Impact of COVID-19 on gestational diabetes pregnancy outcomes in the UK: A multicentre retrospective cohort study

Objective To determine the impact of implementing emergency care pathway(s) for screening, diagnosing and managing women with gestational diabetes (GDM) during COVID-19. Design Retrospective multicentre cohort. Setting Nine National Health Service (NHS) Hospital Trusts/Health boards in England and Scotland. Population 4915 women with GDM pre-pandemic (1 April 2018 to 31 March 2020), and 3467 women with GDM during the pandemic (1 May 2020 to 31 March 2021). Methods We examined clinical outcomes for women with GDM prior to and during the pandemic following changes in screening methods, diagnostic testing, glucose thresholds and introduction of virtual care for monitoring of antenatal glycaemia. Main Outcome Measures Intervention at birth, perinatal mortality, large-for-gestational-age infants and neonatal unit admission. Results The new diagnostic criteria more often identified GDM women who were multiparous, had higher body mass index (BMI) and greater deprivation, and less frequently had previous GDM (all p < 0.05). During COVID, these women had no differences in the key outcome measures. Of the women, 3% were identified with pre-existing diabetes at antenatal booking. Where OGTT continued during COVID, but virtual care was introduced, outcomes were also similar pre- and during the pandemic. Conclusions Using HbA1c and fasting glucose identified a higher risk GDM population during the pandemic but this had minimal impact on pregnancy outcomes. The high prevalence of undiagnosed pre-existing diabetes suggests that women with GDM risk factors should be offered HbA1c screening in early pregnancy

Application-Layer Connector Synthesis

International audienceThe heterogeneity characterizing the systems populating the Ubiquitous Computing environment prevents their seamless interoperability. Heterogeneous protocols may be willing to cooperate in order to reach some common goal even though they meet dynamically and do not have a priori knowledge of each other. Despite numerous e orts have been done in the literature, the automated and run-time interoperability is still an open challenge for such environment. We consider interoperability as the ability for two Networked Systems (NSs) to communicate and correctly coordinate to achieve their goal(s). In this chapter we report the main outcomes of our past and recent research on automatically achieving protocol interoperability via connector synthesis. We consider application-layer connectors by referring to two conceptually distinct notions of connector: coordinator and mediator. The former is used when the NSs to be connected are already able to communicate but they need to be speci cally coordinated in order to reach their goal(s). The latter goes a step forward representing a solution for both achieving correct coordination and enabling communication between highly heterogeneous NSs. In the past, most of the works in the literature described e orts to the automatic synthesis of coordinators while, in recent years the focus moved also to the automatic synthesis of mediators. Within the Connect project, by considering our past experience on automatic coordinator synthesis as a baseline, we propose a formal theory of mediators and a related method for automatically eliciting a way for the protocols to interoperate. The solution we propose is the automated synthesis of emerging mediating connectors (i.e., mediators for short)

All-sky search for long-duration gravitational wave transients with initial LIGO

We present the results of a search for long-duration gravitational wave transients in two sets of data collected by the LIGO Hanford and LIGO Livingston detectors between November 5, 2005 and September 30, 2007, and July 7, 2009 and October 20, 2010, with a total observational time of 283.0 days and 132.9 days, respectively. The search targets gravitational wave transients of duration 10-500 s in a frequency band of 40-1000 Hz, with minimal assumptions about the signal waveform, polarization, source direction, or time of occurrence. All candidate triggers were consistent with the expected background; as a result we set 90% confidence upper limits on the rate of long-duration gravitational wave transients for different types of gravitational wave signals. For signals from black hole accretion disk instabilities, we set upper limits on the source rate density between 3.4×10-5 and 9.4×10-4 Mpc-3 yr-1 at 90% confidence. These are the first results from an all-sky search for unmodeled long-duration transient gravitational waves. © 2016 American Physical Society

All-sky search for long-duration gravitational wave transients with initial LIGO

We present the results of a search for long-duration gravitational wave transients in two sets of data collected by the LIGO Hanford and LIGO Livingston detectors between November 5, 2005 and September 30, 2007, and July 7, 2009 and October 20, 2010, with a total observational time of 283.0 days and 132.9 days, respectively. The search targets gravitational wave transients of duration 10-500 s in a frequency band of 40-1000 Hz, with minimal assumptions about the signal waveform, polarization, source direction, or time of occurrence. All candidate triggers were consistent with the expected background; as a result we set 90% confidence upper limits on the rate of long-duration gravitational wave transients for different types of gravitational wave signals. For signals from black hole accretion disk instabilities, we set upper limits on the source rate density between 3.4×10-5 and 9.4×10-4 Mpc-3 yr-1 at 90% confidence. These are the first results from an all-sky search for unmodeled long-duration transient gravitational waves. © 2016 American Physical Society

Search for Tensor, Vector, and Scalar Polarizations in the Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background

The detection of gravitational waves with Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo has enabled novel tests of general relativity, including direct study of the polarization of gravitational waves. While general relativity allows for only two tensor gravitational-wave polarizations, general metric theories can additionally predict two vector and two scalar polarizations. The polarization of gravitational waves is encoded in the spectral shape of the stochastic gravitational-wave background, formed by the superposition of cosmological and individually unresolved astrophysical sources. Using data recorded by Advanced LIGO during its first observing run, we search for a stochastic background of generically polarized gravitational waves. We find no evidence for a background of any polarization, and place the first direct bounds on the contributions of vector and scalar polarizations to the stochastic background. Under log-uniform priors for the energy in each polarization, we limit the energy densities of tensor, vector, and scalar modes at 95% credibility to Ω0T<5.58×10-8, Ω0V<6.35×10-8, and Ω0S<1.08×10-7 at a reference frequency f0=25 Hz. © 2018 American Physical Society

Search for gravitational waves from Scorpius X-1 in the second Advanced LIGO observing run with an improved hidden Markov model

We present results from a semicoherent search for continuous gravitational waves from the low-mass x-ray binary Scorpius X-1, using a hidden Markov model (HMM) to track spin wandering. This search improves on previous HMM-based searches of LIGO data by using an improved frequency domain matched filter, the J-statistic, and by analyzing data from Advanced LIGO's second observing run. In the frequency range searched, from 60 to 650 Hz, we find no evidence of gravitational radiation. At 194.6 Hz, the most sensitive search frequency, we report an upper limit on gravitational wave strain (at 95% confidence) of h095%=3.47×10-25 when marginalizing over source inclination angle. This is the most sensitive search for Scorpius X-1, to date, that is specifically designed to be robust in the presence of spin wandering. © 2019 American Physical Society

Erratum: "A Gravitational-wave Measurement of the Hubble Constant Following the Second Observing Run of Advanced LIGO and Virgo" (2021, ApJ, 909, 218)

[no abstract available