1,970 research outputs found
"Hospital utilization by Mexican migrants returning to Mexico due to health needs"
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>A total of 12.7 million Mexicans reside as migrants in the United States, of whom only 45% have health insurance in this country while access to health insurance by migrants in Mexico is fraught with difficulties. Health insurance has been shown to impact the use of health care in both countries. This paper quantifies hospitalizations by migrants who return from the US seeking medical care in public and private hospitals in the US-Mexico border area and in communities of origin. The proportion of bed utilization and the proportion of hospitalizations in Mexico out of the total expected by migrants in the US were estimated.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The universe included 48 Ministry of Health and 47 private hospitals serving municipalities of high or very high migration in Mexico, where 17% of remittance-receiving households are located, as well as 15 public and 159 private hospitals in 10 Mexican cities along the border with the US. Hospitals were sampled through various methods to include 27% of beds. Patients and staff were interviewed and data triangulated to quantify migrants that returned to Mexico seeking medical care. Official hospital discharge statistics and secondary data from migration databases and published statistics were analyzed to identify bed occupancy, general migrant hospitalization rates and the size of the migrant population that maintains close relationships with households in communities of origin.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Up to 1609 migrants were admitted to public hospitals (76.6%) and 492 to private hospitals (23.4%) serving municipalities of high and very high migration intensity in 2008. Up to 0.90% of public hospital capacity was used. In the border area up to 908 and 2416 migrants were admitted to public (27.3%) and private (72.7%) hospitals, respectively. Up to 1.18% of public hospital capacity was used. Between 2.4% and 20.4% of the expected hospitalization needs of migrants with dependent households are satisfied through these services. The most common diagnostic categories mentioned across hospitals were traumatisms, complications of diabetes and elective surgery, in that order. Private hospitals mention elective surgeries as the main diagnostic category followed by complications of diabetes.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Hospitals in communities of origin in Mexico are devoting few resources to respond to hospitalization needs of migrants in the US. Currently no hospital programs exist to stimulate migrant demand or to cater to their specific needs. Registering migratory history in clinical and administrative records can be readily implemented. Developing bi-national referral networks and insuring migrants in the US within current Mexican federal programs could greatly increase migrant access to hospitals.</p
A Simple Kinetic Model Describes the Processivity of Myosin-V
Myosin-V is a motor protein responsible for organelle and vesicle transport
in cells. Recent single-molecule experiments have shown that it is an efficient
processive motor that walks along actin filaments taking steps of mean size
close to 36 nm. A theoretical study of myosin-V motility is presented following
an approach used successfully to analyze the dynamics of conventional kinesin
but also taking some account of step-size variations. Much of the present
experimental data for myosin-V can be well described by a two-state chemical
kinetic model with three load-dependent rates. In addition, the analysis
predicts the variation of the mean velocity and of the randomness -- a
quantitative measure of the stochastic deviations from uniform, constant-speed
motion -- with ATP concentration under both resisting and assisting loads, and
indicates a {\it sub}step of size 13-14 nm (from the ATP-binding
site) that appears to accord with independent observations.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, to be published in Biophys. J. in 200
Faculty Showcase Concert
Center for the Performing Arts Thursday Evening November 9, 2006 8:00p.m
Amenability, locally finite spaces, and bi-lipschitz embeddings
We define the isoperimetric constant for any locally finite metric space and
we study the property of having isoperimetric constant equal to zero. This
property, called Small Neighborhood property, clearly extends amenability to
any locally finite space. Therefore, we start making a comparison between this
property and other notions of amenability for locally finite metric spaces that
have been proposed by Gromov, Lafontaine and Pansu, by Ceccherini-Silberstein,
Grigorchuk and de la Harpe and by Block and Weinberger. We discuss possible
applications of the property SN in the study of embedding a metric space into
another one. In particular, we propose three results: we prove that a certain
class of metric graphs that are isometrically embeddable into Hilbert spaces
must have the property SN. We also show, by a simple example, that this result
is not true replacing property SN with amenability. As a second result, we
prove that \emph{many} spaces with \emph{uniform bounded geometry} having a
bi-lipschitz embedding into Euclidean spaces must have the property SN.
Finally, we prove a Bourgain-like theorem for metric trees: a metric tree with
uniform bounded geometry and without property SN does not have bi-lipschitz
embeddings into finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces.Comment: 15 pages. To appear in Expositiones Mathematica
Quantum anti-Zeno effect without wave function reduction
We study the measurement-induced enhancement of the spontaneous decay (called
quantum anti-Zeno effect) for a two-level subsystem, where measurements are
treated as couplings between the excited state and an auxiliary state rather
than the von Neumann's wave function reduction. The photon radiated in a fast
decay of the atom, from the auxiliary state to the excited state, triggers a
quasi-measurement, as opposed to a projection measurement. Our use of the term
"quasi-measurement" refers to a "coupling-based measurement". Such frequent
quasi-measurements result in an exponential decay of the survival probability
of atomic initial state with a photon emission following each
quasi-measurement. Our calculations show that the effective decay rate is of
the same form as the one based on projection measurements. What is more
important, the survival probability of the atomic initial state which is
obtained by tracing over all the photon states is equivalent to the survival
probability of the atomic initial state with a photon emission following each
quasi-measurement to the order under consideration. That is because the
contributions from those states with photon number less than the number of
quasi-measurements originate from higher-order processes.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure
Evaluation of the impact of a school gardening intervention on children's fruit and vegetable intake: a randomised controlled trial.
Background: Current academic literature suggests that school gardening programmes can provide an interactive environment with the potential to change children’s fruit and vegetable intake. This is the first cluster randomised controlled trial (RCT) designed to evaluate whether a school gardening programme can have an effect on children’s fruit and vegetable intake.
Methods: The trial included children from 23 schools; these schools were randomised into two groups, one to receive the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS)-led intervention and the other to receive the less involved Teacher-led intervention. A 24-hour food diary (CADET) was used to collect baseline and follow-up dietary intake 18 months apart. Questionnaires were also administered to evaluate the intervention implementation.
Results: A total of 641 children completed the trial with a mean age of 8.1 years (95% CI: 8.0, 8.4). The unadjusted results from multilevel regression analysis revealed that for combined daily fruit and vegetable intake the Teacher-led group had a higher daily mean change of 8 g (95% CI: −19, 36) compared to the RHS-led group -32 g (95% CI: −60, −3). However, after adjusting for possible confounders this difference was not significant (intervention effect: −40 g, 95% CI: −88, 1; p = 0.06). The adjusted analysis of process measures identified that if schools improved their gardening score by 3 levels (a measure of school gardening involvement - the scale has 6 levels from 0 ‘no garden’ to 5 ‘community involvement’), irrespective of group allocation, children had, on average, a daily increase of 81 g of fruit and vegetable intake (95% CI: 0, 163; p = 0.05) compared to schools that had no change in gardening score.
Conclusions: This study is the first cluster randomised controlled trial designed to evaluate a school gardening intervention. The results have found very little evidence to support the claims that school gardening alone can improve children’s daily fruit and vegetable intake. However, when a gardening intervention is implemented at a high level within the school it may improve children’s daily fruit and vegetable intake by a portion. Improving children’s fruit and vegetable intake remains a challenging task
NS1 Specific CD8(+) T-Cells with Effector Function and TRBV11 Dominance in a Patient with Parvovirus B19 Associated Inflammatory Cardiomyopathy
Background: Parvovirus B19 (B19V) is the most commonly detected virus in endomyocardial biopsies (EMBs) from patients with inflammatory cardiomyopathy (DCMi). Despite the importance of T-cells in antiviral defense, little is known about the role of B19V specific T-cells in this entity.
Methodology and Principal Findings: An exceptionally high B19V viral load in EMBs (115,091 viral copies/mg nucleic acids), peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) and serum was measured in a DCMi patient at initial presentation, suggesting B19V viremia. The B19V viral load in EMBs had decreased substantially 6 and 12 months afterwards, and was not traceable in PBMCs and the serum at these times. Using pools of overlapping peptides spanning the whole B19V proteome, strong CD8(+) T-cell responses were elicited to the 10-amico-acid peptides SALKLAIYKA (19.7% of all CD8(+) cells) and QSALKLAIYK (10%) and additional weaker responses to GLCPHCINVG (0.71%) and LLHTDFEQVM (0.06%). Real-time RT-PCR of IFN gamma secretion-assay-enriched T-cells responding to the peptides, SALKLAIYKA and GLCPHCINVG, revealed a disproportionately high T-cell receptor Vbeta (TRBV) 11 expression in this population. Furthermore, dominant expression of type-1 (IFN gamma, IL2, IL27 and Tbet) and of cytotoxic T-cell markers (Perforin and Granzyme B) was found, whereas gene expression indicating type-2 (IL4, GATA3) and regulatory T-cells (FoxP3) was low.
Conclusions: Our results indicate that B19V Ag-specific CD8(+) T-cells with effector function are involved in B19V associated DCMi. In particular, a dominant role of TRBV11 and type-1/CTL effector cells in the T-cell mediated antiviral immune response is suggested. The persistence of B19V in the endomyocardium is a likely antigen source for the maintenance of CD8(+) T-cell responses to the identified epitopes
A Characterization of Scale Invariant Responses in Enzymatic Networks
An ubiquitous property of biological sensory systems is adaptation: a step
increase in stimulus triggers an initial change in a biochemical or
physiological response, followed by a more gradual relaxation toward a basal,
pre-stimulus level. Adaptation helps maintain essential variables within
acceptable bounds and allows organisms to readjust themselves to an optimum and
non-saturating sensitivity range when faced with a prolonged change in their
environment. Recently, it was shown theoretically and experimentally that many
adapting systems, both at the organism and single-cell level, enjoy a
remarkable additional feature: scale invariance, meaning that the initial,
transient behavior remains (approximately) the same even when the background
signal level is scaled. In this work, we set out to investigate under what
conditions a broadly used model of biochemical enzymatic networks will exhibit
scale-invariant behavior. An exhaustive computational study led us to discover
a new property of surprising simplicity and generality, uniform linearizations
with fast output (ULFO), whose validity we show is both necessary and
sufficient for scale invariance of enzymatic networks. Based on this study, we
go on to develop a mathematical explanation of how ULFO results in scale
invariance. Our work provides a surprisingly consistent, simple, and general
framework for understanding this phenomenon, and results in concrete
experimental predictions
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