Patterns of sick-leave and health outcomes in injured workers with back pain

Little is known about the sick-leave experiences of workers who make a workers’ compensation claim for back pain. Our objective is to describe the 1-year patterns of sick-leave and the health outcomes of a cohort of workers who make a workers’ compensation claim for back pain. We studied a cohort of 1,831 workers from five large US firms who made incident workers’ compensation claims for back pain between January 1, 1999 and June 30, 2002. Injured workers were interviewed 1 month (n = 1,321), 6 months (n = 810) and 1 year (n = 462) following the onset of their pain. We described the course of back pain using four patterns of sick-leave: (1) no sick-leave, (2) returned to worked and stayed, (3) multiple episodes of sick-leave and (4) not yet returned to work. We described the health outcomes as back and/or leg pain intensity, functional limitations and health-related quality of life. We analyzed data from participants who completed all follow-up interviews (n = 457) to compute the probabilities of transition between patterns of sick-leave. A significant proportion of workers experienced multiple episodes of sick-leave (30.2%; 95% CI 25.0–35.1) during the 1-year follow-up. The proportion of workers who did not report sick-leave declined from 42.4% (95% CI 39.0–46.1) at 1 month to 33.6% (28.0–38.7) at 1 year. One year after the injury, 2.9% (1.6–4.9) of workers had not yet returned to work. Workers who did not report sick-leave and those who returned and stayed at work reported better health outcomes than workers who experienced multiple episodes of sick-leave or workers who had not returned to work. Almost a third of workers with an incident episode of back pain experience recurrent spells of work absenteeism during the following year. Our data suggest that stable patterns of sick-leave are associated with better health

OceanBioME.jl: A flexible environment for modelling the coupled interactions between ocean biogeochemistry and physics

<h2>OceanBioME v0.9.1</h2> <p><a href="https://github.com/OceanBioME/OceanBioME.jl/compare/v0.9.0...v0.9.1">Diff since v0.9.0</a></p> <p><strong>Merged pull requests:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Fixes a typo: No idea how we've missed this one (#158) (@jagoosw)</li> <li>(0.9.1) Move testing and docs to buildkite (+ minor GPU bug fix) (#159) (@jagoosw)</li> </ul>If you use this software, please cite our article in the Journal of Open Source Software

Basic and reductive sulfone-directed ring-opening reactions of difluorinated oxa[2.2.1]bicycloheptanes

Phenylsulfenyl chloride reacts with racemic endo Diels-Alder adduct 4 (DEC ) CONEt2) to afford lactone 8, which can be reduced and protected in a series of high-yielding steps. Key sulfone 10 can be ring opened under strong base conditions to afford vinyl sulfone 11. Attempted desulfonation resulted in the formation of a monofluoroalkene, but a direct desulfonation/eliminative ring opening with strain relief delivered highly functionalized monocyclic species 16

Heavy flavour production in Z decays

From an analysis of inclusive leptons in data collected by the ALEPH detector at LEP, we measure the fractions of b and c events in hadronic Z decays. The b fraction times semileptonic branching ratio is measured to be . Assuming a b semileptonic branching ratio of 0.102 ± 0.010 gives , in good agreement with the standard model prediction of 0.217. The c fraction times semileptonic branching ratio is measured to be . Assuming a c semileptonic branching ratio of 0.090 ± 0.013 gives , in agreement with the standard model prediction of 0.171

Search for the neutral Higgs bosons of the MSSM and other two doublet models

Large radiative corrections modify the predictions of the minimal supersymmetric extension of the standard model (MSSM) sufficiently for the constraints on this model, formerly derived from the searches for the CP-even h and for the CP-odd A neutral Higgs bosons, to be invalidated. In particular, the new h → AA decay mode has to be considered. The results presented here have been obtained from a data sample corresponding to about 185000 hadronic Z decays collected by the ALEPH experiment at LEP. No indication for any signal of the reactions or e+e− → hA was found. A domain in the (mh,mA) plane is thus excluded at 95% CL in a large class of two-Higgs-doublet models. More restrictive results are derived in the MSSM, with one loop radiative corrections to the Higgs potential taken into account. It is found that mh > 41 GeV/c2 and mA > 20 GeV/c2 at 95% CL when the other parameters of the model are varied in their allowed ranges