Incidence of Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo and Course of Treatment Following Mild Head Trauma-Is It Worth Looking For?

BACKGROUND: This study aimed to identify the incidence of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo following head trauma. METHODS: This study is a prospective cross-sectional study. Initially, a targeted search for the identification of patients with the international ­classification of diseases (ICD-10) diagnosis of cerebral commotio at relevant emergency units in the Northern Region of Denmark was done. This was followed by a clinical examination to determine the incidence of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) within this population. Of the 295 patients diagnosed with commotio cerebri during a 4-and-a-half month period, 85 patients were included. All patients underwent clinical examination in a mechanical repositional chair wearing Video Frenzel Goggles. Additional examinations included a complete video head impulse test. RESULTS: A total of six patients were identified with benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) following minor head trauma. Bilateral BPPV, multicanal BPPV, and BPPV of a single semicircular canal were identified. All patients experienced relief of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo-related symptoms within 3 treatment sessions. Five patients were identified with a pathological video head impulse test, 54 with an inconclusive examination, and 15 with a normal video head impulse test. CONCLUSION: The incidence of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo following minor head trauma was 7%. A relatively high number of atypical subtypes of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo was found. When applying strict criteria for the interpretation of video head impulse test examination, the number of patients with inconclusive video head impulse test examination was higher than expected and 6.7% of patients had a pathological video head impulse test examination. No relationship between benign paroxysmal positional vertigo and pathological video head impulse test was observed

Physical Model Tests on Spar Buoy for Offshore Floating Wind Energy Conversion

ABSTRACT: The present paper describes the experiences gained from the design methodology and operation of a 3D physical modelexperiment aimed to investigate the dynamic behaviour of a spar buoy floating offshore wind turbine. The physical model consists in a Froude-scaled NREL 5MW reference wind turbine (RWT) supported on the OC3-Hywind floating platform. Experimental tests have been performed at Danish Hydraulic Institute (DHI) offshore wave basin within the European Union-Hydralab+ Initiative, in April 2019. The floating wind turbine model has been subjected to a combination of regular and irregular wave attacks and different wind loads. Measurements of displacements, rotations, accelerations, forces response of the floating model and at the mooring lines have been carried out. First, free decay tests have been analysed to obtain the natural frequency and the modal damping ratios of each degree of freedom governing the offshore. Then, the results concerning regular waves, with orthogonal incidence to the structure, are presented. The results show that most of longitudinal dynamic response occurs at the wave frequency and most of lateral dynamic response occurs at rigid-body frequencies.This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 654110, HYDRALAB+

Copenhagen consensus statement 2019: physical activity and ageing

From 19th to 22nd November 2018, 26 researchers representing nine countries and a variety of academic disciplines met in Snekkersten, Denmark, to reach evidence-based consensus about physical activity and older adults. It was recognised that the term ‘older adults’ represents a highly heterogeneous population. It encompasses those that remain highly active and healthy throughout the life-course with a high intrinsic capacity to the very old and frail with low intrinsic capacity. The consensus is drawn from a wide range of research methodologies within epidemiology, medicine, physiology, neuroscience, psychology and sociology, recognising the strength and limitations of each of the methods. Much of the evidence presented in the statements is based on longitudinal associations from observational and randomised controlled intervention studies, as well as quantitative and qualitative social studies in relatively healthy community-dwelling older adults. Nevertheless, we also considered research with frail older adults and those with age-associated neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and in a few cases molecular and cellular outcome measures from animal studies. The consensus statements distinguish between physical activity and exercise. Physical activity is used as an umbrella term that includes both structured and unstructured forms of leisure, transport, domestic and work-related activities. Physical activity entails body movement that increases energy expenditure relative to rest, and is often characterised in terms of intensity from light, to moderate to vigorous. Exercise is defined as a subset of structured physical activities that are more specifically designed to improve cardiorespiratory fitness, cognitive function, flexibility balance, strength and/or power. This statement presents the consensus on the effects of physical activity on older adults’ fitness, health, cognitive functioning, functional capacity, engagement, motivation, psychological well-being and social inclusion. It also covers the consensus on physical activity implementation strategies. While it is recognised that adverse events can occur during exercise, the risk can be minimised by carefully choosing the type of activity undertaken and by consultation with the individual’s physician when warranted, for example, when the individual is frail, has a number of co-morbidities, or has exercise-related symptoms, such as chest pain, heart arrhythmia or dizziness. The consensus was obtained through an iterative process that began with the presentation of the state-of-the-science in each domain, followed by group and plenary discussions. Ultimately, the participants reached agreement on the 30-item consensus statements

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Discutindo a educação ambiental no cotidiano escolar: desenvolvimento de projetos na escola formação inicial e continuada de professores

A presente pesquisa buscou discutir como a Educação Ambiental (EA) vem sendo trabalhada, no Ensino Fundamental e como os docentes desta escola compreendem e vem inserindo a EA no cotidiano escolar., em uma escola estadual do município de Tangará da Serra/MT, Brasil. Para tanto, realizou-se entrevistas com os professores que fazem parte de um projeto interdisciplinar de EA na escola pesquisada. Verificou-se que o projeto da escola não vem conseguindo alcançar os objetivos propostos por: desconhecimento do mesmo, pelos professores; formação deficiente dos professores, não entendimento da EA como processo de ensino-aprendizagem, falta de recursos didáticos, planejamento inadequado das atividades. A partir dessa constatação, procurou-se debater a impossibilidade de tratar do tema fora do trabalho interdisciplinar, bem como, e principalmente, a importância de um estudo mais aprofundado de EA, vinculando teoria e prática, tanto na formação docente, como em projetos escolares, a fim de fugir do tradicional vínculo “EA e ecologia, lixo e horta”.Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educació

Incidence of Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo and course of treatment following mild head trauma – is it worth looking for?

BACKGROUND: This study aimed to identify the incidence of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo following head trauma. METHODS: This study is a prospective cross-sectional study. Initially, a targeted search for the identification of patients with the international ­classification of diseases (ICD-10) diagnosis of cerebral commotio at relevant emergency units in the Northern Region of Denmark was done. This was followed by a clinical examination to determine the incidence of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) within this population. Of the 295 patients diagnosed with commotio cerebri during a 4-and-a-half month period, 85 patients were included. All patients underwent clinical examination in a mechanical repositional chair wearing Video Frenzel Goggles. Additional examinations included a complete video head impulse test. RESULTS: A total of six patients were identified with benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) following minor head trauma. Bilateral BPPV, multicanal BPPV, and BPPV of a single semicircular canal were identified. All patients experienced relief of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo-related symptoms within 3 treatment sessions. Five patients were identified with a pathological video head impulse test, 54 with an inconclusive examination, and 15 with a normal video head impulse test. CONCLUSION: The incidence of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo following minor head trauma was 7%. A relatively high number of atypical subtypes of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo was found. When applying strict criteria for the interpretation of video head impulse test examination, the number of patients with inconclusive video head impulse test examination was higher than expected and 6.7% of patients had a pathological video head impulse test examination. No relationship between benign paroxysmal positional vertigo and pathological video head impulse test was observed