Bone fractures in children with autistic spectrum disorder

Bone fractures in children represent a source of significant disability and morbidity. Are children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) at an altered risk of fractures compared with typically developing children?; Using the General Practice Research Database, the authors assessed the prevalence of fractures in boys with ASD diagnosed between 2 and 8 years. A cross-sectional design was used to compare the prevalence of fractures among children with ASD and age-matched controls, conditional logistic regression to explore the relative risk of having a fracture in association with diagnosed ASD.; The study population comprised 3,219 boys with a first-time diagnosis of ASD and 12,265 matched controls. ASD was associated with a significantly decreased risk of developing a fracture at any time in childhood (odds ratio [OR], 0.68, 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.59-0.77, p < .0001). The relative risk estimates were lower for the time period after ASD diagnosis (OR, 0.56, 95% CI, 0.48-0.66, p < .0001) but were not different for the time period before ASD diagnosis (OR, 0.96, 95% CI, 0.78-1.18, p = .6866). Adjusting for use of different drugs did not change the estimates.; The relative risk of experiencing a fracture at any time in childhood is lower for boys with ASD compared with healthy boys

Ant Local Search for Combinatorial Optimization

In ant algorithms, each individual ant makes decisions according to the greedy force (short term profit) and the trail system based on the history of the search (information provided by other ants). Usually, each ant is a constructive process, which starts from scratch and builds step by step a complete solution of the considered problem. In contrast, in Ant Local Search (ALS), each ant is a local search, which starts from an initial solution and tries to improve it iteratively. In this paper are presented and discussed successful adaptations of ALS to different combinatorial optimization problems: graph coloring, a refueling problem in a railway network, and a job scheduling problem

Effects on EEG of Drugs and Toxic Substances

The use of different drugs in clinical practice has enhanced the importance of pharmaco-EEG (P-EEG) studies in recent years. The first part of this chapter will discuss the general and methodological aspects of P-EEG. In the second part, EEG characteristics of individual drugs (antiepileptic and non-antiepileptic drugs) will be described