Genetics of Childhood Obesity

Obesity is a major health problem and an immense economic burden on the health care systems both in the United States and the rest of the world. The prevalence of obesity in children and adults in the United States has increased dramatically over the past decade. Besides environmental factors, genetic factors are known to play an important role in the pathogenesis of obesity. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have revealed strongly associated genomic variants associated with most common disorders; indeed there is general consensus on these findings from generally positive replication outcomes by independent groups. To date, there have been only a few GWAS-related reports for childhood obesity specifically, with studies primarily uncovering loci in the adult setting instead. It is clear that a number of loci previously reported from GWAS analyses of adult BMI and/or obesity also play a role in childhood obesity

Homocysteine Reduction for Stroke Prevention: Regarding the Recent AHA/ASA 2021 Prevention of Stroke in Patients With Stroke and Transient Ischemic Attack

Reduction of secondary ischemic stroke risk following an initial stroke is an important goal. The 2021 Prevention of Stroke in Patients With Stroke and Transient Ischemic Attack assembles opportunities for up to 80% secondary stroke reduction. Homocysteine reduction was not included in the recommendations. The reduction of homocysteine with low doses of folic acid has been shown to reduce ischemic stroke and all stroke. This has been obscured by studies using high doses of folic acid and cyanocobalamin in patients with renal failure and Methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) polymorphisms. The confounding impacts of high dose folic acid and cyanocobalamin toxicity in renal failure and MTHFR C677T subgroups are discussed. New studies show that their toxicity is due to non-bioequivalence to the natural dietary forms, L-methylfolate and methylcobalamin. Low doses of folic acid and cyanocobalamin are safer than high doses for these subpopulations. Even lower toxicity with greater effectiveness for reducing homocysteine is seen with L-methylfolate and methylcobalamin, which are safe at high doses. Retinal vascular imaging is a noninvasive method for evaluating central nervous system (CNS) microangiopathy. A formulation containing l-methylfolate and methylcobalamin has been shown to reduce homocysteine and increase perfusion in diabetic retinopathy. This supports homocysteine intervention for CNS ischemia. Future ischemic stroke intervention studies could benefit from monitoring retinal perfusion to estimate the impact of risk reduction strategies. The omission of a recommendation for homocysteine and secondary stroke reduction through the use of B vitamins should be reconsidered in light of re-analysis of major B vitamin intervention studies and new technologies for monitoring CNS perfusion. We recommend revision of the 2021 Guideline to include homocysteine reduction with low doses of folic acid and cyanocobalamin, or better yet, L-methylfolate and methylcobalamin, making a good clinical guideline better

Target Contour Recovering for Tracking People in Complex Environments

Recovering people contours from partial occlusion is a challenging problem in a visual tracking system. Partial occlusions would bring about unreasonable contour changes of the target object. In this paper, a novel method is presented to detect partial occlusion on people contours and recover occluded portions. Unlike other occlusion detection methods, the proposed method is only based on contours, which makes itself more flexible to be extended for further applications. Experiments with synthetic images demonstrate the accuracy of the method for detecting partial occlusions, and experiments on real-world video sequence are also carried out to prove that the method is also good enough to be used to recover target contours

Formulas for approximating pseudo-Boolean random variables

We consider { 0, 1 }n as a sample space with a probability measure on it, thus making pseudo-Boolean functions into random variables. We then derive explicit formulas for approximating a pseudo-Boolean random variable by a linear function if the measure is permutation-invariant, and by a function of degree at most k if the measure is a product measure. These formulas generalize results due to Hammer-Holzman and Grabisch-Marichal-Roubens. We also derive a formula for the best faithful linear approximation that extends a result due to Charnes-Golany-Keane-Rousseau concerning generalized Shapley values. We show that a theorem of Hammer-Holzman that states that a pseudo-Boolean function and its best approximation of degree at most k have the same derivatives up to order k does not generalize to this setting for arbitrary probability measures, but does generalize if the probability measure is a product measure. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Transforms of pseudo-Boolean random variables

As in earlier works, we consider {0, 1}n as a sample space with a probability measure on it, thus making pseudo-Boolean functions into random variables. Under the assumption that the coordinate random variables are independent, we show it is very easy to give an orthonormal basis for the space of pseudo-Boolean random variables of degree at most k. We use this orthonormal basis to find the transform of a given pseudo-Boolean random variable and to answer various least squares minimization questions. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

The HMW effect in Noncommutative Quantum Mechanics

The HMW effect in non-commutative quantum mechanics is studied. By solving the Dirac equations on non-commutative (NC) space and non-commutative phase space, we obtain topological HMW phase on NC space and NC phase space respectively, where the additional terms related to the space-space and momentum-momentum non-commutativity are given explicitly.Comment: 8 Latex page