Disease activity in and quality of life of patients with psoriatic arthritis mutilans : the Nordic PAM Study

Objective: To describe the social status and health-related quality of life of patients with psoriatic arthritis mutilans (PAM) in the Nordic countries.Method: Patients with at least one mutilated joint confirmed by radiology were studied. Disease activity involving joints and skin, physician-assessed disease activity, and patient's education and work status were recorded. Data from the 36-item Short Form Health Survey, Health Assessment Questionnaire and Dermatology Life Quality Index questionnaire were gathered and correlated with disease duration, pain, and general well-being (visual analogue scale). The controls were 58 Swedish patients with long-standing psoriatic arthritis sine PAM.Results: Sixty-seven patients were included. Patients with PAM had a protracted disease history (3314years) and disease onset at a relatively early age (30 +/- 12years). Overall inflammatory activity at inclusion was mild to moderate. The mean number of mutilated joints was 8.2 and gross deformity was found in 16% of patients. Forty per cent were treated with biological and 32% with conventional synthetic disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs. Forty-two per cent had retired early or were on sick leave. Impaired functional capacity with little or no ability to perform self-care or everyday tasks was reported by 21% of the patients. Patients between 45 and 60years of age reported the most impaired quality of life in comparison to the control group.Conclusion: PAM seriously affects social functioning. Whether early recognition of PAM and new forms of therapy can improve disease outcome and quality of life remains to be studied.Peer reviewe

Silicon vacancy in SiC: A high-spin state defect

We report results from spin-polarized ab initio local spin-density calculations for the silicon vacancy (VSi) in 3C– and 2H–SiC in all its possible charge states. The calculated electronic structure for SiC reveals the presence of a stable spin-aligned electron-state t2 near the midgap. The neutral and doubly negative charge states of VSi in 3C–SiC are stabilized in a high-spin configuration with S=1 giving rise to a ground state, which is a many-electron orbital singlet 3T1. For the singly negative VSi, we find a high-spin ground-state4A2 with S=3/2. In the high-spin configuration, VSi preserves the Td symmetry. These results indicate that in neutral, singly, and doubly negative charge states a strong exchange coupling, which prefers parallel electron spins, overcomes the Jahn–Teller energy. In other charge states, the ground state of VSi has a low-spin configuration.Peer reviewe

Structure of CAl12

The structures of an isolated CAl12 cluster and a solid composed of CAl12 clusters have been studied using the Car–Parrinello method, based on the density functional theory and the local density approximation. We have compared the results of using the ultrasoft Vanderbilt pseudopotential with those of both a traditional pseudopotential and a linear combination of atomic orbitals method. We have confirmed the high stability of the cluster in its icosahedral structure. However, we show that the cluster‐assembled solid is unstable against melting of the clusters, as previously found for SiAl12.Peer reviewe

A real-space grid implementation of the Projector Augmented Wave method

A grid-based real-space implementation of the Projector Augmented Wave (PAW) method of P. E. Blochl [Phys. Rev. B 50, 17953 (1994)] for Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations is presented. The use of uniform 3D real-space grids for representing wave functions, densities and potentials allows for flexible boundary conditions, efficient multigrid algorithms for solving Poisson and Kohn-Sham equations, and efficient parallelization using simple real-space domain-decomposition. We use the PAW method to perform all-electron calculations in the frozen core approximation, with smooth valence wave functions that can be represented on relatively coarse grids. We demonstrate the accuracy of the method by calculating the atomization energies of twenty small molecules, and the bulk modulus and lattice constants of bulk aluminum. We show that the approach in terms of computational efficiency is comparable to standard plane-wave methods, but the memory requirements are higher.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review

Scalable Mining of Common Routes in Mobile Communication Network Traffic Data

A probabilistic method for inferring common routes from mobile communication network traffic data is presented. Besides providing mobility information, valuable in a multitude of application areas, the method has the dual purpose of enabling efficient coarse-graining as well as anonymisation by mapping individual sequences onto common routes. The approach is to represent spatial trajectories by Cell ID sequences that are grouped into routes using locality-sensitive hashing and graph clustering. The method is demonstrated to be scalable, and to accurately group sequences using an evaluation set of GPS tagged data

A mixed ultrasoft/normconserved pseudopotential scheme

A variant of the Vanderbilt ultrasoft pseudopotential scheme, where the normconservation is released for only one or a few angular channels, is presented. Within this scheme some difficulties of the truly ultrasoft pseudopotentials are overcome without sacrificing the pseudopotential softness. i) Ghost states are easily avoided without including semicore shells. ii) The ultrasoft pseudo-charge-augmentation functions can be made more soft. iii) The number of nonlocal operators is reduced. The scheme will be most useful for transition metals, and the feasibility and accuracy of the scheme is demonstrated for the 4d transition metal rhodium.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Neurocognitive Functions in 3- to 15-Year-Old Children : An International Comparison

Objectives: Performance on neurocognitive tasks develops with age, but it is still unknown whether this performance differs between children from different cultures. We compared cross-sectionally the development of neurocognitive functions in 3- to 15-year-old children from three countries: Finland, Italy, and the United States (N=2745). Methods: Language, face memory, emotion recognition, theory of mind, and visuospatial processing subtests from the NEPSY-II standardizations in Finland, Italy, and the United States were used to evaluate if children and adolescents from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds differ in performance on these measures. Results: We found significant differences in performance on the tasks between the countries. Generally, the differences were more pronounced in the younger age groups. Some subtests showed greater country effects than others, performance on these subtests being higher, in general, in one country over the others, or showed different patterns of age associated changes in test performance. Conclusions: Significant differences in neurocognitive performance between children from Finland, Italy, and the United States were found. These findings may be due to cultural or educational differences that impact test performance, or due to factors associated with the adaptation of measures from one culture to another. The finding of performance differences across countries on similar tasks indicate that cross-cultural and background variables impact performance on neuropsychological measures. Therefore, clinicians need to consider a child’s cultural background when evaluating performance on neuropsychological assessments. The results also indicate that future cross-cultural studies are needed to further examine the underlying cultural factors that influence neurocognitive performance. (JINS, 2017, 23, 1–14)Objectives: Performance on neurocognitive tasks develops with age, but it is still unknown whether this performance differs between children from different cultures. We compared cross-sectionally the development of neurocognitive functions in 3- to 15-year-old children from three countries: Finland, Italy, and the United States (N = 2745). Methods: Language, face memory, emotion recognition, theory of mind, and visuospatial processing subtests from the NEPSY-II standardizations in Finland, Italy, and the United States were used to evaluate if children and adolescents from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds differ in performance on these measures. Results: We found significant differences in performance on the tasks between the countries. Generally, the differences were more pronounced in the younger age groups. Some subtests showed greater country effects than others, performance on these subtests being higher, in general, in one country over the others, or showed different patterns of age associated changes in test performance. Conclusions: Significant differences in neurocognitive performance between children from Finland, Italy, and the United States were found. These findings may be due to cultural or educational differences that impact test performance, or due to factors associated with the adaptation of measures from one culture to another. The finding of performance differences across countries on similar tasks indicate that cross-cultural and background variables impact performance on neuropsychological measures. Therefore, clinicians need to consider a child's cultural background when evaluating performance on neuropsychological assessments. The results also indicate that future cross-cultural studies are needed to further examine the underlying cultural factors that influence neurocognitive performance.Peer reviewe

Neurocognitive Functions in 3- to 15-Year-Old Children : An International Comparison

Objectives: Performance on neurocognitive tasks develops with age, but it is still unknown whether this performance differs between children from different cultures. We compared cross-sectionally the development of neurocognitive functions in 3- to 15-year-old children from three countries: Finland, Italy, and the United States (N=2745). Methods: Language, face memory, emotion recognition, theory of mind, and visuospatial processing subtests from the NEPSY-II standardizations in Finland, Italy, and the United States were used to evaluate if children and adolescents from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds differ in performance on these measures. Results: We found significant differences in performance on the tasks between the countries. Generally, the differences were more pronounced in the younger age groups. Some subtests showed greater country effects than others, performance on these subtests being higher, in general, in one country over the others, or showed different patterns of age associated changes in test performance. Conclusions: Significant differences in neurocognitive performance between children from Finland, Italy, and the United States were found. These findings may be due to cultural or educational differences that impact test performance, or due to factors associated with the adaptation of measures from one culture to another. The finding of performance differences across countries on similar tasks indicate that cross-cultural and background variables impact performance on neuropsychological measures. Therefore, clinicians need to consider a child’s cultural background when evaluating performance on neuropsychological assessments. The results also indicate that future cross-cultural studies are needed to further examine the underlying cultural factors that influence neurocognitive performance. (JINS, 2017, 23, 1–14)Objectives: Performance on neurocognitive tasks develops with age, but it is still unknown whether this performance differs between children from different cultures. We compared cross-sectionally the development of neurocognitive functions in 3- to 15-year-old children from three countries: Finland, Italy, and the United States (N = 2745). Methods: Language, face memory, emotion recognition, theory of mind, and visuospatial processing subtests from the NEPSY-II standardizations in Finland, Italy, and the United States were used to evaluate if children and adolescents from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds differ in performance on these measures. Results: We found significant differences in performance on the tasks between the countries. Generally, the differences were more pronounced in the younger age groups. Some subtests showed greater country effects than others, performance on these subtests being higher, in general, in one country over the others, or showed different patterns of age associated changes in test performance. Conclusions: Significant differences in neurocognitive performance between children from Finland, Italy, and the United States were found. These findings may be due to cultural or educational differences that impact test performance, or due to factors associated with the adaptation of measures from one culture to another. The finding of performance differences across countries on similar tasks indicate that cross-cultural and background variables impact performance on neuropsychological measures. Therefore, clinicians need to consider a child's cultural background when evaluating performance on neuropsychological assessments. The results also indicate that future cross-cultural studies are needed to further examine the underlying cultural factors that influence neurocognitive performance.Peer reviewe

Pretreatment resistin levels are associated with erosive disease in early rheumatoid arthritis treated with disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs and infliximab

Objective: Resistin is an adipocytokine related to insulin resistance and inflammation. We investigated whether resistin is associated with disease activity and inflammation in disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drug (DMARD)-naive rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients, whether it has predictive value for radiological disease progression, and whether tumour necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) is involved in these effects. Method: Ninety-nine patients with early, DMARD-naive RA participated in the NEO-RACo study. Patients were treated for the first 4 weeks with a combination of methotrexate, sulfasalazine, hydroxychloroquine, and prednisolone (FIN-RACo treatment). Thereafter, they were randomized to receive either infliximab or placebo added to the combination for 6 months. Patients were followed for 5 years. Disease activity was evaluated using the Disease Activity Score based on 28-joint count-erythrocyte sedimentation rate, radiographs were scored with the modified Sharp-van der Heijde method, and plasma resistin concentrations were measured by immunoassay. Human THP-1 macrophages were used in the in vitro studies. Results: A high resistin level at baseline was associated with active inflammatory disease and predicted more rapid radiological progression during 5 year follow-up. Adding infliximab to the DMARD combination delayed radiological progression and overcame the poor predictive value of resistin. Resistin increased TNF-alpha production in human macrophages, indicating a possible connection between resistin and TNF-alpha. Conclusion: The results suggest that high resistin concentration may be a useful marker to distinguish patients with an increased risk of erosive disease in early active RA, and that adding TNF-alpha antagonist to the traditional DMARD combination may delay radiological progression of the disease in these patients.Peer reviewe

Active site manipulation in MoS2 cluster electrocatalysts by transition metal doping

The development of non-platinum group metal catalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) in water electrolyser devices is essential for their widespread and sustainable deployment. In recent years, molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) catalysts have received significant attention as they not only exhibit good electrocatalytic HER activity but also, crucially, acid-stability. However, further performance enhancement is required for these materials to be competitive with Pt and to that end transition metal doping of MoS2 has been explored as a route to further increasing its catalytic activity. In this work, cluster beam deposition was employed to produce controlled cobalt-doped MoS2 clusters (MoS2–Co). We demonstrate that, in contrast to previous observations of performance enhancement in MoS2 resulting from nickel doping (MoS2–Ni), the introduction of Co has a detrimental effect on HER activity. The contrasting behaviours of Ni and Co doping are rationalized by density functional theory (DFT) calculations, which suggest that HER-active surface vacancies are deactivated by combination with Co dopant atoms, whilst their activity is retained, or even partially enhanced, by combination with Ni dopant atoms. Furthermore, the adatom dopant–vacancy combination kinetics appear to be more than three orders of magnitude faster in MoS2–Co than for MoS2–Ni. These findings highlight a fundamental difference in the influence of transition metal dopants on the HER performance of MoS2 electrocatalysts and stress the importance of considering surface atomic defects when predicting their behaviour