Prevalence and spatial concordance of visual field deterioration in fellow eyes of glaucoma patients.

PurposeTo examine the prevalence of visual field deterioration in contralateral eyes of patients with worsening open-angle glaucoma and to evaluate the spatial concordance of visual field deterioration between both eyes.MethodsOne hundred sixteen open-angle glaucoma patients who underwent 8 or more visual field examinations over ≥ 6 years of follow-up were included. The rates of the fast and slow components of visual field decay for each of 52 visual field test locations were calculated with point-wise exponential regression analysis. The spatial concordance of visual field deterioration in contralateral eyes was evaluated with a concordance ratio (calculated as the number of overlapping locations divided by the total number of deteriorating locations) and by comparing the rate of decay in corresponding modified glaucoma hemifield test clusters.ResultsThe average visual field mean deviation (± standard deviation [SD]) was -8.5 (± 6.4) dB and the mean (± SD) follow-up time was 9.0 (± 1.6) years. Sixty-three patients had mild damage, 23 had moderate damage, and 30 had severe damage. The mean concordance ratio (± SD) was 0.46 (± 0.32) for the mild group, 0.33 (± 0.27) for the moderate group, and 0.35 (± 0.21) for the severe group. Thirty-one patients (27%) had deterioration in concordant locations (p < 0.05). Visual field deterioration was greater in the superior hemifield than the inferior hemifield (p < 0.05) when evaluated with both the concordance ratio and modified glaucoma hemifield test cluster analysis methods.ConclusionsThere is only fair spatial concordance with regard to visual field deterioration between the both eyes of an individual. We conclude that testing algorithms taking advantage of inter-eye spatial concordance would not be particularly advantageous in the early detection of glaucomatous deterioration

Product Market Competition And Analysts’ Forecasting Properties: Evidence From Korea

In this paper, we examine the association between product market competition and financial analysts’ forecasting properties in a sample of 76,621 analyst-firm-year observations in South Korea between 2000 and 2014. Using the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index to proxy for product market competition, we document that financial analysts are likely to issue less accurate and more optimistic forecasts in highly competitive product markets. In addition, we find that analysts’ reports show more optimism in stock recommendations in firms with high market competition

Large scale bias and the peak background split

Dark matter haloes are biased tracers of the underlying dark matter distribution. We use a simple model to provide a relation between the abundance of dark matter haloes and their spatial distribution on large scales. Our model shows that knowledge of the unconditional mass function alone is sufficient to provide an accurate estimate of the large scale bias factor. Then we use the mass function measured in numerical simulations of SCDM, OCDM and LCDM to compute this bias. Comparison with these simulations shows that this simple way of estimating the bias relation and its evolution is accurate for less massive haloes as well as massive ones. In particular, we show that haloes which are less/more massive than typical M* haloes at the time they form are more/less strongly clustered than formulae based on the standard Press-Schechter mass function predict.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, submitted to MNRAS corrected y-label for fig.4 (newlabel = 1 + oldlabel

Solution Focused Therapy for Trauma Survivors: A Review of the Outcome Literature

Directly confronting and processing past trauma can be distressing for clients and may contribute to the high dropout rates among leading trauma treatments. Solution-focused therapy (SFT) primarily focuses on the present and future and has been proposed as a strengths-based alternative for treating trauma survivors. This review systematically evaluated the existing outcome literature for the effectiveness of SFT for trauma survivors. Multiple databases were searched using search terms to identify results for solution-focused therapy as a treatment for trauma survivors. Eligible studies included experimental, quasi-experimental, or pre-post designs that reported outcome measures following SFT-based treatment. A total of five studies met inclusion criteria and were evaluated and summarized. Four out of the five studies included data on within-subjects changes in the SFT treatment group, reporting statistically significant improvements on trauma symptoms, recovery, self-esteem, and parenting, with moderate to large effect sizes. Three studies compared SFT with treatment-as- usual (TAU) or no treatment and found mixed results. Compared to control groups, SFT showed statistically significant improvements with large effect sizes on post-traumatic growth and sleep issues, but effect sizes for trauma symptoms were small and not statistically significant or varied greatly between different reporters. The existing literature provides initial evidence of overall improvement for trauma survivors who received SFT, but the effectiveness of SFT at addressing trauma symptoms requires further investigation. More high quality, controlled studies are needed to evaluate SFT as a trauma treatment