A comparison of five paediatric dosing guidelines for antibiotics

Objective: To compare dosing guidance in the paediatric formularies of high- and middle-income countries for 32 commonly prescribed antibiotics on the World Health Organization's (WHO's) 2017 Model list of essential medicines for children. / Methods: We identified paediatric antibiotic guidelines that were either widely used internationally or originated from countries in which antibiotic use has increased markedly in recent years (i.e. Brazil, China, India, the Russian Federation and South Africa). / Findings: The study analysis considered five leading antibiotic guidelines: (i) the Manual of childhood infections: the blue book; (ii) the BNF (British national formulary) for children; (iii) the Red book®: 2018-2021 report of the committee on infectious diseases; (iv) WHO's Pocket book of hospital care for children; and (v) Indian National treatment guidelines for antimicrobial use in infectious diseases. There was marked heterogeneity in the recommended dosing (i.e. daily dose, age dosing bands and dose frequency) for most commonly used antibiotics. The rationale for dosing recommendations was generally unclear. / Conclusion: The pharmacokinetic, pharmacodynamic and clinical evidence supporting paediatric antibiotic dosing, particularly on total doses and on age or weight dosing bands, needs to be improved. Future research should consider whether the variations in guidance identified stem from different clinical disease patterns, varying levels of antibiotic resistance or drug availability rather than historical preferences. Interested global parties could collaborate with WHO's Model list of essential medicines antibiotic working group to develop an evidence-based consensus and identify research priorities

Pain as a mediator in the temperament-alexithymia relationship in individuals suffering from rheumatoid arthritis

[Abstract] OBJECTIVE: The study aims to establish a relationship between temperament traits, symptoms of alexithymia, and pain intensity in rheumatoid arthritis. Despite the significant progress seen in the area of RA treatment, pain, often life-long, remains the predominant symptom. This constant pain and progressing disability, as well as dependence upon other people cause RA patients to experience psychological stress that can be modified by individual patient traits. Recently, several authors have underlined the need to relate personality and temperament constructs to neurobiological processes that may underlie individual differences. It seems then that patient characteristics may play a significant role in the course of the disease. PATIENTS AND METHODS: The study was performed on a group of patients (N=317) with rheumatoid arthritis diagnosed according to the current criteria of the American-European Consensus of 2010. All patients expressed voluntary consent to participate, and the study protocol was approved by the Local Ethics Committee. This was a survey-based study. It involved the application of the adult version of the Buss and Plomin EAS Temperament Questionnaire (EAS-D), which tests 3 main temperament domains: sociability, activity, and emotionality. The pain was measured on the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS). VAS is used to measure pain intensity. The level of alexithymia was tested using the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20. The scale consists of 20 statements and includes 3 subscales that measure difficulty in describing feelings/emotions, difficulty in identifying feelings/emotions, and operational externally oriented thinking. RESULTS: The analysis revealed that alexithymia is positively correlated only with one dimension of temperament, i.e., emotionality, and with pain intensity. Moreover, high emotionality was positively correlated with pain. A simple mediation analysis revealed that pain intensity functioned as a mediator in the emotionality-alexithymia relationship. CONCLUSIONS: The observed correlations indicate that RA patients with a high level of emotionality exhibit high alexithymia as they perceive pain related to the disease symptoms more intensely. The observed mediation is partial, meaning that there are also other mediating factors in this relationship

Erbium-doped polymer waveguide amplifiers for board-level optical interconnects

Optical interconnects have an important role to play in next-generation high-performance electronic systems by enabling power-efficient high-speed board-level communication links. Polymer-based optical waveguides is a leading technology for integrating optical links onto standard printed circuit boards as it is sufficiently low cost and enables cost-effective manufacturing and assembly. Various polymer-based optical backplanes have been reported in recent years enabling different on-board interconnection architectures. However, all currently demonstrated systems are purely passive, which limits therefore the reach, complexity and functionality of these on-board systems. Here, we present recent simulation and experimental studies towards the development of Er-doped polymer-based waveguide amplifiers. Two different approaches to integrate Er-doped materials in siloxane polymer are investigated: (i) ultrafast laser plasma implantation of Er-doped glasses and (ii) solution-based dispersion of Er-doped nanoparticles. Experimental and simulation results on the achievable performance from such waveguide amplifiers are presented focusing on impact of the waveguide loss and upconversion on the gain figure.The authors would like to acknowledge Dow Corning for the provision of the polymer samples and the UK EPSRC for supporting this work through the Seamatics research grant (EP/M015165/1) and IPES CDT (EP/L015455/1)

Erbium-doped polymer waveguide amplifiers for PCB-integrated optical links

Optical technologies are increasingly considered for use in high-performance electronic systems to overcome the performance bottleneck of electrical interconnects when operating at high frequencies and provide high-speed communication between electronic chips and modules. Polymer waveguides are leading candidates for implementing board-level optical interconnections as they exhibit favourable mechanical, thermal and optical properties for direct integration onto conventional printed circuit boards (PCBs). Numerous system demonstrators have been reported in recent years featuring different types of polymer materials and opto-electronic (OE) PCB designs. However, all demonstrated polymer-based interconnection technologies are currently passive, which limits the length of the on-board links and the number of components that can be connected in optical bus architectures. In this paper therefore, we present work towards the formation of low-cost optical waveguide amplifiers that can be readily integrated onto standard PCBs by combining two promising optical technologies: siloxane-based polymers and ultra-fast laser plasma implantation (ULPI). Siloxane-based waveguides exhibit high-temperature resistance in excess of 300°C and low loss at different wavelength ranges, while ULPI has been demonstrated to produce very high dopant concentrations in glass thin films with values of 1.63×1021 cm-3 recently reported in Er-doped silica layers. Here we present detailed simulation studies that demonstrate the potential to achieve a internal gain of up to 8 dB/cm from such structures and report on initial experimental work on Er-doped films and waveguides demonstrating photoluminescence and good lifetimes

Representative Set of Objects in Rough Sets Based on Galois Connections

This paper introduces a novel definition, called representative set of objects of a decision class, in the framework of decision systems based on rough sets. The idea behind such a notion is to consider subsets of objects that characterize the different classes given by a decision system. Besides the formal definition of representative set of objects of a decision class, we present different mathematical properties of such sets and a relationship with classification tasks based on rough sets. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG

A rough set-based association rule approach implemented on exploring beverages product spectrum

[[abstract]]When items are classified according to whether they have more or less of a characteristic, the scale used is referred to as an ordinal scale. The main characteristic of the ordinal scale is that the categories have a logical or ordered relationship to each other. Thus, the ordinal scale data processing is very common in marketing, satisfaction and attitudinal research. This study proposes a new data mining method, using a rough set-based association rule, to analyze ordinal scale data, which has the ability to handle uncertainty in the data classification/sorting process. The induction of rough-set rules is presented as method of dealing with data uncertainty, while creating predictive if—then rules that generalize data values, for the beverage market in Taiwan. Empirical evaluation reveals that the proposed Rough Set Associational Rule (RSAR), combined with rough set theory, is superior to existing methods of data classification and can more effectively address the problems associated with ordinal scale data, for exploration of a beverage product spectrum.[[notice]]補正完畢[[incitationindex]]SCI[[booktype]]紙本[[booktype]]電子