Economic Consequences of Health Status: A Review of the Evidence

The correlation between health and economic performance is extremely robust across communities and over time. Many factors exogenous to income play an important role in determining health status, including a number of geographical, environmental, and evolutionary factors. This suggests the existence of simultaneous impacts of health on wealth and wealth on health. Potential health impacts on national economic performance are explored, and some important unanswered questions are identified.health, economic growth, human capital

Statistical Fluctuations of Electromagnetic Transition Intensities and Electromagnetic Moments in pf-Shell Nuclei

We study the fluctuation properties of $\Delta T=0$ electromagnetic transition intensities and electromagnetic moments in $A \sim 60$ nuclei within the framework of the interacting shell model, using a realistic effective interaction for $pf$-shell nuclei with a $^{56}$Ni core. The distributions of the transition intensities and of the electromagnetic moments are well described by the Gaussian orthogonal ensemble of random matrices. In particular, the transition intensity distributions follow a Porter-Thomas distribution. When diagonal matrix elements (i.e., moments) are included in the analysis of transition intensities, we find that the distributions remain Porter-Thomas except for the isoscalar $M1$. The latter deviation is explained in terms of the structure of the isoscalar $M1$ operator.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

Molecular Pathogenesis of MALT lymphoma

The original dissertation included a number or articles which were excluded from the digital file for copyright reasons. This is a list of the articles:1) Hamoudi RA, Appert A, Ye H, Ruskone-Fourmestraux A, Streubel B, Chott A, Raderer M, Gong L, Wlodarska I, De Wolf-Peeters C, MacLennan KA, de Leval L, Isaacson PG, & Du MQ. Differential expression of NF-kappaB target genes in MALT lymphoma with and without chromosome translocation: insights into molecular mechanism. Leukemia. 2010 Aug;24(8):1487-1497 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/205206402) Ye H, Gong L, Liu H, Hamoudi RA, Shirali S, Ho L, Chott A, Streubel B, Siebert R, Gesk S, Martin-Subero JI, Radford JA, Banerjee S, Nicholson AG, Ranaldi R, Remstein ED, Gao Z, Zheng J, Isaacson PG, Dogan A & Du MQ. MALT lymphoma with t(14;18)(q32;q21)/IGH-MALT1 is characterized by strong cytoplasmic MALT1 and BCL10 expression. J Pathol. 2005 Feb;205(3):293-301. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/156824433) Liu H, Hamoudi RA, Ye H, Ruskone-Fourmestraux A, Dogan A, Isaacson PG & Du MQ. t(11;18)(q21;q21) of mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue lymphoma results from illegitimate non-homologous end joining following double strand breaks. Br J Haematol. 2004 May;125(3):318-329. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/150864124) Liu H, Ye H, Ruskone-Fourmestraux A, De Jong D, Pileri S, Thiede C, Lavergne A, Boot H, Caletti G, Wündisch T, Molina T, Taal BG, Elena S, Thomas T, Zinzani PL, Neubauer A, Stolte M, Hamoudi RA, Dogan A, Isaacson PG & Du MQ. T(11;18) is a marker for all stage gastric MALT lymphomas that will not respond to H. pylori eradication. Gastroenterology. 2002 May;122(5):1286-1294. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=119845155) Liu H, Ye H, Dogan A, Ranaldi R, Hamoudi RA, Bearzi I, Isaacson PG & Du MQ. T(11;18)(q21;q21) is associated with advanced mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue lymphoma that expresses nuclear BCL10. Blood. 2001 Aug 15;98(4):1182-1187. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=114934686) Liu H, Ruskon-Fourmestraux A, Lavergne-Slove A, Ye H, Molina T, Bouhnik Y, Hamoudi RA, Diss TC, Dogan A, Megraud F, Rambaud JC, Du MQ & Isaacson PG. Resistance of t(11;18) positive gastric mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue lymphoma to Helicobacter pylori eradication therapy. Lancet. 2001 Jan 6;357(9249):39-40. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=11197361Mucosa associated lymphoid tissue (MALT) lymphoma is characterized by t(11;18)(q21;q21)/API2-MALT1, t(1;14)(p22;q32)/BCL10-IGH and t(14;18)(q32;q21)/IGH-MALT1, which commonly activate the NF-κB pathway. Gastric MALT lymphomas harbouring such translocation do not respond to Helicobacter pylori eradication, while those without translocation can be cured by antibiotics. To understand the molecular mechanism of MALT lymphoma with and without chromosome translocation, 24 cases (15 translocation-positive and 9 translocation-negative) of MALT lymphomas together with 7 follicular lymphomas and 7 mantle cell lymphomas were analysed by Affymetrix gene expression microarray platform. Unsupervised clustering showed that cases of MALT lymphoma were clustered as a single branch. However, within the MALT lymphoma group, translocation-positive cases were intermingled with translocation-negative cases. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) of the NF-κB target genes and 4394 additional gene sets covering various cellular pathways, biological processes and molecular functions showed that translocation-positive MALT lymphomas were characterized by an enhanced expression of NF-κB target genes, particularly TLR6, CCR2, CD69 and BCL2, while translocation-negative cases were featured by active inflammatory and immune responses, such as IL8, CD86, CD28 and ICOS. Separate analyses of the genes differentially expressed between translocation-positive and negative cases and measurement of gene ontology term in these differentially expressed genes by hypergeometric test reinforced the above findings by GSEA. The differential expression of these NF-κB target genes between MALT lymphoma with and without translocation was confirmed by quantitative RT-PCR and immunohistochemistry or Western blot. Expression of TLR6, in the presence of TLR2, enhanced both API2-MALT1 and BCL10 mediated NF-κB activation in vitro. In addition, there was cooperation between expression of BCL10, MALT1 or API2-MALT1, and stimulation of the antigen receptor or CD40 or TLR in NF-κB activation as shown by both reporter assay and IκBα degradation. Interestingly, expression of BCL10 but not API2-MALT1 and MALT1, in the presence of LPS stimulation, also triggered IκBβ degradation, suggesting activation of different NF-κB dimers between these oncogenic products. Study by co-immunoprecipitation showed that BCL10 directly interacts with MALT1. Sub-cellular localisation experiments in BJAB B-cells, showed that BCL10 localisation was affected by MALT1. When BCL10 was over-expressed, the protein was predominantly expressed in the nuclei, but when MALT1 was over-expressed, BCL10 was mainly localised in the cytoplasm. When both BCL10 and MALT1 were over-expressed, BCL10 was expressed in the cytoplasm in the early hours when the protein level was low, but in both the cytoplasm and nuclei after 9 hours when the protein level was high. Over-expression of API2-MALT1 did not shown any apparent effect on BCL10 sub-cellular localisation in vitro. Finally, comparison of MALT lymphoma expression microarray with other lymphomas showed lactoferrin to be highly expressed in MALT lymphoma. This was confirmed by qRT-PCR, showing lactoferrin to be significantly over-expressed in MALT lymphoma compared to FL and MCL. Thus lactoferrin may be a potential marker for MALT lymphoma

Economic Consequences of Health Status: A Review of the Evidence

The correlation between health and economic performance is extremely robust across communities and over time. Many factors exogenous to income play an important role in determining health status, including a number of geographical, environmental, and evolutionary factors. This suggests the existence of simultaneous impacts of health on wealth and wealth on health. Potential health impacts on national economic performance are explored, and some important unanswered questions are identified

The Changing Global Distribution of Malaria: A Review

Organized efforts to reduce the burden of malaria are as old as human societies. Understanding the historical relationships between humankind and malaria is important for natural and social scientists studying the disease, as well as policy makers trying to control it. Malaria once extended widely throughout the old world, reaching as far north as 64ºN latitude and as far south as 32ºS latitude. Today, however, malaria is almost exclusively a problem of the geographical tropics. Analysis of historical changes in malaria prevalence suggests a number of factors which help to determine the likelihood and sustainability of success in malaria control. Among these are geography, evolutionary history of flora and fauna, infrastructure, and land use. It is due to these factors, much more than socio-economic ones, that attempts to control or interrupt transmission of the disease have historically been most successful on islands, in temperate climates, or at high elevations

Near-Optimal Quantum Algorithms for Multivariate Mean Estimation

We propose the first near-optimal quantum algorithm for estimating in Euclidean norm the mean of a vector-valued random variable with finite mean and covariance. Our result aims at extending the theory of multivariate sub-Gaussian estimators to the quantum setting. Unlike classically, where any univariate estimator can be turned into a multivariate estimator with at most a logarithmic overhead in the dimension, no similar result can be proved in the quantum setting. Indeed, Heinrich ruled out the existence of a quantum advantage for the mean estimation problem when the sample complexity is smaller than the dimension. Our main result is to show that, outside this low-precision regime, there is a quantum estimator that outperforms any classical estimator. Our approach is substantially more involved than in the univariate setting, where most quantum estimators rely only on phase estimation. We exploit a variety of additional algorithmic techniques such as amplitude amplification, the Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm, and quantum singular value transformation. Our analysis also uses concentration inequalities for multivariate truncated statistics. We develop our quantum estimators in two different input models that showed up in the literature before. The first one provides coherent access to the binary representation of the random variable and it encompasses the classical setting. In the second model, the random variable is directly encoded into the phases of quantum registers. This model arises naturally in many quantum algorithms but it is often incomparable to having classical samples. We adapt our techniques to these two settings and we show that the second model is strictly weaker for solving the mean estimation problem. Finally, we describe several applications of our algorithms, notably in measuring the expectation values of commuting observables and in the field of machine learning.Comment: 35 pages, 1 figure; v2: minor change

Thyroid cancer incidences in the United Arab Emirates: a retrospective study on association with age and gender [version 1; peer review: 1 approved]

Background: Thyroid cancer is the ninth most common malignancy worldwide, but the third most common malignancy in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) . To our knowledge, this is the first UAE nationwide study aimed at presenting incidence rates of thyroid cancer at the national level of UAE based upon data from the national cancer registry and GLOBOCAN. Methods: Between 2011 and 2017, a total of 2036 thyroid cancer cases from UAE patients were registered, of which 75.3% were female and 24.7% male patients. Results: The results showed 6.6% increase in thyroid cancer cases in the UAE from 2011 to 2017 (p < 0.001) with a rise of approximately 400 cases per year from 2011 to 2040. Age standardized rate calculations showed increase in prevalence from 1.18 in 2011 to 4.32 in 2017 but decreases in incidence from 1.05 in 2011 to 0.15 in 2017. This trend is confirmed by the predictive model showing increase in incidence from 0.15 in 2017 to 0.64 by 2040. Gender was shown to be significantly associated with thyroid cancer. The female to male ratio was significantly higher in Emirati patients (4.86:1) (p < 0.001) than expat patients (2.47:1) (p < 0.01). Interestingly, expat patients contributed to the majority of thyroid cancer cases despite having lower female to male ratio. The age at diagnosis was significantly associated with thyroid cancer (p = 0.03) with the highest frequency diagnosed at 35-39 years of age. Globally, data from the predictive model showed that Asia had the highest rate of increase per year and UAE the lowest. Conclusions: The slight increase in thyroid cancer prevalence and incidence, together with the different female to male ratio and diagnosis at younger age warrants further investigation at the molecular level from UAE thyroid cancer patients to elucidate the molecular basis of thyroid cancer

Thyroid cancer incidence in the United Arab Emirates: a retrospective study on association with age and gender [version 2; peer review: 2 approved, 1 approved with reservations]

Background: Thyroid cancer is the ninth most common malignancy worldwide, but the third most common malignancy in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). To our knowledge, this is the first UAE nationwide study aimed at presenting incidence rates of thyroid cancer at the national level of UAE based upon data from the national cancer registry and GLOBOCAN. Methods: Between 2011 and 2017, a total of 2036 thyroid cancer cases from UAE patients were registered, of which 75.3% were female and 24.7% male patients. Results: The results showed 6.6% increase in thyroid cancer cases in the UAE from 2011 to 2017 (p < 0.001) with a rise of approximately 400 cases per year from 2011 to 2040. Age standardized rate calculations showed increase in prevalence from 1.18 in 2011 to 4.32 in 2017 but decreases in incidence from 1.05 in 2011 to 0.15 in 2017. This trend is confirmed by the predictive model showing increase in incidence from 0.15 in 2017 to 0.64 by 2040. Gender was shown to be significantly associated with thyroid cancer. The female to male ratio was significantly higher in Emirati patients (4.86:1) (p < 0.001) than expat patients (2.47:1) (p < 0.01). Interestingly, expat patients contributed to the majority of thyroid cancer cases despite having lower female to male ratio. The age at diagnosis was significantly associated with thyroid cancer (p = 0.03) with the highest frequency diagnosed at 35-39 years of age. Globally, data from the predictive model showed that Asia had the highest rate of increase per year and UAE the lowest. Conclusions: The slight increase in thyroid cancer prevalence and incidence, together with the different female to male ratio and diagnosis at younger age warrants further investigation at the molecular level from UAE thyroid cancer patients to elucidate the molecular basis of thyroid cancer