A multi-center study on the attitudes of Malaysian emergency health care staff towards allowing family presence during resuscitation of adult patients

BACKGROUND The practice of allowing family members to witness on-going active resuscitation has been gaining ground in many developed countries since it was first introduced in the early 1990s. In many Asian countries, the acceptability of this practice has not been well studied. AIM We conducted a multi-center questionnaire study to determine the attitudes of health care professionals in Malaysia towards family presence to witness ongoing medical procedures during resuscitation. METHODS Using a bilingual questionnaire (in Malay and English language), we asked our respondents about their attitudes towards allowing family presence (FP) as well as their actual experience of requests from families to be allowed to witness resuscitations. Multiple logistic regression was used to analyze the association between the many variables and a positive attitude towards FP. RESULTS Out of 300 health care professionals who received forms, 270 responded (a 90% response rate). Generally only 15.8% of our respondents agreed to allow relatives to witness resuscitations, although more than twice the number (38.5%) agreed that relatives do have a right to be around during resuscitation. Health care providers are significantly more likely to allow FP if the procedures are perceived as likely to be successful (e.g., intravenous cannulation and blood taking as compared to chest tube insertion). Doctors were more than twice as likely as paramedics to agree to FP (p-value = 0.002). This is probably due to the Malaysian work culture in our health care systems in which paramedics usually adopt a 'follow-the-leader' attitude in their daily practice. CONCLUSION The concept of allowing FP is not well accepted among our Malaysian health care providers

Poverty, growth and policy options

Examines and tests the hypotheses whether the relationship between poverty and development is U-shaped or rectangular hyperbolic. While testing these hypotheses, other variables such as life expectancy, adult literacy rate, and special country characteristics are taken into consideration. The use of international cross-section data of 34 countries on an essentially dynamic issue was made in the absence of time-series data. The authors find that poverty, measured by the proportion of people below US $35.00 per capita (in constant 1975 prices), starts declining at a decreasing rate and reaches an asymptotic level of 5 to 8% of the population below the poverty line.-Author

Equilibria of Graphical Games with Symmetries

We study graphical games where the payoff function of each player satisfies one of four types of symmetries in the actions of his neighbors. We establish that deciding the existence of a pure Nash equilibrium is NP-hard in graphical games with each of the four types of symmetry. Using a characterization of games with pure equilibria in terms of even cycles in the neighborhood graph, as well as a connection to a generalized satisfiability problem, we identify tractable subclasses of the games satisfying the most restrictive type of symmetry. In the process, we characterize a satisfiability problem that remains NP-hard in the presence of a matching, a result that may be of independent interest. Finally, games with symmetries of two of the four types are shown to possess a symmetric mixed equilibrium which can be computed in polynomial time. We have thus identified a class of games where the pure equilibrium problem is computationally harder than the mixed equilibrium problem, unless P=NP

Edaravone alleviates Alzheimer's disease-type pathologies and cognitive deficits

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of most devastating diseases affecting elderly people. Amyloid-β (Aβ) accumulation and the downstream pathological events such as oxidative stress play critical roles in pathogenesis of AD. Lessons from failures of current clinical trials suggest that targeting multiple key pathways of the AD pathogenesis is necessary to halt the disease progression. Here we show that Edaravone, a free radical scavenger that is marketed for acute ischemic stroke, has a potent capacity of inhibiting Aβ aggregation and attenuating Aβ-induced oxidation in vitro. When given before or after the onset of Aβ deposition via i.p. injection, Edaravone substantially reduces Aβ deposition, alleviates oxidative stress, attenuates the downstream pathologies including Tau hyperphosphorylation, glial activation, neuroinflammation, neuronal loss, synaptic dysfunction, and rescues the behavioral deficits of APPswe/PS1 mice. Oral administration of Edaravone also ameliorates the AD-like pathologies and memory deficits of the mice. These findings suggest that Edaravone holds a promise as a therapeutic agent for AD by targeting multiple key pathways of the disease pathogenesis.Shu-Sheng Jiao, Xiu-Qing Yao, Yu-Hui Liu, Qing-Hua Wang, Fan Zeng, Jian-Jun Lu ... et al

Model Checking Recursive Programs with Numeric Data Types

Abstract. Pushdown systems (PDS) naturally model sequential recur-sive programs. Numeric data types also often arise in real-world pro-grams. We study the extension of PDS with unbounded counters, which naturally model numeric data types. Although this extension is Turing-powerful, reachability is known to be decidable when the number of rever-sals between incrementing and decrementing modes is bounded. In this paper, we (1) pinpoint the decidability/complexity of reachability and linear/branching time model checking over PDS with reversal-bounded counters (PCo), and (2) experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in analysing software. We show reachability over PCo is NP-complete, while LTL is coNEXP-complete (coNP-complete for fixed formulas). In contrast, we prove that EF-logic over PCo is undecidable. Our NP upper bounds are by a direct poly-time reduction to satisfaction over existential Presburger formulas, allowing us to tap into highly opti-mized solvers like Z3. Although reversal-bounded analysis is incomplete for PDS with unbounded counters in general, our experiments suggest that some intricate bugs (e.g. from Linux device drivers) can be discov-ered with a small number of reversals. We also pinpoint the decidabil-ity/complexity of various extensions of PCo, e.g., with discrete clocks.