Diagnostics methods for sleep disorders

The aim of this manuscript is to describe the procedures, recommendations, findings and value of the diagnostic methods used in Sleep Disorders including questionnaires, Actigraph, Polysomnography and Multiple sleep latency test. Specific questionnaires including evaluation of sleep quality , hyper somnolence, Respiratory Sleep Disorders and Sleep-Wake rhythm are in general, used as a screening for the Sleep Disorders and indication of sleep studies. Polysomnogram and Multiple sleep latency test are considered the gold standard methods for the diagnosis of majority of sleep disorders and Narcolepsy respectively. Criteria for these disorders are reported bellow.O objetivo deste artigo é o de descrever os procedimentos, as recomendações, os achados e o valor dos métodos diagnósticos utilizados em transtornos do sono, incluindo questionários, actigrafia, polissonografia e teste múltiplo de latência do sono. Questionários específicos incluindo avaliação da qualidade do sono, hipersonolência, transtornos respiratórios do sono e ritmo sono-vigília são utilizados, em geral, para triar transtornos do sono e como indicação para estudos sobre o sono. A polissonografia e o teste múltiplo de latência do sono são considerados como métodos padrão-ouro na maioria dos transtornos do sono e narcolepsia, respectivamente. Os critérios para tais transtornos são relatados abaixo.Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP)UNIFESPSciEL

Quality of life for hospice caregivers

The goal of hospice care is to enhance the quality of life (QOL) of patients and their families during the final stages of illness, the dying process, and the bereavement period. This goal involves using an interdisciplinary approach to attend to patients and families as a "unit of care" and to address the spiritual, physical, emotional, financial, and psychological aspects of living with a terminal illness. Despite efforts, research shows a decrease in the overall quality of life of hospice caregivers after the first 30 days of hospice care, especially in four quality of life domains: physical, financial, emotional, and social domains. The purpose of this study was to examine the following questions: 1) How does the QOL of hospice caregivers change over time? 2) How does a defined intervention affect their QOL? 3) How do different interventions affect the usual trajectory of QOL? 4) How do various aspects of QOL change over time? This poster addresses the first research question

Fggy Carbohydrate Kinase Domain Containing is Induced During Skeletal Muscle Atrophy and Regulates MAP Kinase Signaling

Skeletal muscle atrophy can result from a range of physiological conditions, including denervation. To better characterize the molecular genetic events of atrophy, skeletal muscle was isolated from mice following 3 and 14 days of denervation. The gene expression profile of the denervated muscle tissue was analyzed by microarray and compared to control muscle to identify novel atrophy-induced genes. The microarray revealed that Fggy carbohydrate kinase domain containing (Fggy) is expressed in skeletal muscle and is induced in response to denervation. Bioinformatic analysis of the Fggy gene locus revealed two validated alternative isoforms, which we have termed Fggy-001 and Fggy-003. To confirm that Fggy is expressed in muscle cells, the cDNA of the two validated alternative variants was cloned from mouse myoblast cells. Interestingly, a novel alternative splice variant for each of the validated alternative isoforms was also cloned from mouse muscle cells, suggesting at least four Fggy splice variants to be expressed in skeletal muscle. Ectopic expression of Fggy-001 and Fggy-003 resulted in inhibition of muscle cell differentiation and attenuation of the MAP kinase signaling pathway. Finally, confocal fluorescent microscopy analysis revealed that the Fggy-001 transcripts appear to localize to the cytoplasm, while the Fggy-003 transcripts produce a more punctuate localization pattern throughout the cytoplasm of proliferating muscle cells. The characterization of novel genes that are activated during neurogenic atrophy helps improve our understanding of the molecular and cellular events that lead to muscle atrophy and could eventually lead to new therapeutic targets for the treatment of muscle wasting

Group-PCA for very large fMRI datasets

Increasingly-large datasets (for example, the resting-state fMRI data from the Human Connectome Project) are demanding analyses that are problematic because of the sheer scale of the aggregate data. We present two approaches for applying group-level PCA; both give a close approximation to the output of PCA applied to full concatenation of all individual datasets, while having very low memory requirements regardless of the number of datasets being combined. Across a range of realistic simulations, we find that in most situations, both methods are more accurate than current popular approaches for analysis of multi-subject resting-state fMRI studies. The group-PCA output can be used to feed into a range of further analyses that are then rendered practical, such as the estimation of group-averaged voxelwise connectivity, group-level parcellation, and group-ICA. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Peer reviewe

A bottom-up approach to emulating emotions using neuromodulation in agents

A bottom-up approach to emulating emotions is expounded in this thesis. This is intended to be useful in research where a phenomenon is to be emulated but the nature of it can not easily be defined. This approach not only advocates emulating the underlying mechanisms that are proposed to give rise to emotion in natural agents, but also advocates applying an open-mind as to what the phenomenon actually is. There is evidence to suggest that neuromodulation is inherently responsible for giving rise to emotions in natural agents and that emotions consequently modulate the behaviour of the agent. The functionality provided by neuromodulation, when applied to agents with self-organising biologically plausible neural networks, is isolated and studied. In research efforts such as this the definition should emerge from the evidence rather than postulate that the definition, derived from limited information, is correct and should be implemented. An implementation of a working definition only tells us that the definition can be implemented. It does not tell us whether that working definition is itself correct and matches the phenomenon in the real world. If this model of emotions was assumed to be true and implemented in an agent, there would be a danger of precluding implementations that could offer alternative theories as to the relevance of neuromodulation to emotions. By isolating and studying different mechanisms such as neuromodulation that are thought to give rise to emotions, theories can arise as to what emotions are and the functionality that they provide. The application of this approach concludes with a theory as to how some emotions can operate via the use of neuromodulators. The theory is explained using the concepts of dynamical systems, free-energy and entropy.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceEPSRC : University of StirlingGBUnited Kingdo

Fonemas problemáticos para los hispanohablantes que aprenden inglés

When learning English, learners might face a challenging task in mastering pronunciation due to differences in both languages such as sound-to-letter correspondence, size of phoneme inventory, allophonic realization of sounds, place and manner of articulation, among others. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to review both theoretical and research reports on the most problematic sounds for Spanish-speakers English language learners. Approaches to second language learners’ errors like Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis although being criticized have contributed to identifying likely causes of errors and dealing with them whether anticipating them or providing appropriate feedback on them. Besides, first language interference and age of second language acquisition have been found as complicating factors in the English pronunciation learning process. Finally, some classroom activities have been reported as successful for facilitating English pronunciation in Spanish native speakers.A la hora de aprender inglés, los aprendices pueden encontrar dificultades con respecto a la pronunciación puesto que existen ciertas diferencias en los dos idiomas, tales como la correspondencia de sonido a letra, el tamaño del inventario de fonemas, la realización alofónica de sonidos, el lugar y la forma de articulación, entre otros. Por lo tanto, el propósito de este documento es revisar literatura teórica e investigativa sobre los sonidos más problemáticos para aprendices de inglés que son hablantes nativos de español. Aproximaciones a los errores de los aprendices de una segunda lengua, como el Análisis Contrastivo y el Análisis de Errores que, aunque han sido criticados, han contribuido a identificar las posibles causas de los errores y abordarlas, ya sea anticipándolos o proporcionando una retroalimentación adecuada. Además, la interferencia de la lengua materna y la edad de adquisición del segundo idioma se han encontrado como factores que dificultan el proceso de aprendizaje de la pronunciación en inglés. Finalmente, algunas actividades de clase han sido reportadas como exitosas para facilitar la pronunciación del inglés a hablantes nativos de español.Palabras clave: pronunciación en inglés, hablantes nativos de español, análisis contrastivo, corrección de errores, interferencia, actividades de pronunciación

Concatenation and Concordance in the Reconstruction of Mouse Lemur Phylogeny: An Empirical Demonstration of the Effect of Allele Sampling in Phylogenetics

The systematics and speciation literature is rich with discussion relating to the potential for gene tree/species tree discordance. Numerous mechanisms have been proposed to generate discordance, including differential selection, longbranch attraction, gene duplication, genetic introgression, and/or incomplete lineage sorting. For speciose clades in which divergence has occurred recently and rapidly, recovering the true species tree can be particularly problematic due to incomplete lineage sorting. Unfortunately, the availability of multilocus or “phylogenomic” data sets does not simply solve the problem, particularly when the data are analyzed with standard concatenation techniques. In our study, we conduct a phylogenetic study for a nearly complete species sample of the dwarf and mouse lemur clade, Cheirogaleidae. Mouse lemurs (genus, Microcebus) have been intensively studied over the past decade for reasons relating to their high level of cryptic species diversity, and although there has been emerging consensus regarding the evolutionary diversity contained within the genus, there is no agreement as to the inter-specific relationships within the group. We attempt to resolve cheirogaleid phylogeny, focusing especially on the mouse lemurs, by employing a large multilocus data set. We compare the results of Bayesian concordance methods with those of standard gene concatenation, finding that though concatenation yields the strongest results as measured by statistical support, these results are found to be highly misleading. By employing an approach where individual alleles are treated as operational taxonomic units, we show that phylogenetic results are substantially influenced by the selection of alleles in the concatenation process. Includes supplementary materials

Evidence on Use of PAMs with Lateral Elbow Tendinopathy: An Evidence-based Practice Project

The overall focus of each of case scenarios are related to assessment or interventions that are related to Choosing Wisely Campaign items 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 10. Case scenarios were developed related to each initiative with clientele and conditions across the lifespan in various practice settings. Practice settings included school district, outpatient pediatric, primary care, skilled nursing facility, work rehabilitation, and acute care

Confound modelling in UK Biobank brain imaging

© 2020 Dealing with confounds is an essential step in large cohort studies to address problems such as unexplained variance and spurious correlations. UK Biobank is a powerful resource for studying associations between imaging and non-imaging measures such as lifestyle factors and health outcomes, in part because of the large subject numbers. However, the resulting high statistical power also raises the sensitivity to confound effects, which therefore have to be carefully considered. In this work we describe a set of possible confounds (including non-linear effects and interactions that researchers may wish to consider for their studies using such data). We include descriptions of how we can estimate the confounds, and study the extent to which each of these confounds affects the data, and the spurious correlations that may arise if they are not controlled. Finally, we discuss several issues that future studies should consider when dealing with confounds