Worldwide malaria incidence and cancer mortality are inversely associated

BACKGROUND: Investigations on the effects of malaria infection on cancer mortality are limited except for the incidence of Burkitt’s lymphoma (BL) in African children. Our previous murine lung cancer model study demonstrated that malaria infection significantly inhibited tumor growth and prolonged the life span of tumor-bearing mice. This study aims to assess the possible associations between malaria incidence and human cancer mortality. METHODS: We compiled data on worldwide malaria incidence and age-standardized mortality related to 30 types of cancer in 56 countries for the period 1955–2008, and analyzed their longitudinal correlations by a generalized additive mixed model (GAMM), adjusted for a nonlinear year effect and potential confounders such as country’s income levels, life expectancies and geographical locations. RESULTS: Malaria incidence was negatively correlated with all-cause cancer mortality, yielding regression coefficients (log scale) of −0.020 (95%CI: −0.027,-0.014) for men (P < 0.001) and-0.020 (95%CI: −0.025,-0.014) for women (P < 0.001). Among the 29 individual types of cancer studied, malaria incidence was negatively correlated with colorectum and anus (men and women), colon (men and women), lung (men), stomach (men), and breast (women) cancer. CONCLUSIONS: Our analysis revealed a possible inverse association between malaria incidence and the mortalities of all-cause and some types of solid cancers, which is opposite to the known effect of malaria on the pathogenesis of Burkitt’s lymphoma. Activation of the whole immune system, inhibition of tumor angiogenesis by Plasmodium infection may partially explain why endemic malaria might reduce cancer mortality at the population level

Nuclear Anapole Moments and the Parity-nonconserving Nuclear Interaction

The anapole moment is a parity-odd and time-reversal-even electromagnetic moment. Although it was conjectured shortly after the discovery of parity nonconservation, its existence has not been confirmed until recently in heavy nuclear systems, which are known to be the suitable laboratories because of the many-body enhancement. By carefully identifying the nuclear-spin-dependent atomic parity nonconserving effect, the first clear evidence was found in cesium. In this talk, I will discuss how nuclear anapole moments are used to constrain the parity-nonconserving nuclear force, a still less well-known channel among weak interactions.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, uses aipproc.cls. Proceedings of the 15th International Spin Physics Symposiu

An improved sufficient condition for absence of limit cycles in digital filters

It is known that if the state transition matrix A of a digital filter structure is such that D - A^{dagger}DA is positive definite for some diagonal matrix D of positive elements, then all zero-input limit cycles can be suppressed. This paper shows that positive semidefiniteness of D - A^{dagger}DA is in fact sufficient. As a result, it is now possible to explain the absence of limit cycles in Gray-Markel lattice structures based only on the state-space viewpoint

On factorization of a subclass of 2-D digital FIR lossless matricesfor 2-D QMF bank applications

The role of one-dimensional (1-D) digital finite impulse response (FIR) lossless matrices in the design of FIR perfect reconstruction quadrature mirror filter (QMF) banks has been explored previously. Structures which can realize the complete family of FIR lossless transfer matrices, have also been developed, with QMF application in mind. For the case of 2-D QMF banks, the same concept of lossless polyphase matrix has been used to obtain perfect reconstruction. However, the problem of finding a structure to cover all 2-D FIR lossless matrices of a given degree has not been solved. Progress in this direction is reported. A structure which completely covers a well-defined subclass of 2-D digital FIR lossless matrices is obtained

Efficient reconstruction of band-limited sequences from nonuniformly decimated versions by use of polyphase filter banks

An efficient polyphase structure for the reconstruction of a band-limited sequence from a nonuniformly decimated version is developed. Theoretically, the reconstruction involves the implementation of a bank of multilevel filters, and it is shown that how all these reconstruction filters can be obtained at the cost of one Mth band low-pass filter and a constant matrix multiplier. The resulting structure is therefore more general than previous schemes. In addition, the method offers a direct means of controlling the overall reconstruction distortion T(z) by appropriate design of a low-pass prototype filter P(z). Extension of these results to multiband band-limited signals and to the case of nonconsecutive nonuniform subsampling are also summarized, along with generalizations to the multidimensional case. Design examples are included to demonstrate the theory, and the complexity of the new method is seen to be much lower than earlier ones

Classical sampling theorems in the context of multirate and polyphase digital filter bank structures

The recovery of a signal from so-called generalized samples is a problem of designing appropriate linear filters called reconstruction (or synthesis) filters. This relationship is reviewed and explored. Novel theorems for the subsampling of sequences are derived by direct use of the digital-filter-bank framework. These results are related to the theory of perfect reconstruction in maximally decimated digital-filter-bank systems. One of the theorems pertains to the subsampling of a sequence and its first few differences and its subsequent stable reconstruction at finite cost with no error. The reconstruction filters turn out to be multiplierless and of the FIR (finite impulse response) type. These ideas are extended to the case of two-dimensional signals by use of a Kronecker formalism. The subsampling of bandlimited sequences is also considered. A sequence x(n ) with a Fourier transform vanishes for |ω|&ges;Lπ/M, where L and M are integers with L<M, can in principle be represented by reducing the data rate by the amount M/L. The digital polyphase framework is used as a convenient tool for the derivation as well as mechanization of the sampling theorem

Circulant and skew-circulant matrices as new normal-form realization of IIR digital filters

Normal-form fixed-point state-space realization of IIR (infinite-impulse response) filters are known to be free from both overflow oscillations and roundoff limit cycles, provided magnitude truncation arithmetic is used together with two's-complement overflow features. Two normal-form realizations are derived that utilize circulant and skew-circulant matrices as their state transition matrices. The advantage of these realizations is that the A-matrix has only N (rather than N2) distinct elements and is amenable to efficient memory-oriented implementation. The problem of scaling the internal signals in these structures is addressed, and it is shown that an approximate solution can be obtained through a numerical optimization method. Several numerical examples are included