4,656 research outputs found
Age at quitting smoking as a predictor of risk of cardiovascular disease incidence independent of smoking status, time since quitting and pack-years
BACKGROUND Risk prediction for CVD events has been shown to vary according to current smoking status, pack-years smoked over a lifetime, time since quitting and age at quitting. The latter two are closely and inversely related. It is not known whether the age at which one quits smoking is an additional important predictor of CVD events. The aim of this study was to determine whether the risk of CVD events varied according to age at quitting after taking into account current smoking status, lifetime pack-years smoked and time since quitting. FINDINGS We used the Cox proportional hazards model to evaluate the risk of developing a first CVD event for a cohort of participants in the Framingham Offspring Heart Study who attended the fourth examination between ages 30 and 74 years and were free of CVD. Those who quit before the median age of 37 years had a risk of CVD incidence similar to those who were never smokers. The incorporation of age at quitting in the smoking variable resulted in better prediction than the model which had a simple current smoker/non-smoker measure and the one that incorporated both time since quitting and pack-years. These models demonstrated good discrimination, calibration and global fit. The risk among those quitting more than 5 years prior to the baseline exam and those whose age at quitting was prior to 44 years was similar to the risk among never smokers. However, the risk among those quitting less than 5 years prior to the baseline exam and those who continued to smoke until 44 years of age (or beyond) was two and a half times higher than that of never smokers. CONCLUSIONS Age at quitting improves the prediction of risk of CVD incidence even after other smoking measures are taken into account. The clinical benefit of adding age at quitting to the model with other smoking measures may be greater than the associated costs. Thus, age at quitting should be considered in addition to smoking status, time since quitting and pack-years when counselling individuals about their cardiovascular risk.This research was supported by an NHMRC health services
research grant (no. 465130), an NHMRC/NHF PhD scholarship and a
Vichealth Fellowship
Composite vertices that lead to soft form factors
The momentum-space cut-off parameter of hadronic vertex functions
is studied in this paper. We use a composite model where we can measure the
contributions of intermediate particle propagations to . We show that
in many cases a composite vertex function has a much smaller cut-off than its
constituent vertices, particularly when light constituents such as pions are
present in the intermediate state. This suggests that composite
meson-baryon-baryon vertex functions are rather soft, i.e., they have \Lambda
considerably less than 1 GeV. We discuss the origin of this softening of form
factors as well as the implications of our findings on the modeling of nuclear
reactions.Comment: REVTex, 19 pages, 5 figs(to be provided on request
Deconfinement Phase Transition in an Expanding Quark system in Relaxation Time Approximation
We investigated the effects of nonequilibrium and collision terms on the
deconfinement phase transition of an expanding quark system in Friedberg-Lee
model in relaxation time approximation. By calculating the effective quark
potential, the critical temperature of the phase transition is dominated by the
mean field, while the collisions among quarks and mesons change the time
structure of the phase transition significantly.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figure
General method for extracting the quantum efficiency of dispersive qubit readout in circuit QED
We present and demonstrate a general three-step method for extracting the
quantum efficiency of dispersive qubit readout in circuit QED. We use active
depletion of post-measurement photons and optimal integration weight functions
on two quadratures to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio of the
non-steady-state homodyne measurement. We derive analytically and demonstrate
experimentally that the method robustly extracts the quantum efficiency for
arbitrary readout conditions in the linear regime. We use the proven method to
optimally bias a Josephson traveling-wave parametric amplifier and to quantify
different noise contributions in the readout amplification chain.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure
Toward a unified description of hadro- and photoproduction: S-wave pi- and eta-photoproduction amplitudes
The Chew-Mandelstam parameterization, which has been used extensively in the
two-body hadronic sector, is generalized in this exploratory study to the
electromagnetic sector by simultaneous fits to the pion- and
eta-photoproduction S-wave multipole amplitudes for center-of-mass energies
from the pion threshold through 1.61 GeV. We review the Chew-Mandelstam
parameterization in detail to clarify the theoretical content of the SAID
hadronic amplitude analysis and to place the proposed, generalized SAID
electromagnetic amplitudes in the context of earlier employed parameterized
forms. The parameterization is unitary at the two-body level, employing four
hadronic channels and the gamma-N electromagnetic channel. We compare the
resulting fit to the MAID parameterization and find qualitative agreement
though, numerically, the solution is somewhat different. Applications of the
extended parameterization to global fits of the photoproduction data and to
global fits of the combined hadronic and photoproduction data are discussed.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures; added figures and tex
Study of the island morphology at the early stages of Fe/Mo(110) MBE growth
We present theoretical study of morphology of Fe islands grown at Mo(110)
surface in sub-monolayer MBE mode. We utilize atomistic SOS model with bond
counting, and interactions of Fe adatom up to third nearest neighbors. We
performed KMC simulations for different values of adatom interactions and
varying temperatures. We have found that, while for the low temperature islands
are fat fractals, for the temperature 500K islands have faceted rhombic-like
shape. For the higher temperature, islands acquire a rounded shape. In order to
evaluated qualitatively morphological changes, we measured averaged aspect
ration of islands. We calculated dependence of the average aspect ratio on the
temperature, and on the strength of interactions of an adatom with neighbors.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures. Proceedings of 11-th Symposium on Surface
Physics, Prague 200
Electro-microbiology as a promising approach towards renewable energy and environmental sustainability
Microbial electrochemical technologies provide sustainable wastewater treatment and energy production. Despite significant improvements in the power output of microbial fuel cells (MFCs), this technology is still far from practical applications. Extracting electrical energy and harvesting valuable products by electroactive bacteria (EAB) in bioelectrochemical systems (BESs) has emerged as an innovative approach to address energy and environmental challenges. Thus, maximizing power output and resource recovery is highly desirable for sustainable systems. Insights into the electrode-microbe interactions may help to optimize the performance of BESs for envisioned applications, and further validation by bioelectrochemical techniques is a prerequisite to completely understand the electro-microbiology. This review summarizes various extracellular electron transfer mechanisms involved in BESs. The significant role of characterization techniques in the advancement of the electro-microbiology field is discussed. Finally, diverse applications of BESs, such as resource recovery, and contributions to the pursuit of a more sustainable society are also highlighted
Measurement of p + d -> 3He + eta in S(11) Resonance
We have measured the reaction p + d -> 3He + eta at a proton beam energy of
980 MeV, which is 88.5 MeV above threshold using the new ``germanium wall''
detector system. A missing--mass resolution of the detector system of 2.6% was
achieved. The angular distribution of the meson is forward peaked. We found a
total cross section of (573 +- 83(stat.) +- 69(syst.))nb. The excitation
function for the present reaction is described by a Breit Wigner form with
parameters from photoproduction.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, corrected typos in heade
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