Comparative Effectiveness of Step-up Therapies in Children with Asthma Prescribed Inhaled Corticosteroids : A Historical Cohort Study

This work was supported by the Respiratory Effectiveness Group. Acknowledgments We thank the Respiratory Effectiveness Group for funding this work, Annie Burden for assistance with statistics, and Simon Van Rysewyk and Lisa Law for assistance with medical writing.Peer reviewedPostprin

How sensorimotor interaction shapes and supports young children's gestural communication around science

Research has demonstrated that gesture produced during conversation can provide insights into scientific thinking and can aid scientific communication in adults and school-aged children. However, to date, there has been a limited exploration into the role of gesture in supporting young children’s science communication, and how this is underpinned and shaped by their sensorimotor experiences. This study examines, identifies and conceptualises ways in which children spontaneously used gesture during their interaction-orientated discourse and how this mapped to their action experiences at a water table. Findings show how gestural communication in children under 5 years of age can convey different levels of complexity related to science thinking

Elder Financial Exploitation: Implications for Future Policy and Research in Elder Mistreatment

Recent advances in the understanding of elder mistreatment have demonstrated that financial exploitation tends to be one of the most common forms of mistreatment affecting older populations. Agencies such as the World Bank and World Health Organization show significant concern regarding financial exploitation and its connection to physical and emotional injury to victims. The World Bank uses the term “financial violence” as a means of generally describing the harm caused to an individual as a result of financial exploitation or abuse. The proportion of financial exploitation in relation to other forms of elder mistreatment is defined in our research. We discuss the potential impact of elder financial exploitation on victims as well as explore the implications for future research and policy development focused on financial aspects of elder mistreatment and call for further study in the concept of financial exploitation as a violent act

Protostellar collapse and fragmentation using an MHD GADGET

Although the influence of magnetic fields is regarded as vital in the star formation process, only a few magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) simulations have been performed on this subject within the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method. This is largely due to the unsatisfactory treatment of non-vanishing divergence of the magnetic field. Recently smoothed particle magnetohydrodynamics (SPMHD) simulations based on Euler potentials have proven to be successful in treating MHD collapse and fragmentation problems, however these methods are known to have some intrinsical difficulties. We have performed SPMHD simulations based on a traditional approach evolving the magnetic field itself using the induction equation. To account for the numerical divergence, we have chosen an approach that subtracts the effects of numerical divergence from the force equation, and additionally we employ artificial magnetic dissipation as a regularization scheme. We apply this realization of SPMHD to a widely known setup, a variation of the 'Boss & Bodenheimer standard isothermal test case', to study the impact of the magnetic fields on collapse and fragmentation. In our simulations, we concentrate on setups, where the initial magnetic field is parallel to the rotation axis. We examine different field strengths and compare our results to other findings reported in the literature. We are able to confirm specific results found elsewhere, namely the delayed onset of star formation for strong fields, accompanied by the tendency to form only single stars. We also find that the 'magnetic cushioning effect', where the magnetic field is wound up to form a 'cushion' between the binary, aids binary fragmentation in a case, where previously only formation of a single protostar was expected.Comment: 18 pages, 11 figures. Final version (with revisions). Accepted to MNRA

Suicide prevention: update of the summary of evidence

This document has been produced by the Vulnerable Groups Team of the Public Health Wales NHS Trust in conjunction with the Support Unit for Research Evidence at Cardiff University. It updates the document originally published by the National Public Health Service for Wales in 2007. This document brings together evidence relevant to the prevention of suicide and self harm. It adopts a public health approach to prevention and the evidence is presented at four levels. The document is primarily to support the health boards in developing suicide prevention plans but will be of relevance to other agencies and individuals with an interest in suicide and self harm preventio

Radiative Falloff in Neutron Star Spacetimes

We systematically study late-time tails of scalar waves propagating in neutron star spacetimes. We consider uniform density neutron stars, for which the background spacetime is analytic and the compaction of the star can be varied continously between the Newtonian limit 2M/R << 1 and the relativistic Buchdahl limit 2M/R = 8/9. We study the reflection of a finite wave packet off neutron stars of different compactions 2M/R and find that a Newtonian, an intermediate, and a highly relativistic regime can be clearly distinguished. In the highly relativistic regime, the reflected signal is dominated by quasi-periodic peaks, which originate from the wave packet bouncing back and forth between the center of the star and the maximum of the background curvature potential at R ~ 3 M. Between these peaks, the field decays according to a power-law. In the Buchdahl limit 2M/R -> 8/9 the light travel time between the center and the maximum or the curvature potential grows without bound, so that the first peak arrives only at infinitely late time. The modes of neutron stars can therefore no longer be excited in the ultra-relativistic limit, and it is in this sense that the late-time radiative decay from neutron stars looses all its features and gives rise to power-law tails reminiscent of Schwarzschild black holes.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, to appear in PR

Genome-wide association study of receptive language ability of 12 year olds

Purpose: We have previously shown that individual differences in measures of receptive language ability at age 12 are highly heritable. The current study attempted to identify some of the genes responsible for the heritability of receptive language ability using a genome-wide association (GWA) approach. Method: We administered four internet-based measures of receptive language (vocabulary, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics) to a sample of 2329 12-year-olds for whom DNA and genome-wide genotyping were available. Nearly 700,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and one million imputed SNPs were included in a GWA analysis of receptive language composite scores. Results: No SNP associations met the demanding criterion of genome-wide significance that corrects for multiple testing across the genome (p < 5 ×10-8). The strongest SNP association did not replicate in an additional sample of 2639 12-year-olds. Conclusion: These results indicate that individual differences in receptive language ability in the general population do not reflect common genetic variants that account for >3% of the phenotypic variance. The search for genetic variants associated with language skill will require larger samples and additional methods to identify and functionally characterize the full spectrum of risk variants

Neuronal activation for semantically reversible sentences

Semantically reversible sentences are prone to misinterpretation and take longer for typically developing children and adults to comprehend; they are also particularly problematic for those with language difficulties such as aphasia or Specific Language Impairment. In our study, we used fMRI to compare the processing of semantically reversible and nonreversible sentences in 41 healthy participants to identify how semantic reversibility influences neuronal activation. By including several linguistic and nonlinguistic conditions within our paradigm, we were also able to test whether the processing of semantically reversible sentences places additional load on sentence-specific processing, such as syntactic processing and syntactic-semantic integration, or on phonological working memory. Our results identified increased activation for reversible sentences in a region on the left temporal–parietal boundary, which was also activated when the same group of participants carried out an articulation task which involved saying “one, three” repeatedly. We conclude that the processing of semantically reversible sentences places additional demands on the subarticulation component of phonological working memory