Malaria mortality in Africa and Asia: evidence from INDEPTH health and demographic surveillance system sites.

BACKGROUND: Malaria continues to be a major cause of infectious disease mortality in tropical regions. However, deaths from malaria are most often not individually documented, and as a result overall understanding of malaria epidemiology is inadequate. INDEPTH Network members maintain population surveillance in Health and Demographic Surveillance System sites across Africa and Asia, in which individual deaths are followed up with verbal autopsies. OBJECTIVE: To present patterns of malaria mortality determined by verbal autopsy from INDEPTH sites across Africa and Asia, comparing these findings with other relevant information on malaria in the same regions. DESIGN: From a database covering 111,910 deaths over 12,204,043 person-years in 22 sites, in which verbal autopsy data were handled according to the WHO 2012 standard and processed using the InterVA-4 model, over 6,000 deaths were attributed to malaria. The overall period covered was 1992-2012, but two-thirds of the observations related to 2006-2012. These deaths were analysed by site, time period, age group and sex to investigate epidemiological differences in malaria mortality. RESULTS: Rates of malaria mortality varied by 1:10,000 across the sites, with generally low rates in Asia (one site recording no malaria deaths over 0.5 million person-years) and some of the highest rates in West Africa (Nouna, Burkina Faso: 2.47 per 1,000 person-years). Childhood malaria mortality rates were strongly correlated with Malaria Atlas Project estimates of Plasmodium falciparum parasite rates for the same locations. Adult malaria mortality rates, while lower than corresponding childhood rates, were strongly correlated with childhood rates at the site level. CONCLUSIONS: The wide variations observed in malaria mortality, which were nevertheless consistent with various other estimates, suggest that population-based registration of deaths using verbal autopsy is a useful approach to understanding the details of malaria epidemiology

Wearable technology and the cardiovascular system: the future of patient assessment

The past decade has seen a dramatic rise in consumer technologies able to monitor a variety of cardiovascular parameters. Such devices initially recorded markers of exercise, but now include physiological and health-care focused measurements. The public are keen to adopt these devices in the belief that they are useful to identify and monitor cardiovascular disease. Clinicians are therefore often presented with health app data accompanied by a diverse range of concerns and queries. Herein, we assess whether these devices are accurate, their outputs validated, and whether they are suitable for professionals to make management decisions. We review underpinning methods and technologies and explore the evidence supporting the use of these devices as diagnostic and monitoring tools in hypertension, arrhythmia, heart failure, coronary artery disease, pulmonary hypertension, and valvular heart disease. Used correctly, they might improve health care and support research

Collagenous microstructure of the glenoid labrum and biceps anchor.

Submitted versio

Twitter Watch: Leveraging Social Media to Monitor and Predict Collective-Efficacy of Neighborhoods

Sociologists associate the spatial variation of crime within an urban setting, with the concept of collective efficacy. The collective efficacy of a neighborhood is defined as social cohesion among neighbors combined with their willingness to intervene on behalf of the common good. Sociologists measure collective efficacy by conducting survey studies designed to measure individuals' perception of their community. In this work, we employ the curated data from a survey study (ground truth) and examine the effectiveness of substituting costly survey questionnaires with proxies derived from social media. We enrich a corpus of tweets mentioning a local venue with several linguistic and topological features. We then propose a pairwise learning to rank model with the goal of identifying a ranking of neighborhoods that is similar to the ranking obtained from the ground truth collective efficacy values. In our experiments, we find that our generated ranking of neighborhoods achieves 0.77 Kendall tau-x ranking agreement with the ground truth ranking. Overall, our results are up to 37% better than traditional baselines.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Markov Chain Monte Carlo and the Application to Geodetic Time Series Analysis

The time evolution of geophysical phenomena can be characterised by stochastic time series. The stochastic nature of the signal stems from the geophysical phenomena involved and any noise, which may be due to, e.g., un-modelled effects or measurement errors. Until the 1990's, it was usually assumed that white noise could fully characterise this noise. However, this was demonstrated to be not the case and it was proven that this assumption leads to underestimated uncertainties of the geophysical parameters inferred from the geodetic time series. Therefore, in order to fully quantify all the uncertainties as robustly as possible, it is imperative to estimate not only the deterministic but also the stochastic parameters of the time series. In this regard, the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method can provide a sample of the distribution function of all parameters, including those regarding the noise, e.g., spectral index and amplitudes. After presenting the MCMC method and its implementation in our MCMC software we apply it to synthetic and real time series and perform a cross-evaluation using Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) as implemented in the CATS software. Several examples as to how the MCMC method performs as a parameter estimation method for geodetic time series are given in this chapter. These include the applications to GPS position time series, superconducting gravity time series and monthly mean sea level (MSL) records, which all show very different stochastic properties. The impact of the estimated parameter uncertainties on sub-sequentially derived products is briefly demonstrated for the case of plate motion models. Finally, the MCMC results for weekly downsampled versions of the benchmark synthetic GNSS time series as provided in Chapter 2 are presented separately in an appendix

Extragalactic Radio Continuum Surveys and the Transformation of Radio Astronomy

Next-generation radio surveys are about to transform radio astronomy by discovering and studying tens of millions of previously unknown radio sources. These surveys will provide new insights to understand the evolution of galaxies, measuring the evolution of the cosmic star formation rate, and rivalling traditional techniques in the measurement of fundamental cosmological parameters. By observing a new volume of observational parameter space, they are also likely to discover unexpected new phenomena. This review traces the evolution of extragalactic radio continuum surveys from the earliest days of radio astronomy to the present, and identifies the challenges that must be overcome to achieve this transformational change.Comment: To be published in Nature Astronomy 18 Sept 201

Tumor suppressor BTG1 limits activation of BCL6 expression downstream of ETV6-RUNX1

Translocation t(12;21) (p13;q22), giving rise to the ETV6-RUNX1 fusion gene, is the most common genetic abnormality in childhood B-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia (BCP-ALL). This translocation usually arises in utero, but its expression is insufficient to induce leukemia and requires other cooperating genetic lesions for BCP-ALL to develop. Deletions affecting the transcriptional coregulator BTG1 are frequently observed in ETV6-RUNX1-positive leukemia. Here we report that Btg1 deficiency enhances the self-renewal capacity of ETV6-RUNX1-positive mouse fetal liver-derived hematopoietic progenitors (FL-HPCs). Combined expression of the fusion protein and a loss of BTG1 drive upregulation of the proto-oncogene Bcl6 and downregulation of BCL6 target genes, such as p19Arf and Tp53. Similarly, ectopic expression of BCL6 promotes the self-renewal and clonogenic replating capacity of FL-HPCs, by suppressing the expression of p19Arf and Tp53. Together these results identify BCL6 as a potential driver of ETV6-RUNX1-mediated leukemogenesis, which could involve loss of BTG1-dependent suppression of ETV6-RUNX1 function

Healthy Eating Index scores associated with symptoms of depression in Cuban-Americans with and without type 2 diabetes: a cross sectional study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Low diet quality and depression symptoms are independently associated with poor glycemic control in subjects with type 2 diabetes (T2D); however, the relationship between them is unclear. The aim of this study was to determine the association between diet quality and symptoms of depression among Cuban-Americans with and without T2D living in South Florida.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Subjects (n = 356) were recruited from randomly selected mailing list. Diet quality was determined using the Healthy Eating Index-2005 (HEI-05) score. Symptoms of depression were assessed using the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). Both linear and logistic regression analyses were run to determine whether or not these two variables were related. Symptoms of depression was the dependent variable and independent variables included HEI-05, gender, age, marital status, BMI, education level, A1C, employment status, depression medication, duration of diabetes, and diabetes status. Analysis of covariance was used to test for interactions among variables.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>An interaction between diabetes status, gender and HEI-05 was found (<it>P </it>= 0.011). Among males with a HEI-05 score ≤ 55.6, those with T2D had a higher mean BDI score than those without T2D (11.6 vs. 6.6 respectively, <it>P </it>= 0.028). Among males and females with a HEI-05 score ≤ 55.6, females without T2D had a higher mean BDI score compared to males without T2D (11.0 vs. 6.6 respectively, <it>P </it>= 0.012)</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Differences in symptoms of depression according to diabetes status and gender are found in Cuban-Americans with low diet quality.</p

Saccharomyces cerevisiae chitin biosynthesis activation by N-acetylchitooses depends on size and structure of chito-oligosaccharides

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>To explore chitin synthesis initiation, the effect of addition of exogenous oligosaccharides on <it>in vitro </it>chitin synthesis was studied. Oligosaccharides of various natures and lengths were added to a chitin synthase assay performed on a <it>Saccharomyces cerevisiae </it>membrane fraction.</p> <p>Findings</p> <p><it>N</it>-acetylchito-tetra, -penta and -octaoses resulted in 11 to 25% [¹⁴C]-GlcNAc incorporation into [¹⁴C]-chitin, corresponding to an increase in the initial velocity. The activation appeared specific to <it>N</it>-acetylchitooses as it was not observed with oligosaccharides in other series, such as beta-(1,4), beta-(1,3) or alpha-(1,6) glucooligosaccharides.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The effect induced by the <it>N</it>-acetylchitooses was a saturable phenomenon and did not interfere with free GlcNAc and trypsin which are two known activators of yeast chitin synthase activity <it>in vitro</it>. The magnitude of the activation was dependent on both oligosaccharide concentration and oligosaccharide size.</p