Familial Hypokalemic Periodic Paralysis in Blacks

Hypokalemic periodic paralysis is an uncommon disease that has rarely been reported in blacks. Historical, clinical, and pathological findings in three black patients, in addition to those previously reported in the literature, suggest that the spectrum of the disease is identical in both blacks and whites. Considering the disease as either different or unknown in the black population is probably not justified

Outdoor thermal comfort within five different urban forms in the Netherlands

Outdoor thermal comfort in urban spaces is known as an important contributor to pedestrians' health. The urban microclimate is also important more generally through its influence on urban air quality and the energy use of buildings. These issues are likely to become more acute as increased urbanisation and climate change exacerbate the urban heat island effect. Careful urban planning, however, may be able to provide for cooler urban environments. Different urban forms provide different microclimates with different comfort situations for pedestrians. In this paper, singular East–West and North–South, linear East–West and North–South, and a courtyard form were analysed for the hottest day so far in the temperate climate of the Netherlands (19th June 2000 with the maximum 33 °C air temperature). ENVI-met was used for simulating outdoor air temperature, mean radiant temperature, wind speed and relative humidity whereas RayMan was used for converting these data into Physiological Equivalent Temperature (PET). The models with different compactness provided different thermal environments. The results demonstrate that duration of direct sun and mean radiant temperature, which are influenced by urban form, play the most important role in thermal comfort. This paper also shows that the courtyard provides the most comfortable microclimate in the Netherlands in June compared to the other studied urban forms. The results are validated through a field measurement and calibration

Occult Cushing\u27s Syndrome Presenting with Osteoporosis

Osteoporosis is a frequent complication both of endogenous hypercortisolism and of long-term treatment with corticosteroids, but only rarely is it the major clinical feature with the more characteristic features absent or minimally present. In the two patients presented, hypercortisolism was uncovered only during routine evaluation of osteoporosis. This presentation is probably due to slow progression of the disease and is often associated with so-called black adenoma of the adrenal gland. Secondary causes should be sought in all patients with seemingly senile or postmenopausal osteoporosis

A scalable implementation of information theoretic feature selection for high dimensional data

With the growth of high dimensional data, feature selection is a vital component of machine learning as well as an important stand alone data analytics tool. Without it, the computation cost of big data analytics can become unmanageable and spurious correlations and noise can reduce the accuracy of any results. Feature selection removes irrelevant and redundant information leading to faster, more reliable data analysis. Feature selection techniques based on information theory are among the fastest known and the Manchester AnalyticS Toolkit (MAST) provides an efficient, parallel and scalable implementation of these methods. This paper considers a number of data structures for storing the frequency counters that underpin MAST. We show that preprocessing the data to reduce the number of zero-valued counters in an array structure results in an order of magnitude reduction in both memory usage and execution time compared to state of the art structures that use explicit mappings to avoid zero-valued counters. We also describe a number of parallel processing techniques that enable MAST to scale linearly with the number of processors even on NUMA architectures. MAST targets scale-up servers rather than scale-out clusters and we show that it performs orders of magnitude faster than existing tools. Moreover, we show that MAST is 3.5 times faster than a scale-out solution built for Spark running on the same server. As an example of the performance of MAST, we were able to process a dataset of 100 million examples and 100,000 features in under 10 minutes on a four socket server which each socket containing an 8-core Intel Xeon E5-4620 processor

Longitudinal trends in master track and field performance throughout the aging process: 83,209 results from Sweden in 16 athletics disciplines

© 2020, The Author(s). In the research of age-related performance declines, the value of cross-sectional versus longitudinal data is an ongoing debate. This paper analyses the largest longitudinal master track and field data set ever published to compare the age-related decline in performance between 16 athletics disciplines in cross-sectional and longitudinal data. The data set contained 83,209 results (64,948 from men, 78.1%; 18,261 from women, 21.9%) from 34,132 athletes (26,186 men, 76.7%; 7946 women, 23.3%), aged 35–97 years. In 61 athletes, 20 or more, and in 312 athletes, 15 or more results were available. The data were analyzed by regression statistics/ANCOVA. Men had a higher performance than women, irrespective of discipline in both cross-sectional and longitudinal data (p < 0.001). The performance in cross-sectional data was lower compared with the longitudinal data in all events and at any age (p ≤ 0.007) except for 1000 m men. The average age was lower in the cross-sectional than the longitudinal data (p < 0.001); men 46 and 58 years, women 44 and 56 years, respectively. The annual percentage rate of decline did not differ significantly between cross-sectional and longitudinal data, or between sexes in most disciplines. Performance declines after age 70 were 1.7 times (men) and 1.4 times (women) as steep as before. In conclusion, although longitudinal master athletics data of athletes with 10 and more results has higher average performance and age compared with cross-sectional data, cross-sectional data give a good impression of the annual percentage decline in performance, which was similar in men and women

The effect of past use of oral contraceptive on bone mineral density, bone biochemical markers and muscle strength in healthy pre and post menopausal women

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>during adulthood, most studies have reported that oral contraceptive (OC) pills had neutral, or possibly beneficial effect on bone health. We proposed this study of pre and post menopausal women assessing BMD, bone biochemical markers and physical performance among OC past users and comparable women who have never use Ocs.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A cross-sectional study comparing the bone density, bone biochemical markers (osteocalcin, CTX) and three measures to assess physical performance: timed get-up-and-go test "TGUG", five-times-sit-to-stand test "5 TSTS" and 8-feet speed walk "8 FSW" of users and never users OC. We were recruited 210 women who used OC for at least 2 years with that of 200 nonusers was carried out in pre and postmenopausal women (24-86 years).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>when analysing the whole population, BMD and biochemical markers values were similar for Ocs past users and control subjects. However when analysing the subgroup of premenopausal women, there was a statistically significant difference between users and never-users in osteocalcin (15,5 ± 7 ng/ml vs 21,6 ± 9 ng/ml; p = 0,003) and CTX (0,30 ± 0,1 ng/ml vs 0,41 ± 0,2 ng/ml; p = 0,025). This difference persisted after adjustment for age, BMI, age at menarche and number of pregnancies. In contrast, in post menopausal women, there was no difference in bone biochemical markers between OC users and the control. On the other hand OC past users had a significant greater performance than did the never users group. And when analysing the physical performance tests by quartile OC duration we found a significant negative association between the three tests and the use of OC more than 10 years.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>the funding show no evidence of a significant difference in BMD between Ocs users and never user control groups, a decrease in bone turn over in OC pre menopausal users and a greater physical performances in patients who used OC up than 10 years.</p

Peak strain magnitudes and rates in the tibia exceed greatly those in the skull: An in vivo study in a human subject

Bone mass and architecture are the result of a genetically determined baseline structure, modified by the effect of internal hormonal/biochemical regulators and the effect of mechanical loading. Bone strain is thought to drive a feedback mechanism to regulate bone formation and resorption to maintain an optimal, but not excessive mass and organisation of material at each skeletal location. Because every site in the skeleton has different functions, we have measured bone strains induced by physiological and more unusual activities, at two different sites, the tibia and cranium of a young human male in vivo. During the most vigorous activities, tibial strains were shown to exceed 0.2%, when ground reaction exceeded 5 times body weight. However in the skull the highest strains recorded were during heading a heavy medicine/exercise ball where parietal strains were up to 0.0192%. Interestingly parietal strains during more physiological activities were much lower, often below 0.01%. Strains during biting were not dependent upon bite force, but could be induced by facial contortions of similar appearance without contact between the teeth. Rates of strain change in the two sites were also very different, where peak tibial strain rate exceeded rate in the parietal bone by more than 5 fold. These findings suggest that the skull and tibia are subject to quite different regulatory influences, as strains that would be normal in the human skull would be likely to lead to profound bone loss by disuse in the long bones

Characteristics of patients initiating raloxifene compared to those initiating bisphosphonates

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Both raloxifene and bisphosphonates are indicated for the prevention and treatment of postmenopausal osteoporosis, however these medications have different efficacy and safety profiles. It is plausible that physicians would prescribe these agents to optimize the benefit/risk profile for individual patients. The objective of this study was to compare demographic and clinical characteristics of patients initiating raloxifene with those of patients initiating bisphosphonates for the prevention and treatment of osteoporosis.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>This study was conducted using a retrospective cohort design. Female beneficiaries (45 years and older) with at least one claim for raloxifene or a bisphosphonate in 2003 through 2005 and continuous enrollment in the previous 12 months and subsequent 6 months were identified using a collection of large national commercial, Medicare supplemental, and Medicaid administrative claims databases (MarketScan^®). Patients were divided into two cohorts, a combined commercial/Medicare cohort and a Medicaid cohort. Within each cohort, characteristics (demographic, clinical, and resource utilization) of patients initiating raloxifene were compared to those of patients initiating bisphosphonate therapy. Group comparisons were made using chi-square tests for proportions of categorical measures and Wilcoxon rank-sum tests for continuous variables. Logistic regression was used to simultaneously examine factors independently associated with initiation of raloxifene versus a bisphosphonate.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Within both the commercial/Medicare and Medicaid cohorts, raloxifene patients were younger, had fewer comorbid conditions, and fewer pre-existing fractures than bisphosphonate patients. Raloxifene patients in both cohorts were less likely to have had a bone mineral density (BMD) screening in the previous year than were bisphosphonate patients, and were also more likely to have used estrogen or estrogen/progestin therapy in the previous 12 months. These differences remained statistically significant in the multivariate model.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>In this sample of patients enrolled in commercial, Medicare, and Medicaid plans, patients who initiated raloxifene treatment differed from those initiating bisphosphonates. Raloxifene patients were younger, had better overall health status and appeared to be less likely to have risk factors for new osteoporotic fractures than bisphosphonate patients. Differences in the clinical profiles of these agents may impact prescribing decisions. Investigators using observational data to make comparisons of treatment outcomes associated with these medications should take these important differences in patient characteristics into consideration.</p