Competitive martial arts and aggressiveness : a 2-yr. longitudinal study among young boys

Item does not contain fulltextBACKGROUND: Implementation of non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) in Down syndrome screening programmes requires health policy decisions about its combination with other tests and its timing in pregnancy. AIM: Our aim was to aid health policy decision makers by conducting a quantitative analysis of different NIPT implementation strategies. METHODS: Decision trees were created to illustrate all plausible alternatives in a theoretical cohort of 100,000 pregnant women in five screening programmes: classical screening by the first-trimester combined test (FCT), pre-selection of high-risk women prior to NIPT by the FCT, NIPT as the first screening test at 10 weeks and at 13 weeks, and the simultaneous conductance of NIPT and the FCT. RESULTS: Pre-selection by FCT prior to NIPT reduces the number of amniocenteses to a minimum because of a reduction of false-positive NIPT results. If NIPT is the first screening test, it detects almost all fetal Down syndrome cases. NIPT at 10 weeks reassures women early in pregnancy, while NIPT at 13 weeks prevents unnecessary tests due to spontaneous miscarriages and allows for immediate confirmation by amniocentesis. CONCLUSION: Every implementation strategy has its advantages and disadvantages. The most favourable implementation strategy may be NIPT as the first screening test at 13 weeks, offering the most accurate screening test for Down syndrome, when the risk for spontaneous miscarriage has declined remarkably and timely confirmation by amniocentesis can be performed

An Agent-based Model for Studying Child Maltreatment and Child Maltreatment Prevention

Abstract. This paper presents an agent-based model that simulates the dynamics of child maltreatment and child maltreatment prevention. The developed model follows the principles of complex systems science and explicitly models a community and its families with multi-level factors and interconnections across the social ecology. This makes it possible to experiment how different factors and prevention strategies can affect the rate of child maltreatment. We present the background of this work and give an overview of the agent-based model and show some simulation results. Keywords: Agent-based modeling, Complexity science, Child maltreatment, Child maltreatment prevention

Hydrostatic pressure and electric field effects on the normalized binding energy in asymmetrical quantum wells

We have investigated the simultaneous effects of the hydrostatic pressure and electric field on the ground subband level and on normalized binding energy of an on-center donor in asymmetrical GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells within the effective-mass approximation and a variational approach. We found that the well size at which the impurity energy changes from positive to negative value (turning point) strongly depends on the asymmetry and hydrostatic pressure. As a key result, we suggest that the study of the normalized binding energy for various values of the electric field in direct and inverse polarization regimes can be used to feel the quantum well asymmetry and to unambiguously find out the effective pressure acting on a given heterostructure