552 research outputs found
Prevalence of insomnia symptoms and their associated factors in patients treated in outpatient clinics of four general hospitals in Guangzhou, China
Background: Data on the prevalence of insomnia symptoms in medical outpatient clinics in China are lacking. This study examined the prevalence of insomnia symptoms and their socio-demographic correlates in patients treated at medical outpatient clinics affiliated with four general hospitals in Guangzhou, a large metropolis in southern China.
Method: A total of 4399 patients were consecutively invited to participate in the study. Data on insomnia and its socio-demographic correlates were collected with standardized questionnaires.
Results: The prevalence of any type of insomnia symptoms was 22.1% (95% confidence interval (CI): 20.9â23.3%); the prevalence of difficulty initiating sleep was 14.3%, difficulty maintaining sleep was 16.2%, and early morning awakening was 12.4%. Only 17.5% of the patients suffering from insomnia received sleeping pills. Multiple logistic regression analysis revealed that male gender, education level, rural residence, and being unemployed or retired were negatively associated with insomnia symptoms, while lacking health insurance, older age and more severe depressive symptoms were positively associated with insomnia symptoms.
Conclusions: Insomnia symptoms are common in patients attending medical outpatient clinics in Guangzhou. Increasing awareness of sleep hygiene measures, regular screening and psychosocial and pharmacological interventions for insomnia are needed in China.
Trial registration: ChiCTR-INR-16008066. Registered 8 March 2016
Spin-dependent thermoelectric transport through double quantum dots
We study thermoelectric transport through double quantum dots system with
spin-dependent interdot coupling and ferromagnetic electrodes by means of the
non-equilibrium Green function in the linear response regime. It is found that
the thermoelectric coefficients are strongly dependent on the splitting of
interdot coupling, the relative magnetic configurations and the spin
polarization of leads. In particular, the thermoelectric efficiency can achieve
considerable value in parallel configuration when the effective interdot
coupling and tunnel coupling between QDs and the leads for spin-down electrons
are small. Moreover, the thermoelectric efficiency increases with the intradot
Coulomb interactions increasing and can reach very high value at an appropriate
temperature. In the presence of the magnetic field, the spin accumulation in
leads strongly suppresses the thermoelectric efficiency and a pure spin
thermopower can be obtained.Comment: 5 figure
Lyme Disease and YouTubeâą: A Cross-Sectional Study of Video Contents
Objectives: Lyme disease is the most common tick-borne disease. People seek health information on Lyme disease from YouTubeTM videos. In this study, we investigated if the contents of Lyme disease-related YouTubeTM videos varied by their sources.
Methods: Most viewed English YouTubeTM videos (n = 100) were identified and manually coded for contents and sources.
Results: Within the sample, 40 videos were consumer-generated, 31 were internet-based news, 16 were professional, and 13 were TV news. Compared with consumer-generated videos, TV news videos were more likely to mention celebrities (odds ratio [OR], 10.57; 95% confidence interval [CI], 2.13â52.58), prevention of Lyme disease through wearing protective clothing (OR, 5.63; 95% CI, 1.23â25.76), and spraying insecticides (OR, 7.71; 95% CI, 1.52â39.05).
Conclusion: A majority of the most popular Lyme disease-related YouTubeTM videos were not created by public health professionals. Responsible reporting and creative video-making facilitate Lyme disease education. Partnership with YouTubeTM celebrities to co-develop educational videos may be a future direction
Estrogen induces global reorganization of chromatin structure in human breast cancer cells
In the cell nucleus, each chromosome is confined to a chromosome territory. This spatial organization of chromosomes plays a crucial role in gene regulation and genome stability. An additional level of organization has been discovered at the chromosome scale: the spatial segregation into open and closed chromatins to form two genome-wide compartments. Although considerable progress has been made in our knowledge of chromatin organization, a fundamental issue remains the understanding of its dynamics, especially in cancer. To address this issue, we performed genome-wide mapping of chromatin interactions (Hi-C) over the time after estrogen stimulation of breast cancer cells. To biologically interpret these interactions, we integrated with estrogen receptor α (ERα) binding events, gene expression and epigenetic marks. We show that gene-rich chromosomes as well as areas of open and highly transcribed chromatins are rearranged to greater spatial proximity, thus enabling genes to share transcriptional machinery and regulatory elements. At a smaller scale, differentially interacting loci are enriched for cancer proliferation and estrogen-related genes. Moreover, these loci are correlated with higher ERα binding events and gene expression. Taken together these results reveal the role of a hormone--estrogen--on genome organization, and its effect on gene regulation in cancer
The Subleading Term of the Strong Coupling Expansion of the Heavy-Quark Potential in a Super Yang-Mills Plasma
Applying the AdS/CFT correspondence, the expansion of the heavy-quark
potential of the supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory at large is
carried out to the sub-leading term in the large 't Hooft coupling at nonzero
temperatures. The strong coupling corresponds to the semi-classical expansion
of the string-sigma model, the gravity dual of the Wilson loop operator, with
the sub-leading term expressed in terms of functional determinants of
fluctuations. The contributions of these determinants are evaluated
numerically.Comment: 17 pages in JHEP3, typos fixed, updated version to be published in
JHE
#Globalhealth Twitter Conversations on #Malaria, #HIV, #TB, #NCDS, and #NTDS: a Cross-Sectional Analysis
BackgroundAdvocates use the hashtag #GlobalHealth on Twitter to draw users' attention to prominent themes on global health, to harness their support, and to advocate for change.ObjectivesWe aimed to describe #GlobalHealth tweets pertinent to given major health issues.MethodsTweets containing the hashtag #GlobalHealth (N = 157,951) from January 1, 2014, to April 30, 2015, were purchased from GNIP Inc. We extracted 5 subcorpora of tweets, each with 1 of 5 co-occurring disease-specific hashtags (#Malaria, #HIV, #TB, #NCDS, and #NTDS) for further analysis. Unsupervised machine learning was applied to each subcorpus to categorize the tweets by their underlying topics and obtain the representative tweets of each topic. The topics were grouped into 1 of 4 themes (advocacy; epidemiological information; prevention, control, and treatment; societal impact) or miscellaneous. Manual categorization of most frequent users was performed. Time zones of users were analyzed.FindingsIn the entire #GlobalHealth corpus (N = 157,951), there were 40,266 unique users, 85,168 retweets, and 13,107 unique co-occurring hashtags. Of the 13,087 tweets across the 5 subcorpora with co-occurring hashtag #malaria (n = 3640), #HIV (n = 3557), #NCDS (noncommunicable diseases; n = 2373), #TB (tuberculosis; n = 1781), and #NTDS (neglected tropical diseases; n = 1736), the most prevalent theme was prevention, control, and treatment (4339, 33.16%), followed by advocacy (3706, 28.32%), epidemiological information (1803, 13.78%), and societal impact (1617, 12.36%). Among the top 10 users who tweeted the highest number of tweets in the #GlobalHealth corpus, 5 were individual professionals, 3 were news media, and 2 were organizations advocating for global health. The most common users' time zone was Eastern Time (United States and Canada).ConclusionsThis study highlighted the specific #GlobalHealth Twitter conversations pertinent to malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, noncommunicable diseases, and neglected tropical diseases. These conversations reflect the priorities of advocates, funders, policymakers, and practitioners of global health on these high-burden diseases as they presented their views and information on Twitter to their followers
Existence of anti-periodic solutions with symmetry for some high-order ordinary differential equations
Performance evaluation of turbulence-accentuated interchannel crosstalk for hybrid fibre and free-space optical wavelength-division-multiplexing systems using digital pulse-position modulation
A hybrid fibre and free-space optical communication link using digital pulse-position modulation (DPPM) in a wavelength-division-multiplexing system is proposed. Such a system, which could provide a power efficient, robust and flexible solution to high-speed access networks, is a contender for a passive optical network solution and could readily be deployed in areas with restrictions in optical fibre installation, or alternatively as a disaster recovery network. Interchannel crosstalk and atmospheric turbulence are major impairments in such a system and could combine in some cases to degrade the system. Both impairments are investigated here and the results are presented in the form of bit error probability, required optical transmission power and power penalties. Depending on the position of the interferer relative to the desired user, power penalties of about 0.2â3.0 dB for weak turbulence and above 20 dB for strong turbulence regimes are reported for bit error rate of 10â6. DPPM scheme with a coding level of 2 show about 2 dB improvements over onâoff-keying scheme
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