Socio-cultural predictors of injuries: life-course experience of hospitalised injuries during the past century in the Velestino study.

Retrospective reviews provide unique opportunity to assess changing approaches to trauma in recent history and identify modifiable behaviours through the lessons of the past. The objective of this paper is to depict the nearly one-century long, life-course injury experience of seniors residing in Velestino, an agricultural Greek town, and comment on neglected determinants and transitional patterns following historical and socio-cultural events in the area. The life-course experience of non-fatal injuries, requiring hospitalisation, has been reported by N = 643 study participants, aged 65-102 years. Injuries were grouped and assessed in three ways: chronologically, by body part and by type. Overall, 124 injuries have been recorded over the past 70 years; the majority sustained by men (58.6%), and the highest number of injuries occurred during the recent decades, 1980s-1990s. For the age groups 26-45 and 46-65 years old, traffic (37.5% and 22.2%) and occupational (25.0% and 22.2%) events have been the commonest cause of injury, whereas injuries occurring at home were primary hazard (25.8%) for the elderly. Moreover, meaningful historical connections with warfare and migration movements were made. In retrospect, socio-cultural factors emerge as important predictors of certain injuries, pointing to the number of factors that should be taken into account when designing injury-prevention programmes

POWER ON THE PLANTATION COMPLEX: BIOPOLITICS AND THANATOPOLITICS

This study examines how planters in Barbados, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, exercised three modes of power (sovereignty, discipline, and governmentality) in the management of those enslaved. The first part of this dissertation examines how the capture, incarceration, transportation, and sale of enslaved Africans and those subjugated under regimes of unfree labour, were carried out by Imperial agents, slave-traders, and planters, through the geo-economic/political ordering of sovereign power. In the second part of this study, I demonstrate how practices of surveillance, slave-labour, punishment, and resistance realized a shift in the dominant mode of power being exercised on the plantation from sovereignty to discipline. The third, and final part of this dissertation, reveals how planters initiated pro-natalist policies through the deployment of an incentive structure, and how physicians and slave managers coordinated this governmental strategy. Throughout this work I explore how the slave vessel, colonial marketplace, and institutions of confinement, connect the economic, juridical, and political dimensions of plantation slavery as a dispositif of capitalist exploitation. These zones of exchange exhibit how the organizational synergy of Barbadian plantations shaped them into a complex biopolitical and thanatopolitical regime of racism, punishment, and managerialism

Evaluation and Treatment of Xerostomia in Cancer Patients in Clinical Practice

No abstract available

Serum folate and B12 levels in association with cognitive impairment among seniors: results from the VELESTINO study in Greece and meta-analysis.

OBJECTIVE: To summarize existing evidence on the effect of serum folate and vitamin B12 levels on cognitive impairment among elders via a meta-analysis, also including unpublished data from a cross-sectional study of seniors ( > 65 years) residing in Velestino, Greece. METHOD: Serum measurements and Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) assessments were available for 593 Velestinians. In addition, 12 studies availing data on folate blood levels (N = 9,747) and 9 on B12 (N = 8,122) were identified following a search algorithm; pooled effect estimates were derived. RESULTS: Cognitive impairment (MMSE < 24) among Velestenians was associated with lower education level in both genders; decreased social activity, depressive symptoms and low folate levels in males; older age in females. Meta-analyses showed an adverse effect of low-folate levels on cognition (OR: 1.66, 95% CI: 1.40-1.96); B12 was nonsignificantly associated (OR: 1.11, 95% CI: 0.88-1.40). DISCUSSION: Low folate levels are associated with cognitive impairment of seniors; underlying pathophysiological mechanisms should be further explored

A hybrid classification algorithm evaluated on medical data

Ant colony optimization algorithms have been applied successfully to data mining classification problems. Recently, an improved version of cAnt-Miner (Ant-Miner coping with continuous attributes), called cAnt-Miner2, has been introduced for mining classification rules. In this paper, a hybrid algorithm is presented, combining the cAnt-Miner2 and the mRMR feature selection algorithms. The proposed algorithm was experimentally compared to cAnt-Miner2, using some public medical data sets to demonstrate its functioning. The experiments were very promising and the proposed approach is better in terms of accuracy, simplicity and computational cost than the original cAnt-Miner2 algorithm. © 2010 IEEE

A study of cAnt-Miner2 parameters using medical data sets

This paper presents a study of the user-defined parameters of the cAnt-Miner2 algorithm which extended the approach of coping with continuous attributes that was introduced by the cAnt-Miner algorithm. Experiments on two public medical data sets were carried out, in order to find appropriate parameter combinations for different classification problems. The experiments highlight the influence of each parameter and their combinations on the cAnt-Miner2 algorithm, in terms of accuracy, simplicity and computational cost. © 2010 IEEE

Ant colony optimization and data mining

The Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) technique was inspired by the ants' behavior throughout their exploration for food. In nature, ants wander randomly, seeking for food. After succeeding, they return to their nest. During their move, they lay down pheromone that forms an evaporating chemical path. Other ants that locate this trail, follow it and reinforce it, since they also lay down pheromone. As a result, shorter paths to food have more pheromone and are more likely to be followed. ACO algorithms are probabilistic techniques for solving computational problems that are based in finding as good as possible paths through graphs by imitating the ants' search for food. The use of such techniques has been very successful for several problems. Besides, Data Mining (DM), a discipline that consists of techniques for discovering previously unknown, valid patterns and relationships in large data sets, has emerged as an important technology with numerous practical applications, due to wide availability of a vast amount of data. The collaborative use of ACO and DM (the use of ACO algorithms for DM tasks) is a very promising direction. In this chapter, we review ACO, DM, Classification and Clustering (two of the most popular DM tasks) and focus on the use of ACO for Classification and Clustering. Moreover, we briefly present related applications and examples and outline possible future trends of this promising collaborative use of techniques. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Ant colony optimization and data mining: Techniques and trends

The Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) technique was inspired by the ants' behaviour throughout their exploration for food. The use of this technique has been very successful for several problems. Besides, Data Mining (DM) has emerged as an important technology with numerous practical applications, due to the wide availability of a vast amount of data. The collaborative use of ACO and DM is very promising. In this paper, we review ACO, DM, Classification and Clustering (popular DM tasks) and focus on the use of ACO for Classification and Clustering. Moreover, we briefly present related applications and examples and outline possible future trends of this promising collaborative use of techniques. © 2010 IEEE