Serum Micronutrient Status, Sleep And Neurobehavioral Function In Early Adolescents: A Cohort Study

Adolescence represents a critical period of neurobehavioral development. Prior research has proposed suboptimal micronutrient and sleep status as individual risk factors for neurobehavioral impairment in adolescents. Additionally, there is a small but growing body of literature that has documented an association between micronutrient status and sleep patterns, suggesting a complex relationship among micronutrients, sleep and neurobehavioral function. It was thus the aim of the present study to provide a systematic review on micronutrients and sleep, empirically examine the associations between micronutrient status and sleep with a focus on early adolescents, and to characterize the contribution of sleep to the relationship between micronutrient status and neurobehavioral function. Study One (Chapter 2) systematically reviewed the existing studies (n=26) on the relationship between micronutrients and sleep across populations, thereby providing the background and generating hypotheses for the empirical sub-studies. Data sets from the China Jintan Child Cohort were used to conduct cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses (n=777) of serum zinc/iron concentrations and adolescent sleep assessed by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (Chapter 3), as well as a mediation analysis (n=226) of sleep quality between serum iron/zinc and neurobehavioral function in early adolescents aged 11-14 years (Chapter 4). Cross-sectional analyses found significant associations of higher serum zinc concentrations with better global sleep quality, as well as decreased odds of insufficient sleep duration and sleep disturbances in early adolescents. Longitudinal analyses reported a trend towards better sleep efficiency at early adolescence with increasing serum zinc concentrations at preschool age. Serum iron concentrations were significantly associated with concurrent sleep latency but not global sleep quality and other sleep domains in early adolescents. Similarly, the interaction effects between serum iron and zinc on sleep quality did not reach statistical significance. Results of the mediation analyses indicate that early adolescents with low levels of serum iron and zinc were significantly associated with fast but error-prone performance on nonverbal reasoning task. Sleep quality partially mediated the relationship between low serum zinc and non-verbal reasoning but not low iron. Findings from this dissertation study provide preliminary evidence for understanding the multifaceted and interrelated role of micronutrient status, sleep, and neurobehavioral function during early adolescence, which may be useful for developing interventions to optimize sleep-related health in adolescents. Future research is needed to validate and examine the clinical relevance of these findings

A Wireless Covert Channel Based on Constellation Shaping Modulation

Wireless covert channel is an emerging covert communication technique which conceals the very existence of secret information in wireless signal including GSM, CDMA, and LTE. The secret message bits are always modulated into artificial noise superposed with cover signal, which is then demodulated with the shared codebook at the receiver. In this paper, we first extend the traditional KS test and regularity test in covert timing channel detection into wireless covert channel, which can be used to reveal the very existence of secret data in wireless covert channel from the aspect of multiorder statistics. In order to improve the undetectability, a wireless covert channel for OFDM-based communication system based on constellation shaping modulation is proposed, which generates additional constellation points around the standard points in normal constellations. The carrier signal is then modulated with the dirty constellation and the secret message bits are represented by the selection mode of the additional constellation points; shaping modulation is employed to keep the distribution of constellation errors unchanged. Experimental results show that the proposed wireless covert channel scheme can resist various statistical detections. The communication reliability under typical interference is also proved

Semi-supervised Counting via Pixel-by-pixel Density Distribution Modelling

This paper focuses on semi-supervised crowd counting, where only a small portion of the training data are labeled. We formulate the pixel-wise density value to regress as a probability distribution, instead of a single deterministic value. On this basis, we propose a semi-supervised crowd-counting model. Firstly, we design a pixel-wise distribution matching loss to measure the differences in the pixel-wise density distributions between the prediction and the ground truth; Secondly, we enhance the transformer decoder by using density tokens to specialize the forwards of decoders w.r.t. different density intervals; Thirdly, we design the interleaving consistency self-supervised learning mechanism to learn from unlabeled data efficiently. Extensive experiments on four datasets are performed to show that our method clearly outperforms the competitors by a large margin under various labeled ratio settings. Code will be released at https://github.com/LoraLinH/Semi-supervised-Counting-via-Pixel-by-pixel-Density-Distribution-Modelling.Comment: This is the technical report of a paper that was submitted to IEEE Transactions and is now under revie

The effect of a culturally tailored web-based physical activity promotion program on Asian American midlife women’s depressive symptoms

The benefits of physical activities on depressive symptoms have increasingly been reported in the literature, but the effect through which a Web-based physical activity promotion program alleviates depressive symptoms is not clearly known, especially among ethnic minority midlife women. The purpose of this pilot randomized control study is to examine the preliminary efficacy of the Web-based physical activity promotion program in enhancing the depressive symptoms of Asian American midlife women through increasing physical activity. This study adopted a randomized repeated measures pretest/posttest control group design. This study consisted of two groups of research participants: 18 in an intervention group and 15 in a control group. By using multiple instruments, the participants’ background and health status, depressive symptom experience, and physical activity experience were measured at three time points (pre-, post 1-month, and post 3-months). The data were analyzed using a modified intent-to-treat linear mixed-model growth curve analysis. After controlling for covariates, random intercept, and random slope, only discrimination stress showed statistical significances in the group effect (0.18, p = .08 for control) and time effect (-0.04, p = .04), but not in the group × time effect (p = .51). The active living habits scores showed statistical significances in the group effect (0.82, p \u3c 0.01 for control), time effect (0.29, p \u3c 0.01), and group × time effect (-0.31, p = 0.03 for control). Findings support the significant effect of the Web-based physical activity promotion program on the women’s discrimination stress and active living habits