Age Cutoff for Early-Onset Parkinson\u27s Disease: Recommendations from the International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society Task Force on Early Onset Parkinson\u27s Disease

BACKGROUND: Early-onset Parkinson\u27s disease (EOPD)/young-onset Parkinson\u27s disease (YOPD) is defined as Parkinson\u27s disease (PD) with an age at onset (AAO) after age 21 years but before the usual AAO for PD. Consensus is lacking, and the reported maximal age for EOPD/YOPD has varied from 40 to 60 years, leading to a lack of uniformity in published studies and difficulty in harmonization of data. EOPD and YOPD have both been used in the literature, somewhat interchangeably. OBJECTIVE: To define the nomenclature and AAO cutoff for EOPD/YOPD. METHODS: An extensive review of the literature and task force meetings were conducted. Conclusions were reached by consensus. RESULTS: First, the literature has seen a shift from the use of YOPD toward EOPD. This seems motivated by an attempt to avoid age-related stigmatization of patients. Second, in defining EOPD, 56% of the countries use 50 or 51 years as the cutoff age. Third, the majority of international genetic studies in PD use an age cutoff of younger than 50 years to define EOPD. Fourth, many studies suggest that changes in the estrogen level can affect the predisposition to develop PD, making the average age at menopause of 50 years an important factor to consider when defining EOPD. Fifth, considering the differential impact of the AAO of PD on professional and social life, using 50 years as the upper cutoff for the definition of EOPD seems reasonable. CONCLUSIONS: This task force recommends the use of EOPD rather than YOPD. It defines EOPD as PD with AAO after 21 years but before 50 years

Revisiting Low Resource Status of Indian Languages in Machine Translation

Indian language machine translation performance is hampered due to the lack of large scale multi-lingual sentence aligned corpora and robust benchmarks. Through this paper, we provide and analyse an automated framework to obtain such a corpus for Indian language neural machine translation (NMT) systems. Our pipeline consists of a baseline NMT system, a retrieval module, and an alignment module that is used to work with publicly available websites such as press releases by the government. The main contribution towards this effort is to obtain an incremental method that uses the above pipeline to iteratively improve the size of the corpus as well as improve each of the components of our system. Through our work, we also evaluate the design choices such as the choice of pivoting language and the effect of iterative incremental increase in corpus size. Our work in addition to providing an automated framework also results in generating a relatively larger corpus as compared to existing corpora that are available for Indian languages. This corpus helps us obtain substantially improved results on the publicly available WAT evaluation benchmark and other standard evaluation benchmarks.Comment: 10 pages, few figures, Preprint under revie

Soil carbon development in rejuvenated Indian coal mine spoil

The impact of mine spoil on the landscape is significant, as excavated rock-debris is commonly disposedin heaps that blanket the original land surface. Spoil heaps destroy the original soil habitat releasing soil-bound carbon, which is difficult to re-estate when mining operations cease and restoration begins. Thepresent work follows the development of vegetative cover on a coalmine spoil tip in India over a period of19 years following restoration. The potential of re-vegetated the mine spoil to imbibe carbon is examinedthrough the development of above- and below-ground biomass development. It was observed that the soilorganic carbon and microbial biomass carbon (MBC) significantly increased with re-vegetation age, withabove ground biomass increasing by 23 times, and belowground biomass increased by 26 times during theperiod of study. Soil organic carbon and MBC increased by 4× and 6.6× times, respectively. The averagecalculated annual carbon budget was 8.40 T/ha/year, of which 2.14 T/ha was allocated to above groundbiomass, 0.31 T/ha to belowground biomass, 2.88 T/ha to litter mass and 1.35 T/ha was sequestered intothe soil. This work has shown that the development of biomass following the restoration of mine spoilwas significant and that considerable quantities of carbon were stored in above and below ground plantmatter, and in the soil itself. It is concluded that appropriate restoration strategies can be used to rapidlyestablish a viable, healthy and sustainable ecosystem that imbibes carbon into former mine-impacted land

Spatial Distribution and Risk Factors of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) H5N1 in China

Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 was first encountered in 1996 in Guangdong province (China) and started spreading throughout Asia and the western Palearctic in 2004–2006. Compared to several other countries where the HPAI H5N1 distribution has been studied in some detail, little is known about the environmental correlates of the HPAI H5N1 distribution in China. HPAI H5N1 clinical disease outbreaks, and HPAI virus (HPAIV) H5N1 isolated from active risk-based surveillance sampling of domestic poultry (referred to as HPAIV H5N1 surveillance positives in this manuscript) were modeled separately using seven risk variables: chicken, domestic waterfowl population density, proportion of land covered by rice or surface water, cropping intensity, elevation, and human population density. We used bootstrapped logistic regression and boosted regression trees (BRT) with cross-validation to identify the weight of each variable, to assess the predictive power of the models, and to map the distribution of HPAI H5N1 risk. HPAI H5N1 clinical disease outbreak occurrence in domestic poultry was mainly associated with chicken density, human population density, and elevation. In contrast, HPAIV H5N1 infection identified by risk-based surveillance was associated with domestic waterfowl density, human population density, and the proportion of land covered by surface water. Both models had a high explanatory power (mean AUC ranging from 0.864 to 0.967). The map of HPAIV H5N1 risk distribution based on active surveillance data emphasized areas south of the Yangtze River, while the distribution of reported outbreak risk extended further North, where the density of poultry and humans is higher. We quantified the statistical association between HPAI H5N1 outbreak, HPAIV distribution and post-vaccination levels of seropositivity (percentage of effective post-vaccination seroconversion in vaccinated birds) and found that provinces with either outbreaks or HPAIV H5N1 surveillance positives in 2007–2009 appeared to have had lower antibody response to vaccination. The distribution of HPAI H5N1 risk in China appears more limited geographically than previously assessed, offering prospects for better targeted surveillance and control interventions

Plagioclase preferred orientation in layered mylonites : evaluation of flow laws for the lower crust

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution February 2008We evaluate the applicability of plagioclase and gabbro flow laws by comparing predicted and observed deformation mechanisms in gabbroic shear zones. Gabbros and layered gabbro mylonites were collected from the Southwest Indian Ridge (SWIR), ODP Hole 735B. Deformation temperatures are constrained by two-pyroxene thermometry, stress is estimated from grain size, and deformation mechanisms are analyzed by microstructure and the presence or absence of a lattice preferred orientation (LPO). Our analyses indicate that mylonite layers deformed at a strain rate in the range of 10-12 to 10- 11 s-1, while coarse-grained gabbro deformed at a strain rate of approximately 10-14 to 10- 13 s-1. Plagioclase in pure plagioclase mylonite layers exhibit strong LPOs indicating they deform by dislocation creep. Plagioclase grain size in mixed plagioclase-pyroxene mylonite layers is finer than in pure plagioclase layers, and depends on the size and proportion of pyroxenes. Progressive mixing of pyroxene and plagioclase within gabbro mylonite layers is accompanied by weakening of the LPO indicating that phase mixing promotes a transition to diffusion creep processes that involve grain boundary sliding. Our results indicate that experimental flow laws are accurate at geologic strain rates, although the strain rate for diffusion creep of fine-grained gabbro may be underestimated. At the conditions estimated for the SWIR crust, our calculations suggest that strain localization leads to a factor of two to four decrease in lower crustal viscosity. Even so, the viscosity of lower gabbroic crust is predicted to be similar to that of dry upper mantle

Improved performance of crystal structure solution from powder diffraction data through parameter tuning of a simulated annealing algorithm

Significant gains in the performance of the simulated annealing algorithm in the DASH software package have been realised by using the irace automatic configuration tool to optimise the values of three key simulated annealing parameters. Specifically, the success rate in finding the global minimum in intensity chi squared space is improved by up to an order of magnitude. The general applicability of these revised simulated annealing parameters is demonstrated using the crystal structure determinations of over 100 powder diffraction data sets

Flying Over an Infected Landscape: Distribution of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 Risk in South Asia and Satellite Tracking of Wild Waterfowl

Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 virus persists in Asia, posing a threat to poultry, wild birds, and humans. Previous work in Southeast Asia demonstrated that HPAI H5N1 risk is related to domestic ducks and people. Other studies discussed the role of migratory birds in the long distance spread of HPAI H5N1. However, the interplay between local persistence and long-distance dispersal has never been studied. We expand previous geospatial risk analysis to include South and Southeast Asia, and integrate the analysis with migration data of satellite-tracked wild waterfowl along the Central Asia flyway. We find that the population of domestic duck is the main factor delineating areas at risk of HPAI H5N1 spread in domestic poultry in South Asia, and that other risk factors, such as human population and chicken density, are associated with HPAI H5N1 risk within those areas. We also find that satellite tracked birds (Ruddy Shelduck and two Bar-headed Geese) reveal a direct spatio-temporal link between the HPAI H5N1 hot-spots identified in India and Bangladesh through our risk model, and the wild bird outbreaks in May–June–July 2009 in China (Qinghai Lake), Mongolia, and Russia. This suggests that the continental-scale dynamics of HPAI H5N1 are structured as a number of persistence areas delineated by domestic ducks, connected by rare transmission through migratory waterfowl

Global patient outcomes after elective surgery: prospective cohort study in 27 low-, middle- and high-income countries.

BACKGROUND: As global initiatives increase patient access to surgical treatments, there remains a need to understand the adverse effects of surgery and define appropriate levels of perioperative care. METHODS: We designed a prospective international 7-day cohort study of outcomes following elective adult inpatient surgery in 27 countries. The primary outcome was in-hospital complications. Secondary outcomes were death following a complication (failure to rescue) and death in hospital. Process measures were admission to critical care immediately after surgery or to treat a complication and duration of hospital stay. A single definition of critical care was used for all countries. RESULTS: A total of 474 hospitals in 19 high-, 7 middle- and 1 low-income country were included in the primary analysis. Data included 44 814 patients with a median hospital stay of 4 (range 2-7) days. A total of 7508 patients (16.8%) developed one or more postoperative complication and 207 died (0.5%). The overall mortality among patients who developed complications was 2.8%. Mortality following complications ranged from 2.4% for pulmonary embolism to 43.9% for cardiac arrest. A total of 4360 (9.7%) patients were admitted to a critical care unit as routine immediately after surgery, of whom 2198 (50.4%) developed a complication, with 105 (2.4%) deaths. A total of 1233 patients (16.4%) were admitted to a critical care unit to treat complications, with 119 (9.7%) deaths. Despite lower baseline risk, outcomes were similar in low- and middle-income compared with high-income countries. CONCLUSIONS: Poor patient outcomes are common after inpatient surgery. Global initiatives to increase access to surgical treatments should also address the need for safe perioperative care. STUDY REGISTRATION: ISRCTN5181700