Factors Associated With Healthcare Utilization Among Children With Noncardiac Chest Pain and Innocent Heart Murmurs

Objective To examine differences in factors related to health care utilization (HCU) among children eventually diagnosed with noncardiac chest pain (NCCP) or an innocent heart murmur (IHM). Methods 67 pediatric patients with NCCP and 62 with IHM and their parent/guardian completed paper-and-pencil measures of psychological functioning and past HCU during an initial visit to the cardiologist's office. Results Children with NCCP utilized significantly more health care services compared to their IHM counterparts in the year prior to their cardiology visit. Children in the NCCP group had higher internalizing and somatic symptoms, and their parents experienced more anxious symptoms, than those in the IHM group. For the NCCP group only, child and parent psychological symptoms and parent HCU were positively related to child HCU. Conclusions Results identify possible child and parent psychological factors that may be the focus of interventions to reduce high rates of HCU among children with NCCP

Search for gravitational-lensing signatures in the full third observing run of the LIGO-Virgo network

Gravitational lensing by massive objects along the line of sight to the source causes distortions of gravitational wave-signals; such distortions may reveal information about fundamental physics, cosmology and astrophysics. In this work, we have extended the search for lensing signatures to all binary black hole events from the third observing run of the LIGO--Virgo network. We search for repeated signals from strong lensing by 1) performing targeted searches for subthreshold signals, 2) calculating the degree of overlap amongst the intrinsic parameters and sky location of pairs of signals, 3) comparing the similarities of the spectrograms amongst pairs of signals, and 4) performing dual-signal Bayesian analysis that takes into account selection effects and astrophysical knowledge. We also search for distortions to the gravitational waveform caused by 1) frequency-independent phase shifts in strongly lensed images, and 2) frequency-dependent modulation of the amplitude and phase due to point masses. None of these searches yields significant evidence for lensing. Finally, we use the non-detection of gravitational-wave lensing to constrain the lensing rate based on the latest merger-rate estimates and the fraction of dark matter composed of compact objects