The Association Between Obstructive Sleep Apnea and Depression in Older Adults

Background: Depression is the most frequent psychiatric disorder among the elderly. Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a chronic and prevalent disease that has an ambiguous role in triggering depression. Several researches with contradictory findings have been performed about the association between OSA and depression. Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the association between OSA and depression among elderly. Patients and Methods: A total of 350 home residing elderly took part in this case-control study. The participants were selected using clustering method. All cases were divided into two groups of depressed and non-depressed using the geriatric depression scale (GDS). Then they were matched in age, gender, education and body mass index (BMI). Berlin questionnaire (BQ) was used to diagnose OSA. Data analysis was performed using Mann-Whitney U test, t-test, Chi-square and Fisher’s exact tests and odds ratio. Results: Totally, 60.6 % of depressed group and 18.9 % of non-depressed group were in high risk for OSA. A significant association was found between OSA and depression (P < 0.001, OR = 6.61, CI 95 % = 4.1 - 10.7). In addition, a significant association was found between gender and OSA (P = 0.008). Conclusions: OSA was associated with depression among the elderly patients. Given the high prevalence of OSA in older adults, implementation of screening methods is necessary to identify people at high risk of OSA

Prognostic factors for esophageal squamous cell Carcinoma-A Population-Based study in Golestan province, Iran, a high incidence area

Golestan Province in northern Iran is an area with a high incidence of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC). We aimed to investigate prognostic factors for ESCC and survival of cases in Golestan, on which little data were available. We followed-up 426 ESCC cases participating in a population-based case-control study. Data were analyzed using the Kaplan-Meier method and the Cox proportional hazard models. Median survival was 7 months. Age at diagnosis was inversely associated with survival, but the association was disappeared with adjustment for treatment. Residing in urban areas (hazard ratio, HR = 0.70; 95 CI 0.54-0.90) and being of non-Turkmen ethnic groups (HR = 0.76; 95 CI 0.61-0.96) were associated with better prognosis. In contrast to other types of tobacco use, nass (a smokeless tobacco product) chewing was associated with a slightly poorer prognosis even in models adjusted for other factors including stage of disease and treatment (HR = 1.38; 95 CI 0.99-1.92). Opium use was associated with poorer prognosis in crude analyses but not in adjusted models. Almost all of potentially curative treatments were associated with longer survival. Prognosis of ESCC in Golestan is very poor. Easier access to treatment facilities may improve the prognosis of ESCC in Golestan. The observed association between nass chewing and poorer prognosis needs further investigations; this association may suggest a possible role for ingestion of nass constituents in prognosis of ESCC. © 2011 Aghcheli et al

A note on interval estimation for the mean of inverse Gaussian distribution

In this paper, we study the interval estimation for the mean from inverse Gaussian distribution. This distribution is a member of the natural exponential families with cubic variance function. Also, we simulate the coverage probabilities for the confidence intervals considered. The results show that the likelihood ratio interval is the best interval and Wald interval has the poorest performance

A New Generalized Varentropy and its Properties

The variance of Shannon information related to the random variable X, which is called varentropy, is a measurement that indicates, how the information content of X is scattered around its entropy and explains its various applications in information theory, computer sciences, and statistics. In this paper, we introduce a new generalized varentropy based on the Tsallis entropy and also obtain some results and bounds for it. We compare the varentropy with the Tsallis varentropy. Moreover, we explain the Tsallis varentropy of the order statistics and analyse this concept in residual (past) lifetime distributions and then introduce two new classes of distributions by them.The authors would like to thank the editor and anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions that improved the quality of the paper

A view on weighted exponential entropy and examining some of its features

One of the alternative versions of Shannon entropy is a measure of information which is called exponential entropy. Shannon and exponential entropies depend only on the event probabilities. These measures have also been extended to incorporate a set of weights associated with the events. Such weights may reflect some additional characteristics of the events such as their relative importance. In this paper, Axiomatic derivations and properties of weighted exponential entropy parallel to those achieved for weighted entropy are investigated. The relation between weighted exponential entropy of  X and a strictly monotone and nonnegative function of X has obtained. The generalized weighted entropy and the generalized weighted exponential entropy for continuous random variable have been presented

A single-center non-blinded randomized clinical trial to assess the safety and effectiveness of PhR160 spray in the treatment of COVID-19 pneumonia

7-16COVID-19 is an emerging pandemic that caused a very widespread infection with more than 1000000 cases in Iran within a year. The main cause of mortality among patients with COVID-19 is pulmonary failure. In Iranian Traditional Medicine, essences have been used for curing pulmonary diseases. Pinen-Hydronoplacton-Ribonucleic acid (PHR) is an inhaler spray made of seven different plants, which all are used by humans and have desirable pharmacological features for treating pulmonary symptoms of COVID-19 patients. This study was conducted to assess the safety and effectiveness of PHR160 spray in improving pulmonary symptoms of COVID-19 patients. This was a single-centre, non-blinded randomized clinical trial with two parallel groups in two different wards of Baqiyatallah hospital, Tehran, Iran. Participants were 63 male patients diagnosed with COVID-19 pneumonia, divided into 2 groups of 32 in the intervention group and 31 in the control group. The intervention group received 5 days of PHR160 spray, 10 puffs each day, 300 micrograms in each puff in addition to the routine treatment. Oxygen saturation was measured by a pulse oximeter, every six hours and recorded daily. This study showed that administration of PhR 160 in patients of COVID-19 was safe, and it significantly increased the arterial oxygen saturation percentage in COVID-19 patients. In addition, it decreased hospitalization duration, dyspnea score, and cough score significantly in the patients. The statistical modelling test, with adjusting the age and respiratory rate for baseline and 4 days of the intervention, shows that the oxygen saturation percentage mean was significantly more in the intervention group by 5.14 units (p<0.001)

Mast cell lineage diversion of T lineage precursors by the essential T cell transcription factor GATA-3

GATA-3 is essential for T cell development from the earliest stages. However, abundant GATA-3 can drive T lineage precursors to a non–T cell fate, depending on Notch signaling and developmental stage. Here, overexpression of GATA-3 blocked the survival of pro–T cells when Notch-Delta signals were present but enhanced viability in their absence. In fetal thymocytes at the double-negative 1 (DN1) stage and DN2 stage but not those at the DN3 stage, overexpression of GATA-3 rapidly induced respecification to the mast cell lineage with high frequency by direct transcriptional 'reprogramming'. Normal DN2 thymocytes also showed mast cell potential when interleukin 3 and stem cell factor were added in the absence of Notch signaling. Our results suggest a close relationship between the pro–T cell and mast cell programs and a previously unknown function for Notch in T lineage fidelity

Log-concavity property for some well-known distributions

Interesting properties and propositions, in many branches of science such as economics have been obtained according to the property of cumulative distribution function of a random variable as a concave function. Caplin and Nalebuff (1988,1989), Bagnoli and Khanna (1989) and Bagnoli and Bergstrom (1989 , 1989, 2005) have discussed the log-concavity property of probability distributions and their applications, especially in economics. Log-concavity concerns twice differentiable real-valued function g whose domain is an interval on extended real line. g as a function is said to be log-concave on the interval (a,b) if the function ln(g) is a concave function on (a,b). Log-concavity of g on (a,b) is equivalent to g'/g being monotone decreasing on (a,b) or (ln(g))" <0. Bagnoli and Bergstrom (2005 [<A HREF="#b6">6</A>]) have obtained log-concavity for distributions such as normal, logistic, extreme-value, exponential, Laplace, Weibull, power function, uniform, gamma, beta, Pareto, log-normal, Student's t, Cauchy and F distributions. We have discussed and introduced the continuous versions of the Pearson family, also found the log-concavity for this family in general cases, and then obtained the log-concavity property for each distribution that is a member of Pearson family. For the Burr family these cases have been calculated, even for each distribution that belongs to Burr family. Also, log-concavity results for distributions such as generalized gamma distributions, Feller-Pareto distributions, generalized Inverse Gaussian distributions and generalized Log-normal distributions have been obtained