A Morbidity Submodel of Infectious Diseases

Numbers of sick persons with infectious diseases in a country can be estimated by the morbidity submodel of infectious diseases. The input of the model is the population structure of the country and the outputs are numbers of sick, deaths and prevalence rates of infectious diseases. The model makes use of three disease specific rates which are assumed to be constant across developed countries, namely morbidity rate, recovery rate, and death rate per capita. For this paper values of these three rates were calculated from Japanese survey data describing disease specific prevalence rate, death rate, and duration of stay. The outputs of the model are in good agreement with WHO statistics from Japan and other developed countries

Analysis and Future Estimation of Medical Demands Using a Health Care Simulation Model: A Case Study of Japan

A method of building a universal health care model was proposed in RM-77-006 (Kaihara, et al., An Approach to Building a Universal Health Care Model). This method is based on the calculation of essential parameters of health care from ordinary statistics. The essential parameters proposed in the previous report were population structure, morbidity rate, recovery rate, death rate, patient registration rate and awareness rate. The method was applied successfully to the analysis of medical demands at the national level of Japan. The results showed that in the past 15 years the awareness rate was the most important factor which contributed to the increase of the patients. But in the future, the model predicted that the change of population structure will be the main cause of the increase of the number of patients in Japan

An Approach to Building a Universal Health Care Model: Morbidity Model of Degenerative Diseases

There have been many different approaches to building health care models. Because of these differences, it is sometimes difficult to relate the developed models to each other. We have therefore first defined the submodels of the health care system and clarified the relation of our approach to studies already undertaken. The submodels also show the steps in building the health care model. The first step was to construct the morbidity model of degenerative diseases. The validity of the model was tested for various countries, using statistics from the World Health Organization. The fit of the model to empirical data was satisfactory. The model was applied to an international comparison and estimation of trends in degenerative diseases. The study showed the feasibility of this type of approach in health planning

On the security of 1024-bit RSA and 160-bit elliptic curve cryptography

Meeting the requirements of NIST’s new cryptographic standard ‘Suite B Cryptography’ means phasing out usage of 1024-bit RSA and 160-bit Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) by the year 2010. This write-up comments on the vulnerability of these systems to an open community attack effort and aims to assess the risk of their continued usage beyond 2010. We conclude that for 1024-bit RSA the risk is small at least until the year 2014, and that 160-bit ECC may safely be used for much longer – with the current state of the art in cryptanalysis we would be surprised if a public effort can make a dent in 160-bit ECC by the year 2020. Our assessment is based on the latest practical data of large scale integer factorization and elliptic curve discrete logarithm computation efforts

Circulating mucosal-associated invariant T cells identify patients responding to anti-PD-1 therapy

Immune checkpoint inhibitors are used for treating patients with metastatic melanoma. Since the response to treatment is variable, biomarkers are urgently needed to identify patients who may benefit from such therapy. Here, we combine single-cell RNA-sequencing and multiparameter flow cytometry to assess changes in circulating CD8+ T cells in 28 patients with metastatic melanoma starting anti-PD-1 therapy, followed for 6 months: 17 responded to therapy, whilst 11 did not. Proportions of activated and proliferating CD8+ T cells and of mucosal-associated invariant T (MAIT) cells are significantly higher in responders, prior to and throughout therapy duration. MAIT cells from responders express higher level of CXCR4 and produce more granzyme B. In silico analysis support MAIT presence in the tumor microenvironment. Finally, patients with >1.7% of MAIT among peripheral CD8+ population show a better response to treatment. Our results thus suggest that MAIT cells may be considered a biomarker for patients responding to anti-PD-1 therapy

Split luciferase complementation assay to detect regulated protein-protein interactions in rice protoplasts in a large-scale format

BACKGROUND: The rice interactome, in which a network of protein-protein interactions has been elucidated in rice, is a useful resource to identify functional modules of rice signal transduction pathways. Protein-protein interactions occur in cells in two ways, constitutive and regulative. While a yeast-based high-throughput method has been widely used to identify the constitutive interactions, a method to detect the regulated interactions is rarely developed for a large-scale analysis. RESULTS: A split luciferase complementation assay was applied to detect the regulated interactions in rice. A transformation method of rice protoplasts in a 96-well plate was first established for a large-scale analysis. In addition, an antibody that specifically recognizes a carboxyl-terminal fragment of Renilla luciferase was newly developed. A pair of antibodies that recognize amino- and carboxyl- terminal fragments of Renilla luciferase, respectively, was then used to monitor quality and quantity of interacting recombinant-proteins accumulated in the cells. For a proof-of-concept, the method was applied to detect the gibberellin-dependent interaction between GIBBERELLIN INSENSITIVE DWARF1 and SLENDER RICE 1. CONCLUSIONS: A method to detect regulated protein-protein interactions was developed towards establishment of the rice interactome

The ability of contemporary cardiologists to judge the ischemic impact of a coronary lesion visually

Background: Landmark trials showed that invasive pressure measurement (Fractional Flow Reserve, FFR) was a better guide to coronary stenting than visual assessment. However, present-day interventionists have benefited from extensive research and personal experience of mapping anatomy to hemodynamics. Aims: To determine if visual assessment of the angiogram performs as well as invasive measurement of coronary physiology. Methods: 25 interventional cardiologists independently visually assessed the single vessel coronary disease of 200 randomized participants in The Objective Randomized Blinded Investigation with optimal medical Therapy of Angioplasty in stable angina trial (ORBITA). They gave a visual prediction of the FFR and Instantaneous Wave-free Ratio (iFR), denoted vFFR and viFR respectively. Each judged each lesion on 2 occasions, so that every lesion had 50 vFFR, and 50 viFR assessments. The group consensus visual estimates (vFFR-group and viFR-group) and individual cardiologists' visual estimates (vFFR-individual and viFR-individual) were tested alongside invasively measured FFR and iFR for their ability to predict the placebo-controlled reduction in stress echo ischemia with stenting. Results: Placebo-controlled ischemia improvement with stenting was predicted by vFFR-group (p < 0.0001) and viFR-group (p < 0.0001), vFFR-individual (p < 0.0001) and viFR-individual (p < 0.0001). There were no significant differences between the predictive performance of the group visual estimates and their invasive counterparts: p = 0.53 for vFFR vs FFR and p = 0.56 for viFR vs iFR. Conclusion: Visual assessment of the angiogram by contemporary experts, provides significant additional information on the amount of ischaemia which can be relieved by placebo-controlled stenting in single vessel coronary artery disease