived techniques, in particular test-driven development, to ensure code quality, re-use and reliability. In this article we provide examples that illustrate the types of problems Chaste can be used to solve, which can be run on a desktop computer. We highlight some scientific studies that have used or are using Chaste, and the insights they have provided. The source code, both for specific releases and the development version, is available to download under an open source Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) licence at http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/chaste, together with details of a mailing list and links to documentation and tutorials

Testing the theory of immune selection in cancers that break the rules of transplantation

Modification of cancer cells likely to reduce their immunogenicity, including loss or down-regulation of MHC molecules, is now well documented and has become the main support for the concept of immune surveillance. The evidence that these modifications, in fact, result from selection by the immune system is less clear, since the possibility that they may result from reorganized metabolism associated with proliferation or from cell de-differentiation remains. Here, we (a) survey old and new transplantation experiments that test the possibility of selection and (b) survey how transmissible tumours of dogs and Tasmanian devils provide naturally evolved tests of immune surveillance