Prolonged exercise testing in two children with a mild Multiple Acyl-CoA-Dehydrogenase deficiency

BACKGROUND: Multiple Acyl-CoA-Dehydrogenase deficiency (MADD) is an inherited metabolic disorder characterized by impaired oxidation of fatty acids and some amino acids. METHODS: We were interested whether children with MADD could tolerate a prolonged low-intensity exercise test and if this test could have any additional diagnostic value. Therefore, we performed a maximal exercise test and a low-intensity prolonged exercise test in 2 patients with MADD and in 5 control subjects. During a prolonged exercise test the subjects exercised on a cycle ergometer at a constant workload of 30% of their maximum for 90 minutes and heart rate, oxygen uptake, fuel utilization and changes in relevant blood and urinary parameters were monitored. RESULTS: The tests were tolerated well. During the prolonged exercise test the fatty acid oxidation (FAO) was quite low compared to 5 control subjects, while characteristic metabolites of MADD appeared in plasma and urine. CONCLUSION: We suggest that the prolonged exercise test could be of diagnostic importance and might replace the fasting test as a diagnostic procedure in some cases, particularly in patients with anamnestic signs of intolerance for prolonged exercise

Automatic skeleton-based compilation through integration with an algorithm classification

This paper presents a technique to fully automatically generate efficient and readable code for parallel processors. We base our approach on skeleton-based compilation and ‘algorithmic species’, an algorithm classification of program code. We use a tool to automatically annotate C code with species information where possible. The annotated program code is subsequently fed into the skeleton-based source-to-source compiler ‘Bones’, which generates OpenMP, OpenCL or CUDA code and optimises host-accelerator transfers. This results in a unique approach, integrating a skeleton-based compiler for the first time into an automated flow. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach on the PolyBench suite by showing average speed-ups of 1.4x and 1.6x for GPU code compared to ppcg and Par4All, two state-of-the-art compilers