A Systematic Review - The Effect of Hospice and Palliative Care

Many older adults nearing death experience unnecessarily invasive and costly healthcare treatments, often causing more harm than good. Hospice and palliative care interventions offer a possible solution to this problem by prioritizing high-quality and cost-effective care with a strong focus on comfort and satisfaction. The authors of this paper seek to answer the following question: Do hospice and palliative care interventions directed toward older adults at the end of life improve quality of life, cost of care, and satisfaction? This paper thoroughly reviews and critically appraises existing research related to the effect of hospice and palliative care directed toward older adults at the end of life. Twenty primary studies published between 2011 and 2016 were identified, reviewed, and critically evaluated in an effort to answer this question. The publications were diverse in objective, scope, and design, but all contributed to the conversation regarding this potential solution to substandard care for older adults at the end of life. Based on the existing evidence, the authors came to the following conclusion: hospice and palliative care interventions are associated with improved quality of life in five out of six measured areas, decreased cost of care, and high satisfaction for care recipients and providers alike. Ten recommendations for clinical practice and five recommendations for future research are discussed

Electron capture by Ne2+ ions from atomic hydrogen

Using a merged-beam technique, the absolute, total electron-capture cross section has been measured for collisions of Ne2+ ions with hydrogen (deuterium) atoms at collision energies between 139 and 1490 eV/u. These data are compared to three other published measurements, two of which differ from one another by a factor greater than two. Early quantal rate coefficient calculations for Ne2+ ions with hydrogen at eV/u energies predict a cross section many orders of magnitude below the previously measured cross section at 40 eV/u. A possible explanation is given for the discrepancy between theory and experiment

Application of next generation sequencing to CEPH cell lines to discover variants associated with FDA approved chemotherapeutics

After publication of this work [1], it has come to our attention that there is an error in the author list of the initial version of this manuscript; rather than Ernest J Lam, the second author of the manuscript should be listed as Ernest T Lam

Bounds on Integrals of the Wigner Function

The integral of the Wigner function over a subregion of the phase-space of a quantum system may be less than zero or greater than one. It is shown that for systems with one degree of freedom, the problem of determining the best possible upper and lower bounds on such an integral, over all possible states, reduces to the problem of finding the greatest and least eigenvalues of an hermitian operator corresponding to the subregion. The problem is solved exactly in the case of an arbitrary elliptical region. These bounds provide checks on experimentally measured quasiprobability distributions.Comment: 10 pages, 1 PostScript figure, Latex file; revised following referees' comments; to appear in Physical Review Letter

Incorporating Concomitant Medications into Genome-Wide Analyses for the Study of Complex Disease and Drug Response

Given the high costs of conducting a drug-response trial, researchers are now aiming to use retrospective analyses to conduct genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to identify underlying genetic contributions to drug-response variation. To prevent confounding results from a GWAS to investigate drug response, it is necessary to account for concomitant medications, defined as any medication taken concurrently with the primary medication being investigated. We use data from the Action to Control Cardiovascular Disease (ACCORD) trial in order to implement a novel scoring procedure for incorporating concomitant medication information into a linear regression model in preparation for GWAS. In order to accomplish this, two primary medications were selected: thiazolidinediones and metformin because of the wide-spread use of these medications and large sample sizes available within the ACCORD trial. A third medication, fenofibrate, along with a known confounding medication, statin, were chosen as a proof-of-principle for the scoring procedure. Previous studies have identified SNP rs7412 as being associated with statin response. Here we hypothesize that including the score for statin as a covariate in the GWAS model will correct for confounding of statin and yield a change in association at rs7412. The response of the confounded signal was successfully diminished from p = 3.19 × 10−7 to p = 1.76 × 10−5, by accounting for statin using the scoring procedure presented here. This approach provides the ability for researchers to account for concomitant medications in complex trial designs where monotherapy treatment regimens are not available

Multi-omic profiling reveals the ataxia protein sacsin is required for integrin trafficking and synaptic organization

Autosomal recessive spastic ataxia of Charlevoix-Saguenay (ARSACS) is a childhood-onset cerebellar ataxia caused by mutations in SACS, which encodes the protein sacsin. Cellular ARSACS phenotypes include mitochondrial dysfunction, intermediate filament disorganization, and progressive death of cerebellar Purkinje neurons. It is unclear why the loss of sacsin causes these deficits or why they manifest as cerebellar ataxia. Here, we perform multi-omic profiling in sacsin knockout (KO) cells and identify alterations in microtubule dynamics and mislocalization of focal adhesion (FA) proteins, including multiple integrins. Deficits in FA structure, signaling, and function can be rescued by targeting PTEN, a negative regulator of FA signaling. ARSACS mice possess mislocalization of ITGA1 in Purkinje neurons and synaptic disorganization in the deep cerebellar nucleus (DCN). The sacsin interactome reveals that sacsin regulates interactions between cytoskeletal and synaptic adhesion proteins. Our findings suggest that disrupted trafficking of synaptic adhesion proteins is a causal molecular deficit in ARSACS

Imaging Electronic Correlations in Twisted Bilayer Graphene near the Magic Angle

Twisted bilayer graphene with a twist angle of around 1.1{\deg} features a pair of isolated flat electronic bands and forms a strongly correlated electronic platform. Here, we use scanning tunneling microscopy to probe local properties of highly tunable twisted bilayer graphene devices and show that the flat bands strongly deform when aligned with the Fermi level. At half filling of the bands, we observe the development of gaps originating from correlated insulating states. Near charge neutrality, we find a previously unidentified correlated regime featuring a substantially enhanced flat band splitting that we describe within a microscopic model predicting a strong tendency towards nematic ordering. Our results provide insights into symmetry breaking correlation effects and highlight the importance of electronic interactions for all filling factors in twisted bilayer graphene.Comment: Main text 9 pages, 4 figures; Supplementary Information 25 page

Measurement of the cross-section and charge asymmetry of WW bosons produced in proton-proton collisions at s=8\sqrt{s}=8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

This paper presents measurements of the $W^+ \rightarrow \mu^+\nu$ and $W^- \rightarrow \mu^-\nu$ cross-sections and the associated charge asymmetry as a function of the absolute pseudorapidity of the decay muon. The data were collected in proton--proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC and correspond to a total integrated luminosity of 20.2~\mbox{fb^{-1}}. The precision of the cross-section measurements varies between 0.8% to 1.5% as a function of the pseudorapidity, excluding the 1.9% uncertainty on the integrated luminosity. The charge asymmetry is measured with an uncertainty between 0.002 and 0.003. The results are compared with predictions based on next-to-next-to-leading-order calculations with various parton distribution functions and have the sensitivity to discriminate between them.Comment: 38 pages in total, author list starting page 22, 5 figures, 4 tables, submitted to EPJC. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/STDM-2017-13

Search for chargino-neutralino production with mass splittings near the electroweak scale in three-lepton final states in √s=13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for supersymmetry through the pair production of electroweakinos with mass splittings near the electroweak scale and decaying via on-shell W and Z bosons is presented for a three-lepton final state. The analyzed proton-proton collision data taken at a center-of-mass energy of √s=13  TeV were collected between 2015 and 2018 by the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 139  fb−1. A search, emulating the recursive jigsaw reconstruction technique with easily reproducible laboratory-frame variables, is performed. The two excesses observed in the 2015–2016 data recursive jigsaw analysis in the low-mass three-lepton phase space are reproduced. Results with the full data set are in agreement with the Standard Model expectations. They are interpreted to set exclusion limits at the 95% confidence level on simplified models of chargino-neutralino pair production for masses up to 345 GeV