Smoking cessation—but not smoking reduction—improves the annual decline in FEV1 in occupationally exposed workers

SummaryIntroductionIndividuals exposed both to cigarette smoke and respiratory pollutants at work incur a greater risk of development of airway hyperresponsiveness (AHR) and accelerated decline in forced expiratory volume in 1s (FEV1) than that incurred by subjects undergoing each exposure separately. We examined whether smoking cessation or smoking reduction improves AHR and thereby slows down the decline in FEV1 in occupationally exposed workers.MethodsWe examined 165 workers (137 males and 28 females) participating in a smoking cessation programme. Nicotine tablets were used for smoking cessation or smoking reduction. Respiratory symptoms were assessed by questionnaire, FEV1 by spirometry and AHR by methacholine challenge test. At 1 year, subjects were classified into quitters, reducers, or continuing smokers.ResultsSixty-seven subjects completed the study (32 quitters; 17 reducers; 18 continuing smokers). Respiratory symptoms improved markedly in quitters (P<0.001 for all comparisons) and less so in reducers (P values between 0.163 and 0.027). At 1 year, FEV1 had slightly but significantly improved in quitters (P=0.006 vs. smokers; P=0.038 vs. reducers) and markedly deteriorated in reducers and continuing smokers. Concurrent, 1-year change in AHR did not differ significantly among the groups.ConclusionIn occupationally exposed workers, stopping smoking markedly improved respiratory symptoms and, in males, slowed the annual decline in FEV1. Smoking reduction resulted in smaller improvements in symptoms but deterioration in FEV1. These findings were independent of AHR. While smoking cessation should remain the ultimate goal in workplace cessation programmes more studies are necessary to better ascertain the benefits of smoking reduction

Extension of formal conjugations between diffeomorphisms

We study the formal conjugacy properties of germs of complex analytic diffeomorphisms defined in the neighborhood of the origin of ${\mathbb C}^{n}$. More precisely, we are interested on the nature of formal conjugations along the fixed points set. We prove that there are formally conjugated local diffeomorphisms $\phi, \eta$ such that every formal conjugation $\hat{\sigma}$ (i.e. $\eta \circ \hat{\sigma} = \hat{\sigma} \circ \phi$) does not extend to the fixed points set $Fix (\phi)$ of $\phi$, meaning that it is not transversally formal (or semi-convergent) along $Fix (\phi)$. We focus on unfoldings of 1-dimensional tangent to the identity diffeomorphisms. We identify the geometrical configurations preventing formal conjugations to extend to the fixed points set: roughly speaking, either the unperturbed fiber is singular or generic fibers contain multiple fixed points.Comment: 34 page

Basal ryanodine receptor activity suppresses autophagic flux

The inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate receptors (IP3Rs) and intracellular Ca2+ signaling are critically involved in regulating different steps of autophagy, a lysosomal degradation pathway. The ryanodine receptors (RyR), intracellular Ca2+-release channels mainly expressed in excitable cell types including muscle and neurons, have however not yet been extensively studied in relation to autophagy. Yet, aberrant expression and excessive activity of RyRs in these tissues has been implicated in the onset of several diseases including Alzheimer’s disease, where impaired autophagy regulation contributes to the pathology. In this study, we determined whether pharmacological RyR inhibition could modulate autophagic flux in ectopic RyR-expressing models, like HEK293 cells and in cell types that endogenously express RyRs, like C2C12 myoblasts and primary hippocampal neurons. Importantly, RyR3 overexpression in HEK293 cells impaired the autophagic flux. Conversely, in all cell models tested, pharmacological inhibition of endogenous or ectopically expressed RyRs, using dantrolene or ryanodine, augmented autophagic flux by increasing lysosomal turn-over (number of autophagosomes and autolysosomes measured as mCherry-LC3 punctae/cell increased from 70.37 ± 7.81 in control HEK RyR3 cells to 111.18 ± 7.72 and 98.14 ± 7.31 after dantrolene and ryanodine treatments, respectively). Moreover, in differentiated C2C12 cells, transmission electron microscopy demonstrated that dantrolene treatment decreased the number of early autophagic vacuoles from 5.9 ± 2.97 to 1.8 ± 1.03 per cellular cross section. The modulation of the autophagic flux could be linked to the functional inhibition of RyR channels as both RyR inhibitors efficiently diminished the number of cells showing spontaneous RyR3 activity in the HEK293 cell model (from 41.14% ± 2.12 in control cells to 18.70% ± 2.25 and 9.74% ± 2.67 after dantrolene and ryanodine treatments, respectively). In conclusion, basal RyR-mediated Ca2+-release events suppress autophagic flux at the level of the lysosomes

Spherical designs and lattices

In this article we prove that integral lattices with minimum <= 7 (or <= 9) whose set of minimal vectors form spherical 9-designs (or 11-designs respectively) are extremal, even and unimodular. We furthermore show that there does not exist an integral lattice with minimum <=11 which yields a 13-design.Comment: The final publication is available at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13366-013-0155-

Plastic flow and structural heterogeneities in silicate glasses - A high throughput investigation

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A Connection between Star Formation in Nuclear Rings and their Host Galaxies

We present results from a photometric H-alpha survey of 22 nuclear rings, aiming to provide insight into their star formation properties, including age distribution, dynamical timescales, star formation rates, and galactic bar influence. We find a clear relationship between the position angles and ellipticities of the rings and those of their host galaxies, which indicates the rings are in the same plane as the disk and circular. We use population synthesis models to estimate ages of each H-alpha emitting HII region, which range from 1 Myr to 10 Myrs throughout the rings. We find that approximately half of the rings contain azimuthal age gradients that encompass at least 25% of the ring, although there is no apparent relationship between the presence or absence of age gradients and the morphology of the rings or their host galaxies. NGC1343, NGC1530, and NGC4321 show clear bipolar age gradients, where the youngest HII regions are located near the two contact points of the bar and ring. We speculate in these cases that the gradients are related to an increased mass inflow rate and/or an overall higher gas density in the ring, which would allow for massive star formation to occur on short timescales, after which the galactic rotation would transport the HII regions around the ring as they age. Two-thirds of the barred galaxies show correlation between the locations of the youngest HII region(s) in the ring and the location of the contact points, which is consistent with predictions from numerical modeling.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures (7 color), 23 tables, accepted for publication in ApJS (Feb 08); NASA-GSFC, IAC, University of Maryland, STSc

Density hardening plasticity and mechanical aging of silica glass under pressure: A Raman spectroscopic study

In addition of a flow, plastic deformation of structural glasses (in particular amorphous silica) is characterized by a permanent densification. Raman spectroscopic estimators are shown to give a full account of the plastic behavior of silica under pressure. While the permanent densification of silica has been widely discussed in terms of amorphous-amorphous transition, from a plasticity point of view, the evolution of the residual densification with the maximum pressure of a pressure cycle can be discussed as a density hardening phenomenon. In the framework of such a mechanical aging effect, we propose that the glass structure could be labelled by the maximum pressure experienced by the glass and that the saturation of densification could be associated with the densest packing of tetrahedra only linked by their vertices

A comprehensive picture of baryons in groups and clusters of galaxies

(Abridged) Based on XMM-Newton, Chandra and SDSS data, we investigate the baryon distribution in groups and clusters and its use as a cosmological constraint. For this, we considered a sample of 123 systems, with total masses in the mass range M500 = ~ 10^13 - 4 x 10^15 h_70^-1 Msun. The gas masses and total masses are derived from X-ray data under the assumption of hydrostatic equilibrium and spherical symmetry. The stellar masses are based on SDSS-DR8 data. For the 37 systems out of 123 that had both optical and X-ray data available, we investigated the gas, stellar and total baryon mass fractions inside r2500 and r500, and the differential gas mass fraction within the spherical annulus between r2500 and r500, as a function of total mass. For the other objects, we investigated the gas mass fraction only. We find that the gas mass fraction inside r2500 and r500 depends on the total mass. However, the differential gas mass fraction does not show any dependence on total mass for systems with M500 > 10^14 Msun. We find that the total baryonic content increases with cluster mass. This led us to investigate the contribution of the ICL to the total baryon budget for lower mass systems, but we find that it cannot account for the difference observed. The gas mass fraction dependence on total mass observed for groups and clusters could be due to the difficulty of low-mass systems to retain gas inside the inner region. Due to their shallower potential well, non-thermal processes are more effective in expelling the gas from their central regions outwards. Since the differential gas mass fraction is nearly constant it provides better constraints for cosmology. Using our total f_b estimates, our results imply 0.17 < Omega_m < 0.55.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&A; 16 pages, 9 figures, 1 tabl

Regularization of Linear Ill-posed Problems by the Augmented Lagrangian Method and Variational Inequalities

We study the application of the Augmented Lagrangian Method to the solution of linear ill-posed problems. Previously, linear convergence rates with respect to the Bregman distance have been derived under the classical assumption of a standard source condition. Using the method of variational inequalities, we extend these results in this paper to convergence rates of lower order, both for the case of an a priori parameter choice and an a posteriori choice based on Morozov's discrepancy principle. In addition, our approach allows the derivation of convergence rates with respect to distance measures different from the Bregman distance. As a particular application, we consider sparsity promoting regularization, where we derive a range of convergence rates with respect to the norm under the assumption of restricted injectivity in conjunction with generalized source conditions of H\"older type

Continuous stellar mass-loss in N-body models of galaxies

We present an N-body computer code - aimed at studies of galactic dynamics - with a CPU-efficient algorithm for a continuous (i.e. time-dependent) stellar mass-loss. First, we summarize available data on stellar mass-loss and derive the long-term (20 Gyr) dependence of mass-loss rate of a coeval stellar population. We then implement it, through a simple parametric form, into a particle-mesh code with stellar and gaseous particles. We perform several tests of the algorithm reliability and show an illustrative application: a 2D simulation of a disk galaxy, starting as purely stellar but evolving as two-component due to gradual mass-loss from initial stars and due to star formation. In a subsequent paper we will use the code to study what changes are induced in galactic disks by the continuous gas recycling compared to the instantaneous recycling approximation, especially the changes in star formation rate and radial inflow of matter.Comment: accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics (13 pages, 11 postscript figures