Why and how should the patient perform a correct home blood pressure measurement?

Home blood pressure (BP) measurement is a medical prescription. The interpretation of the results must be left to the physician. This method is complementary to the classical office BP measurement and the 24 hour ambulatory blood pressure measurement. It must be proposed to some selected patients on the basis of their capacity of learning and understanding the place of the technique for the diagnosis and the treatment compliance. It allows a more active contribution of the patient to the management of her chronic disease and, this, may improve the prevention of cardiovascular complication. A normal blood pressure during self BP measurement is equal or lower to 135/85 mmHg or even lower in high cardiovascular risk patients. This new technique, already largely used by patients, needs adequate education and good advice for buying a validated device.L’automesure de la pression artérielle est un acte médical. Sa prescription et l’interprétation de ses données sont à réaliser par le médecin. Ce pré-requis étant dit, cette technique, complémentaire de la mesure au cabinet de consultation et de celle ambulatoire de la pression artérielle, apporte, chez les sujets sélectionnés, des informations pour la confirmation d’un diagnostic d’hypertension artérielle et pour l’appréciation de la qualité de son traitement. Elle permet de responsabiliser le patient dans sa prise en charge d’un problème souvent asymptomatique jusqu’à sa révélation lors d’une complication. La pression artérielle normale est, en automesure, inférieure à 135/85 mmHg, voire plus basse chez le patient à haut risque cardiovasculaire. Cette technique, fréquemment utilisée de nos jours par le patient, mérite qu’une éducation correcte de ce dernier soit faite après lui avoir conseillé d’acheter un appareil validé.Peer reviewe

Research Methodology: An Innovative Approach to a Venerable Course

This paper outlines a number of innovations that we have recently implemented in the Research Methodology Course at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health. Consistent with the goals of evidence-based medicine, evidence-based public health, intrinsic motivation, and phase 4 (T4) translational research, we have placed the emphasis on enhancing the students’ desire to learn—and more specifically on their desire to learn rigorous methods for conducting useful research that delivers practical benefits in a straightforward manner. A dozen innovations, along with some preliminary outcomes, are outlined in detail. Clin Trans Sci 2010; Volume 3: 309–311Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/79360/1/j.1752-8062.2010.00239.x.pd

Agent-Based Simulations of Blockchain protocols illustrated via Kadena's Chainweb

While many distributed consensus protocols provide robust liveness and consistency guarantees under the presence of malicious actors, quantitative estimates of how economic incentives affect security are few and far between. In this paper, we describe a system for simulating how adversarial agents, both economically rational and Byzantine, interact with a blockchain protocol. This system provides statistical estimates for the economic difficulty of an attack and how the presence of certain actors influences protocol-level statistics, such as the expected time to regain liveness. This simulation system is influenced by the design of algorithmic trading and reinforcement learning systems that use explicit modeling of an agent's reward mechanism to evaluate and optimize a fully autonomous agent. We implement and apply this simulation framework to Kadena's Chainweb, a parallelized Proof-of-Work system, that contains complexity in how miner incentive compliance affects security and censorship resistance. We provide the first formal description of Chainweb that is in the literature and use this formal description to motivate our simulation design. Our simulation results include a phase transition in block height growth rate as a function of shard connectivity and empirical evidence that censorship in Chainweb is too costly for rational miners to engage in. We conclude with an outlook on how simulation can guide and optimize protocol development in a variety of contexts, including Proof-of-Stake parameter optimization and peer-to-peer networking design.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, accepted to the IEEE S&B 2019 conferenc

Editorial

No abstract available

Renal function assessment is part of endovascular aortic aneurysm repair and its follow up.

Peer reviewe

An Extended Platter Metaphor for Effective Reconfigurable Network Visualization

We adapt the Flodar [6] metaphor to visualize dynamic networks and present experimental results on the effectiveness of this approach. Dynamic reconfiguration of networks enable rapid optimization of per¬formance of a network, however, it poses several management difficulties when user intervention is required to resolve complex routing problems. Our metaphor scales well for networks of varying size, addresses the cluttering problem seen in past metaphors and maintains the overall network context while providing additional support for navigation and interaction. We apply the metaphor to three dynamic reconfiguration management tasks and show how these tasks are visually represented with our approach. We conducted an experiment with network administrators and researchers as subjects. A good understanding of network conditions portrayed in the metaphor was achieved within a short period

The Role of Diversity in Cybersecurity Risk Analysis: An Experimental Plan

Cybersecurity threat and risk analysis (RA) approaches are used to identify and mitigate security risks early-on in the software development life-cycle. Existing approaches automate only parts of the analysis procedure, leaving key decisions in identification, feasibility and risk analysis, and quality assessment to be determined by expert judgement. Therefore, in practice teams of experts manually analyze the system design by holding brainstorming workshops. Such decisions are made in face of uncertainties, leaving room for biased judgement (e.g., preferential treatment of category of experts). Biased decision making during the analysis may result in unequal contribution of expertise, particularly since some diversity dimensions (i.e., gender) are underrepresented in security teams. Beyond the work of risk perception of non-technical threats, no existing work has empirically studied the role of diversity in the risk analysis of technical artefacts. This paper proposes an experimental plan for identifying the key diversity factors in RA