Relationship between antihypertensive medications and cognitive impairment: Part II. Review of Physiology and animal studies

Purpose of Review There is an established association between hypertension and increased risk of poor cognitive performance and dementia including Alzheimer’s disease; however, associations between antihypertensive medications (AHM) and dementia risk are less clear. An increased interest in AHM has resulted in expanding publications; however, none of the recent reviews provide comprehensive review. Our extensive review includes 24 mechanistic animal and human studies published over the last 5 years assessing relationship between AHM and cognitive function. Recent Findings All classes of AHM showed similar result patterns in animal studies. The mechanism by which AHM exert their effect was extensively studied by evaluating well-established pathways of AD disease process, including amyloid beta (Aβ), vascular, oxidative stress and inflammation pathways, but only few studies evaluated the blood pressure lowering effect on the AD disease process. Summary Methodological limitations of the studies prevent comprehensive conclusions prior to further work evaluating AHM in animals and larger human observational studies, and selecting those with promising results for future RCTs

Does innovation stimulate employment? A firm-level analysis using comparable micro-data from four European countries

This paper studies the impact of process and product innovations introduced by firms on employment growth in these firms. A simple model that relates employment growth to process innovations and to the growth of sales separately due to innovative and unchanged products is developed and estimated using comparable firm-level data from France, Germany, Spain and the UK. Results show that displacement effects induced by productivity growth in the production of old products are large, while those associated with process innovations, which are likely to be compensated by price decreases, appear to be small. The effects related to product innovations are, however, strong enough to overcompensate these displacement effects

Relationship between antihypertensive medications and cognitive impairment: Part I. review of human studies and clinical trials

Purpose of review: There is an established association between hypertension and increased risk of poor cognitive performance and dementia including Alzheimer’s disease; however, associations between antihypertensive medications (AHMs) and dementia risk are less consistent. An increased interest in AHM has resulted in expanding publications; however, none of the recent reviews are comprehensive. Our extensive review includes 15 observational and randomized controlled trials (RCTs) published over the last 5 years, assessing the relationship between AHM and cognitive impairment. Recent findings: All classes of AHM showed similar result patterns in human studies with the majority of study results reporting point estimates below one and only a small number of studies (N = 15) reporting statistically significant results in favor of a specific class. Summary: Only a small number of studies reported statistically significant results in favor of a specific class of AHM. Methodological limitations of the studies prevent definitive conclusions. Further work is now needed to evaluate the class of AHM and cognitive outcomes in future RCTs, with a particular focus on the drugs with the promising results in both animals and human observational studies

An Experimental Evaluation of Bayesian Optimization on Bipedal Locomotion

© 2014 IEEE.The design of gaits and corresponding control policies for bipedal walkers is a key challenge in robot locomotion. Even when a viable controller parametrization already exists, finding near-optimal parameters can be daunting. The use of automatic gait optimization methods greatly reduces the need for human expertise and time-consuming design processes. Many different approaches to automatic gait optimization have been suggested to date. However, no extensive comparison among them has yet been performed. In this paper, we present some common methods for automatic gait optimization in bipedal locomotion, and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. We experimentally evaluated these gait optimization methods on a bipedal robot, in more than 1800 experimental evaluations. In particular, we analyzed Bayesian optimization in different configurations, including various acquisition functions

Does innovation stimulate employment? A firm-level analysis using comparable micro data on four European countries

This paper studies the impact of process and product innovations introduced by firms on their employment growth. A model that relates employment growth to process innovations and to the growth of sales due to innovative and unchanged products is derived and estimated using a unique source of comparable firm-level data from France, Germany, Spain and the UK. Results for manufacturing show that, although process innovation tends to displace employment, compensation effects are prevalent, and product innovation is associated with employment growth. In the service sector there is less evidence of displacement effects, and growth in sales of new products accounts for a non-negligible proportion of employment growth. Overall the results are similar across countries, with some interesting exceptions

Self-organized Criticality and Absorbing States: Lessons from the Ising Model

We investigate a suggested path to self-organized criticality. Originally, this path was devised to "generate criticality" in systems displaying an absorbing-state phase transition, but closer examination of the mechanism reveals that it can be used for any continuous phase transition. We used the Ising model as well as the Manna model to demonstrate how the finite-size scaling exponents depend on the tuning of driving and dissipation rates with system size.Our findings limit the explanatory power of the mechanism to non-universal critical behavior.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, REVTeX