Assessment of depression in diabetic patients

Background: Diabetes is one of the most common chronic conditions in the world. The worldwide prevalence of diabetes mellitus (DM) has risen dramatically over the past two decades because of increasing obesity and reduced activity levels. The purpose of this study was to show the association between depression and diabetes. Methods: It was a cross-study. The study included 240 patients who were chosen randomly with no gender bias. A convenient subject of 240 diabetic patients was interviewed. Results: Out of the total 240 diabetic patients, included in this study, the majority of patients, 52.63% in the age group of 60 years had depression with a Hamilton score of >19 while 47.37% of patients in the age of 40 to 50 years had Hamilton score of >19. 84.21% of males had depression with a Hamilton score >19 as compared to females who had a Hamilton score of 15.79%. The patients within the age group of 40-59 have 2.5 times more risk of having depression as compared to the age group of 20 to 39 and patients in the age group >60 years have 4.23 times higher risk of depression as compared to patients in the age group of 20 to 39 years. The association between gender and depression shows that males have a higher rate of depression (78.17%) as compared to females (21.81%) with an odd's ratio of 3.0. Conclusions: Our study showed a high prevalence of depression and anxiety in male patients and the elderly age group. Planning and implementation of screening for mental health issues in the elderly population diagnosed with a lifestyle disease-such as type 2 diabetes mellitus-with existing comorbidities should be recognized as one of the most important goals of the public health system. It seems necessary to involve medical teams in the screening process to verify the symptoms, promptly establish the diagnosis, and initiate the appropriate depression treatment. In diabetic patients, depression remains underdiagnosed and an important aspect of the diabetic specialists would be the awareness of this quite common co-morbidity

Moving Alps. Le conseguenze sociali della dismissione industriale nello spazio alpino europeo.

Presentazione dei risultati del progetto trAIL

The Infrared Behavior of Gluon and Ghost Propagators in Landau Gauge QCD

A solvable systematic truncation scheme for the Dyson-Schwinger equations of Euclidean QCD in Landau gauge is presented. It implements the Slavnov-Taylor identities for the three-gluon and ghost-gluon vertices, whereas irreducible four-gluon couplings as well as the gluon-ghost and ghost-ghost scattering kernels are neglected. The infrared behavior of gluon and ghost propagators is obtained analytically: The gluon propagator vanishes for small spacelike momenta whereas the ghost propagator diverges stronger than a massless particle pole. The numerical solutions are compared with recent lattice data for these propagators. The running coupling of the renormalization scheme approaches a fixed point, $\alpha_c \simeq 9.5$, in the infrared.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, Revtex; revised version accepted for publication in Physical Review Letter

Study of Quark Propagator Solutions to the Dyson--Schwinger Equation in a Confining Model

We solve the Dyson--Schwinger equation for the quark propagator in a model with singular infrared behavior for the gluon propagator. We require that the solutions, easily found in configuration space, be tempered distributions and thus have Fourier transforms. This severely limits the boundary conditions that the solutions may satisify. The sign of the dimensionful parameter that characterizes the model gluon propagator can be either positive or negative. If the sign is negative, we find a unique solution. It is singular at the origin in momentum space, falls off like $1/p^2$ as $p^2\rightarrow +/-\infty$, and it is truly nonperturbative in that it is singular in the limit that the gluon--quark interaction approaches zero. If the sign of the gluon propagator coefficient is positive, we find solutions that are, in a sense that we exhibit, unconstrained linear combinations of advanced and retarded propagators. These solutions are singular at the origin in momentum space, fall off like $1/p^2$ asympotically, exhibit ``resonant--like" behavior at the position of the bare mass of the quark when the mass is large compared to the dimensionful interaction parameter in the gluon propagator model, and smoothly approach a linear combination of free--quark, advanced and retarded two--point functions in the limit that the interaction approaches zero. In this sense, these solutions behave in an increasingly ``particle--like" manner as the quark becomes heavy. The Feynman propagator and the Wightman function are not tempered distributions and therefore are not acceptable solutions to the Schwinger--Dyson equation in our model. On this basis we advance several arguments to show that the Fourier--transformable solutions we find are consistent with quark confinement, even though they have singularities on th

Nonperturbative Determination of Heavy Meson Bound States

In this paper we obtain a heavy meson bound state equation from the heavy quark equation of motion in heavy quark effective theory (HQET) and the heavy meson effective field theory we developed very recently. The bound state equation is a covariant extention of the light-front bound state equation for heavy mesons derived from light-front QCD and HQET. We determine the covariant heavy meson wave function variationally by minimizing the binding energy $\bar{\Lambda}$. Subsequently the other basic HQET parameters $\lambda_1$ and $\lambda_2$, and the heavy quark masses $m_b$ and $m_c$ can also be consistently determined.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figur

Slavnov-Taylor identities in Coulomb gauge Yang-Mills theory

The Slavnov-Taylor identities of Coulomb gauge Yang-Mills theory are derived from the (standard, second order) functional formalism. It is shown how these identities form closed sets from which one can in principle fully determine the Green's functions involving the temporal component of the gauge field without approximation, given appropriate input.Comment: 20 pages, no figure

pi-pi scattering in a QCD based model field theory

A model field theory, in which the interaction between quarks is mediated by dressed vector boson exchange, is used to analyse the pionic sector of QCD. It is shown that this model, which incorporates dynamical chiral symmetry breaking, asymptotic freedom and quark confinement, allows one to calculate $f_\pi$, $m_\pi$, $r_\pi$ and the partial wave amplitudes in $\pi$-$\pi$ scattering and obtain good agreement with the experimental data, with the latter being well described up to energies \mbox{$E\simeq 700$ MeV}.Comment: 23 Pages, 4 figures in PostScript format, PHY-7512-TH-93, REVTEX Available via anonymous ftp in /pub: login anonymou get pipi93.tex Fig1.ps Fig2.ps Fig3.ps Fig4.p

Dynamical chiral symmetry breaking and confinement with an infrared-vanishing gluon propagator?

We study a model Dyson-Schwinger equation for the quark propagator closed using an {\it Ansatz} for the gluon propagator of the form \mbox{$D(q) \sim q^2/[(q^2)^2 + b^4]$} and two {\it Ans\"{a}tze} for the quark-gluon vertex: the minimal Ball-Chiu and the modified form suggested by Curtis and Pennington. Using the quark condensate as an order parameter, we find that there is a critical value of $b=b_c$ such that the model does not support dynamical chiral symmetry breaking for $b>b_c$. We discuss and apply a confinement test which suggests that, for all values of $b$, the quark propagator in the model {\bf is not} confining. Together these results suggest that this Ansatz for the gluon propagator is inadequate as a model since it does not yield the expected behaviour of QCD.Comment: 21 Pages including 4 PostScript figures uuencoded at the end of the file. Replacement: slight changes of wording and emphasis. ADP-93-215/T133, ANL-PHY-7599-TH-93, FSU-SCRI-93-108, REVTEX 3.

Seropositivity to Herpes Simplex Virus Antibodies and Risk of Alzheimer's Disease: A Population-Based Cohort Study

International audienceBACKGROUND: Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV) infection has been proposed as a possible risk factor of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) notably because it is neurotropic, ubiquitous in the general population and able to establish lifelong latency in the host. The fact that HSV was present in elderly subjects with AD suggests that the virus could be a co-factor of the disease. We investigated the risk of developing AD in anti-HSV immunoglobulin G (IgG) positive subjects (indicator of a lifelong infection to HSV) and IgM-positive subjects (indicator of primary infection or reactivation of the virus) in a longitudinal population-based cohort of elderly subjects living in the community. METHODS: Cox proportional hazard models were used to study the risk of developing AD according to the presence or not of anti-HSV IgG and IgM antibodies, assessed in the sera of 512 elderly initially free of dementia followed for 14 years. RESULTS: During the follow-up, 77 incident AD cases were diagnosed. Controlled for age, gender, educational level and Apolipoprotein E4 (APOE4) status, IgM-positive subjects showed a significant higher risk of developing AD (HR = 2.55; 95% CI [1.38-4.72]), although no significant increased risk was observed in IgG-positive subjects (HR = 1.67; 95%CI [0.75-3.73]). No modification effect with APOE4 status was found. CONCLUSION: Reactivation of HSV seropositivity is highly correlated with incident AD. HSV chronic infection may therefore be contributive to the progressive brain damage characteristic of AD

Infrared Behaviour of the Gluon Propagator: Confining or Confined?

The possible infrared behaviour of the gluon propagator is studied analytically, using the Schwinger-Dyson equations, in both the axial and the Landau gauge. The possibility of a gluon propagator less singular than $1/k^{2}$ when $k^{2} \rightarrow 0$ is investigated and found to be inconsistent, despite claims to the contrary, whereas an infrared enhanced one is consistent. The implications for confinement are discussed.Comment: 20 pages, latex, 2 figure