14,319 research outputs found
Secondhand smoke exposure and risk of incident peripheral arterial disease and mortality: a Scotland-wide retrospective cohort study of 4045 non-smokers with cotinine measurement
Background:
Active smoking is an important risk factor for all-cause mortality and peripheral arterial disease (PAD). In contrast, published studies on the associations with secondhand smoke (SHS) are limited. The aim of this study was to examine the associations between SHS exposure and incident PAD, as well as mortality, among middle-aged non-smokers.
Methods:
We undertook a retrospective, cohort study using record linkage of the Scottish Health Surveys between 1998 and 2010 to hospital admissions and death certificates. Inclusion was restricted to participants aged > 45 years. Cox proportional hazard models were used to examine the association between SHS exposure and incident PAD (hospital admission or death) and all-cause mortality, with adjustment for potential confounders.
Results:
Of the 4045 confirmed non-smokers (self-reported non-smokers with salivary cotinine concentrations < 15 ng/mL), 1163 (28.8%) had either moderate or high exposure to SHS at baseline. In men, high exposure to SHS (cotinine ≥2.7 ng/mL) was associated with increased risk of all-cause mortality (fully adjusted hazard ratio [HR] 1.54, 95% CI 1.07–2.22, p = 0.020) with evidence of a dose-relationship (p for trend = 0.004). In men, high exposure to SHS was associated with increased risk of incident PAD over the first five years of follow-up (fully adjusted HR 4.29, 95% CI 1.14–16.10, p = 0.031) but the association became non-significant over longer term follow-up.
Conclusions:
SHS exposure was independently associated with all-cause mortality and may be associated with PAD, but larger studies, or meta-analyses, are required to confirm the latter
Perceived Family Life Quality in Junior Secondary School Students in Hong Kong
The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.The present longitudinal study examined perceived family functioning and related socio-demographic correlates from the perspective of adolescents in Hong Kong. Results showed that adolescent perceptions of family functioning based on different indicators gradually deteriorated over time. Regarding the socio-demographic correlates, (a) boys had more favourable perceived family functioning than did girls; (b) adolescents from non-intact families had poorer perceived family functioning than those from intact families; and (c) economically disadvantaged adolescents had poorer perceived family functioning than non-economically disadvantaged adolescents. Results also revealed that adolescents’ perceived family functioning was positively related to positive youth devel- opment. Analyses further indicated that perceived family functioning and positive youth development were concurrently and longitudinally related
Anisotropic optical properties of rhombohedral and tetragonal thin film BiFeO phases
The anisotropic optical properties of multiferroic BiFeO thin films have
been determined with Mueller matrix ellipsometry at room-temperature. The full
dielectric tensors of tetragonal-like and rhombohedral-like BiFeO phases
epitaxially grown on LaAlO and SrTiO single crystal substrates,
respectively, within the spectral range of 0.6 and 6.5 eV are reported.
Strain-driven anisotropy changes and transition shifts are observed as well as
evidence of sub-band gap many-particle excitations are found. The transition
shifts, mostly to higher energies for the highly strained tetragonal-like
BiFeO phase on LaAlO, are indicative of band structure differences.
Additionally, optical modelling, confirmed by piezoelectric force microscopy
studies, revealed that the average polarization direction of bivariant
BiFeO on LaAlO is not parallel to the crystallographic [001] direction
but tilted by about . Spectral weight analyses reveal
phase-dependent differences underlining that theoretical calculations of
optical spectra need further improvement to appropriately account for
electronic and excitonic correlations to fully understand multiferroic
BiFeO.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure
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