Use of Gastric Bypass Surgery for the Treatment of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

Over the past decade, the incidence of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) has increased significantly. Evidence has shown that a clear association exists between obesity and diabetes development. This association has inspired researchers to explore bariatric surgery as an option for diabetes management and possible disease reversal. Improvement of T2DM using Roux-En-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) is thought to result from from a combination of weight loss, decreased caloric intake, hormonal changes and rearrangement of the gastrointestinal anatomy. Positive outcomes resulting from the procedure include decreased mortality rates, normalization of HbA1c levels, decreased dependence on diabetic medications, and increased insulin sensitivity. Gastric bypass, specifically RYGB, appears to be a promising treatment for T2DM. Due to possible complications and limited research in some populations, treatment should be restricted to patients with a BMI \u3e 35 with concurrent diabetes. Patients with diabetes who qualify should be counseled on the potential benefits of gastric bypass as a viable option for diabetes management

Labour supply and skills demands in fashion retailing

If, as Adam Smith once famously suggested, Britain was a nation of shopkeepers then it is now a nation of shopworkers. Retail is now a significant part of the UK economy, accounting for £256 billion in sales and one-third of all consumer spending (Skillsmart, 2007). It is the largest private sector employer in the UK, employing 3m workers, or 1 in 10 of the working population. For future job creation in the UK economy retail is also similarly prominent and the sector is expected to create a further 250,000 jobs to 2014 (Skillsmart, 2007). The centrality of retail to economic success and job creation is apparent in other advanced economies. For example, within the US, retail sales is the occupation with the largest projected job growth in the period 2004-2014 (Gatta et al., 2009) and in Australia retail accounts for 1 in 6 workers (Buchanan et al., 2003). Within the UK these workers are employed in approximately 290,000 businesses, encompassing large and small organizations and also a number of sub-sectors. This variance suggests that retail should not be regarded as homogenous in its labour demands. Hart et al. (2007) note how skill requirements and the types of workers employed may differ across the sector. This chapter further opens up this point, providing an analysis of the labour supply and skills demands for the sub-sectors of clothing, footwear and leather goods, which are described by Skillsmart (2007: 48) as being 'significant categories in UK retailing'

Impairment in delay discounting in schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder but not primary mood disorders

A measure of planning and impulse control, the delay-discounting (DD) task estimates the extent to which an individual decreases the perceived value of a reward as the reward is delayed. We examined cross-disorder performance between healthy controls (n = 88), individuals with bipolar disorder (n = 23), major depressive disorder (n = 43), and primary psychotic disorders (schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder; n = 51) on the DD task (using a $10 delayed larger reward), as well as the interaction of DD scores with other symptom domains (cognition, psychosis, and affect). We found that individuals with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder display significantly greater rates of discounting compared to healthy controls, while individuals with a primary mood disorder do not differ from healthy controls after adjustment for IQ. Further, impairment in working memory is associated with higher discounting rates among individuals with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, but cognitive dysfunction alone does not account for the extent of impairment in DD. Taken together, these results suggest an impaired ability to plan for the future and make adaptive decisions that are specific to individuals with psychotic disorders, and likely related to adverse functional outcomes. More generally, this work demonstrates the presence of variation in impulsivity across major psychiatric illnesses, supporting the use of a trans-diagnostic perspective

Compatibility of Cats With Children in the Family

Although studies involving pet dogs and cats, and human adults and children, have been reported, the specific interactions between cats and children have not. This study sought information from parents about the cat's role in families that have at least one child 3–12 years of age and at least one cat. Demographic data on cat source, breed, gender/neuter status, was sought as well as information on adults and children in the families and on affectionate, aggressive, fearful, and playful responses of the cats to children. A convenience sample was recruited via listservs for pet owners and parents. Using a pilot tested web survey, descriptive statistics were based on 865 respondents. Multi-variate statistical analyses were conducted on data from 665 respondents with complete responses for all items, including respondents' locations and whether cats were adopted as kittens. Multi-variate analyses included consideration of demographic data, geographic region of respondents, behavioral characteristics of the cats, and responses of the children to the cats. From descriptive statistics, cats' affection was more typical with adults than young children. Neuter status or gender was unrelated to cats' aggression or affection. Being the family's only cat was associated with heightened aggression and reduced affection. Younger cats were more likely to be affectionate. Multivariate analysis revealed three primary factors accounting for children's compatibility with the specified cat: positive interactions of the cat, aggression/fearfulness of cat, and the cat's playfulness and children's reaction to the cats. Positive child-cat relationships were more typical with two or more adults and multiple cats in the home. Old cats were the least satisfactory. A breeder or shelter was a better source than as a feral, from a newspaper ad, or another source. European respondents rated their cats' interactions with children more favorably than in U.S./Canada. This difference may reflect the European adoptions more frequently being of kittens, often purebred, assuring more early handling within the family. A noteworthy finding was that all family participants, humans, and pets alike, affect the cat-child relationship, and these results reveal that many variables can play a role in achieving a desirable relationship for a cat and child

Search for new physics with same-sign isolated dilepton events with jets and missing transverse energy

A search for new physics is performed in events with two same-sign isolated leptons, hadronic jets, and missing transverse energy in the final state. The analysis is based on a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.98 inverse femtobarns produced in pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC. This constitutes a factor of 140 increase in integrated luminosity over previously published results. The observed yields agree with the standard model predictions and thus no evidence for new physics is found. The observations are used to set upper limits on possible new physics contributions and to constrain supersymmetric models. To facilitate the interpretation of the data in a broader range of new physics scenarios, information on the event selection, detector response, and efficiencies is provided.Comment: Published in Physical Review Letter

Search for a W' boson decaying to a bottom quark and a top quark in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

Results are presented from a search for a W' boson using a dataset corresponding to 5.0 inverse femtobarns of integrated luminosity collected during 2011 by the CMS experiment at the LHC in pp collisions at sqrt(s)=7 TeV. The W' boson is modeled as a heavy W boson, but different scenarios for the couplings to fermions are considered, involving both left-handed and right-handed chiral projections of the fermions, as well as an arbitrary mixture of the two. The search is performed in the decay channel W' to t b, leading to a final state signature with a single lepton (e, mu), missing transverse energy, and jets, at least one of which is tagged as a b-jet. A W' boson that couples to fermions with the same coupling constant as the W, but to the right-handed rather than left-handed chiral projections, is excluded for masses below 1.85 TeV at the 95% confidence level. For the first time using LHC data, constraints on the W' gauge coupling for a set of left- and right-handed coupling combinations have been placed. These results represent a significant improvement over previously published limits.Comment: Submitted to Physics Letters B. Replaced with version publishe

Measurement of jet fragmentation into charged particles in pp and PbPb collisions at sqrt(s[NN]) = 2.76 TeV

Jet fragmentation in pp and PbPb collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV per nucleon pair was studied using data collected with the CMS detector at the LHC. Fragmentation functions are constructed using charged-particle tracks with transverse momenta pt > 4 GeV for dijet events with a leading jet of pt > 100 GeV. The fragmentation functions in PbPb events are compared to those in pp data as a function of collision centrality, as well as dijet-pt imbalance. Special emphasis is placed on the most central PbPb events including dijets with unbalanced momentum, indicative of energy loss of the hard scattered parent partons. The fragmentation patterns for both the leading and subleading jets in PbPb collisions agree with those seen in pp data at 2.76 TeV. The results provide evidence that, despite the large parton energy loss observed in PbPb collisions, the partition of the remaining momentum within the jet cone into high-pt particles is not strongly modified in comparison to that observed for jets in vacuum.Comment: Submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physic

Search for new physics in events with opposite-sign leptons, jets, and missing transverse energy in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

A search is presented for physics beyond the standard model (BSM) in final states with a pair of opposite-sign isolated leptons accompanied by jets and missing transverse energy. The search uses LHC data recorded at a center-of-mass energy sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the CMS detector, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of approximately 5 inverse femtobarns. Two complementary search strategies are employed. The first probes models with a specific dilepton production mechanism that leads to a characteristic kinematic edge in the dilepton mass distribution. The second strategy probes models of dilepton production with heavy, colored objects that decay to final states including invisible particles, leading to very large hadronic activity and missing transverse energy. No evidence for an event yield in excess of the standard model expectations is found. Upper limits on the BSM contributions to the signal regions are deduced from the results, which are used to exclude a region of the parameter space of the constrained minimal supersymmetric extension of the standard model. Additional information related to detector efficiencies and response is provided to allow testing specific models of BSM physics not considered in this paper.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO

Framework for a Community Health Observing System for the Gulf of Mexico Region: Preparing for Future Disasters

© Copyright © 2020 Sandifer, Knapp, Lichtveld, Manley, Abramson, Caffey, Cochran, Collier, Ebi, Engel, Farrington, Finucane, Hale, Halpern, Harville, Hart, Hswen, Kirkpatrick, McEwen, Morris, Orbach, Palinkas, Partyka, Porter, Prather, Rowles, Scott, Seeman, Solo-Gabriele, Svendsen, Tincher, Trtanj, Walker, Yehuda, Yip, Yoskowitz and Singer. The Gulf of Mexico (GoM) region is prone to disasters, including recurrent oil spills, hurricanes, floods, industrial accidents, harmful algal blooms, and the current COVID-19 pandemic. The GoM and other regions of the U.S. lack sufficient baseline health information to identify, attribute, mitigate, and facilitate prevention of major health effects of disasters. Developing capacity to assess adverse human health consequences of future disasters requires establishment of a comprehensive, sustained community health observing system, similar to the extensive and well-established environmental observing systems. We propose a system that combines six levels of health data domains, beginning with three existing, national surveys and studies plus three new nested, longitudinal cohort studies. The latter are the unique and most important parts of the system and are focused on the coastal regions of the five GoM States. A statistically representative sample of participants is proposed for the new cohort studies, stratified to ensure proportional inclusion of urban and rural populations and with additional recruitment as necessary to enroll participants from particularly vulnerable or under-represented groups. Secondary data sources such as syndromic surveillance systems, electronic health records, national community surveys, environmental exposure databases, social media, and remote sensing will inform and augment the collection of primary data. Primary data sources will include participant-provided information via questionnaires, clinical measures of mental and physical health, acquisition of biological specimens, and wearable health monitoring devices. A suite of biomarkers may be derived from biological specimens for use in health assessments, including calculation of allostatic load, a measure of cumulative stress. The framework also addresses data management and sharing, participant retention, and system governance. The observing system is designed to continue indefinitely to ensure that essential pre-, during-, and post-disaster health data are collected and maintained. It could also provide a model/vehicle for effective health observation related to infectious disease pandemics such as COVID-19. To our knowledge, there is no comprehensive, disaster-focused health observing system such as the one proposed here currently in existence or planned elsewhere. Significant strengths of the GoM Community Health Observing System (CHOS) are its longitudinal cohorts and ability to adapt rapidly as needs arise and new technologies develop