Death and Emergency Readmission of Infants Discharged After Interventions for Congenital Heart Disease: A National Study of 7643 Infants to Inform Service Improvement.

Improvements in hospital-based care have reduced early mortality in congenital heart disease. Later adverse outcomes may be reducible by focusing on care at or after discharge. We aimed to identify risk factors for such events within 1 year of discharge after intervention in infancy and, separately, to identify subgroups that might benefit from different forms of intervention.Cardiac procedures performed in infants between 2005 and 2010 in England and Wales from the UK National Congenital Heart Disease Audit were linked to intensive care records. Among 7976 infants, 333 (4.2%) died before discharge. Of 7643 infants discharged alive, 246 (3.2%) died outside the hospital or after an unplanned readmission to intensive care (risk factors were age, weight-for-age, cardiac procedure, cardiac diagnosis, congenital anomaly, preprocedural clinical deterioration, prematurity, ethnicity, and duration of initial admission; c-statistic 0.78 [0.75-0.82]). Of the 7643, 514 (6.7%) died outside the hospital or had an unplanned intensive care readmission (same risk factors but with neurodevelopmental condition and acquired cardiac diagnosis and without preprocedural deterioration; c-statistic 0.78 [0.75-0.80]). Classification and regression tree analysis were used to identify 6 subgroups stratified by the level (3-24%) and nature of risk for death outside the hospital or unplanned intensive care readmission based on neurodevelopmental condition, cardiac diagnosis, congenital anomaly, and duration of initial admission. An additional 115 patients died after planned intensive care admission (typically following elective surgery).Adverse outcomes in the year after discharge are of similar magnitude to in-hospital mortality, warrant service improvements, and are not confined to diagnostic groups currently targeted with enhanced monitoring

Regular Incidence Complexes, Polytopes, and C-Groups

Regular incidence complexes are combinatorial incidence structures generalizing regular convex polytopes, regular complex polytopes, various types of incidence geometries, and many other highly symmetric objects. The special case of abstract regular polytopes has been well-studied. The paper describes the combinatorial structure of a regular incidence complex in terms of a system of distinguished generating subgroups of its automorphism group or a flag-transitive subgroup. Then the groups admitting a flag-transitive action on an incidence complex are characterized as generalized string C-groups. Further, extensions of regular incidence complexes are studied, and certain incidence complexes particularly close to abstract polytopes, called abstract polytope complexes, are investigated.Comment: 24 pages; to appear in "Discrete Geometry and Symmetry", M. Conder, A. Deza, and A. Ivic Weiss (eds), Springe

Views of addiction neuroscientists and clinicians on the clinical impact of a ‘Brain Disease Model of Addiction’

Addiction is increasingly described as a "chronic and relapsing brain disease". The potential impact of the brain disease model on the treatment of addiction or addicted individuals' treatment behaviour remains uncertain. We conducted a qualitative study to examine: (i) the extent to which leading Australian addiction neuroscientists and clinicians accept the brain disease view of addiction; and (ii) their views on the likely impacts of this view on addicted individuals' beliefs and behaviour. Thirty-one Australian addiction neuroscientists and clinicians (10 females and 21 males; 16 with clinical experience and 15 with no clinical experience) took part in 1 h semi-structured interviews. Most addiction neuroscientists and clinicians did not uncritically support the use of brain disease model of addiction. Most were cautious about the potential for adverse impacts on individuals' recovery and motivation to enter treatment. While some recognised the possibility that the brain disease model of addiction may provide a rationale for addicted persons to seek treatment and motivate behaviour change, Australian addiction neuroscientist and clinicians do not assume that messages about "diseased brains" will always lead to increased treatment-seeking and reduced drug use. Research is needed on how neuroscience research could be used in ways that optimise positive outcomes for addicted persons

Semantics-based information extraction for detecting economic events

As today's financial markets are sensitive to breaking news on economic events, accurate and timely automatic identification of events in news items is crucial. Unstructured news items originating from many heterogeneous sources have to be mined in order to extract knowledge useful for guiding decision making processes. Hence, we propose the Semantics-Based Pipeline for Economic Event Detection (SPEED), focusing on extracting financial events from news articles and annotating these with meta-data at a speed that enables real-time use. In our implementation, we use some components of an existing framework as well as new components, e.g., a high-performance Ontology Gazetteer, a Word Group Look-Up component, a Word Sense Disambiguator, and components for detecting economic events. Through their interaction with a domain-specific ontology, our novel, semantically enabled components constitute a feedback loop which fosters future reuse of acquired knowledge in the event detection process

Quasi-Normal Modes of Stars and Black Holes

Perturbations of stars and black holes have been one of the main topics of relativistic astrophysics for the last few decades. They are of particular importance today, because of their relevance to gravitational wave astronomy. In this review we present the theory of quasi-normal modes of compact objects from both the mathematical and astrophysical points of view. The discussion includes perturbations of black holes (Schwarzschild, Reissner-Nordstr\"om, Kerr and Kerr-Newman) and relativistic stars (non-rotating and slowly-rotating). The properties of the various families of quasi-normal modes are described, and numerical techniques for calculating quasi-normal modes reviewed. The successes, as well as the limits, of perturbation theory are presented, and its role in the emerging era of numerical relativity and supercomputers is discussed.Comment: 74 pages, 7 figures, Review article for "Living Reviews in Relativity

Search for new phenomena in final states with an energetic jet and large missing transverse momentum in pp collisions at √ s = 8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Results of a search for new phenomena in final states with an energetic jet and large missing transverse momentum are reported. The search uses 20.3 fb−1 of √ s = 8 TeV data collected in 2012 with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Events are required to have at least one jet with pT > 120 GeV and no leptons. Nine signal regions are considered with increasing missing transverse momentum requirements between Emiss T > 150 GeV and Emiss T > 700 GeV. Good agreement is observed between the number of events in data and Standard Model expectations. The results are translated into exclusion limits on models with either large extra spatial dimensions, pair production of weakly interacting dark matter candidates, or production of very light gravitinos in a gauge-mediated supersymmetric model. In addition, limits on the production of an invisibly decaying Higgs-like boson leading to similar topologies in the final state are presente

The context of chemical communication driving a mutualism

Recent work suggests that Drosophila and Saccharomyces yeasts may establish a mutualistic association, and that this is driven by chemical communication. While individual volatiles have been implicated in the attraction of D. melanogaster, the semiochemicals affecting the behavior of the sibling species D. simulans are less well characterised. Here, we comprehensively scrutinize a broad range of volatiles produced by attractive and repulsive yeasts to experimentally evaluate the chemical nature of communication between these species. When grown in liquid or on agar-solidified grape juice, attraction to S. cerevisiae was primarily driven by 3-methylbutyl acetate (isoamyl acetate) and repulsion by acetic acid, a known attractant to D. melanogaster (also known as vinegar fly). Using T-maze choice tests and synthetic compounds we show that these responses were strongly influenced by compound concentration. Moreover, the behavioral response is further impacted by the chemical context of the environment. Thus, chemical communication between yeasts and flies is complex, and is not simply driven by the presence of single volatiles, but modulated by compound interactions. The ecological context of chemical communication needs to be taken into consideration when testing for ecologically realistic responses

Depression and sickness behavior are Janus-faced responses to shared inflammatory pathways

It is of considerable translational importance whether depression is a form or a consequence of sickness behavior. Sickness behavior is a behavioral complex induced by infections and immune trauma and mediated by pro-inflammatory cytokines. It is an adaptive response that enhances recovery by conserving energy to combat acute inflammation. There are considerable phenomenological similarities between sickness behavior and depression, for example, behavioral inhibition, anorexia and weight loss, and melancholic (anhedonia), physio-somatic (fatigue, hyperalgesia, malaise), anxiety and neurocognitive symptoms. In clinical depression, however, a transition occurs to sensitization of immuno-inflammatory pathways, progressive damage by oxidative and nitrosative stress to lipids, proteins, and DNA, and autoimmune responses directed against self-epitopes. The latter mechanisms are the substrate of a neuroprogressive process, whereby multiple depressive episodes cause neural tissue damage and consequent functional and cognitive sequelae. Thus, shared immuno-inflammatory pathways underpin the physiology of sickness behavior and the pathophysiology of clinical depression explaining their partially overlapping phenomenology. Inflammation may provoke a Janus-faced response with a good, acute side, generating protective inflammation through sickness behavior and a bad, chronic side, for example, clinical depression, a lifelong disorder with positive feedback loops between (neuro)inflammation and (neuro)degenerative processes following less well defined triggers

What Do Men Want from a Health Screening Mobile App? A Qualitative Study.

There is a lack of mobile app which aims to improve health screening uptake developed for men. As part of the study to develop an effective mobile app to increase health screening uptake in men, we conducted a needs assessment to find out what do men want from a health screening mobile app. In-depth interviews and focus group discussions were conducted with 31 men from a banking institution in Kuala Lumpur. The participants were purposely sampled according to their job position, age, ethnicity and screening status. The recruitment was stopped once data saturation was achieved. The audio-recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using thematic approach. Three themes emerged from the analysis and they were: content, feature and dissemination. In terms of the content, men wanted the app to provide information regarding health screening and functions that can assess their health; which must be personalized to them and are trustable. The app must have user-friendly features in terms of information delivery, ease of use, attention allocation and social connectivity. For dissemination, men proposed that advertisements, recommendations by health professionals, providing incentive and integrating the app as into existing systems may help to increase the dissemination of the app. This study identified important factors that need to be considered when developing a mobile app to improve health screening uptake. Future studies on mobile app development should elicit users' preference and need in terms of its content, features and dissemination strategies to improve the acceptability and the chance of successful implementation

Missed, not missing: Phylogenomic evidence for the existence of Avian FoxP3

The Forkhead box transcription factor FoxP3 is pivotal to the development and function of regulatory T cells (Tregs), which make a major contribution to peripheral tolerance. FoxP3 is believed to perform a regulatory role in all the vertebrate species in which it has been detected. The prevailing view is that FoxP3 is absent in birds and that avian Tregs rely on alternative developmental and suppressive pathways. Prompted by the automated annotation of foxp3 in the ground tit (Parus humilis) genome, we have questioned this assumption. Our analysis of all available avian genomes has revealed that the foxp3 locus is missing, incomplete or of poor quality in the relevant genomic assemblies for nearly all avian species. Nevertheless, in two species, the peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) and the saker falcon (F. cherrug), there is compelling evidence for the existence of exons showing synteny with foxp3 in the ground tit. A broader phylogenomic analysis has shown that FoxP3 sequences from these three species are similar to crocodilian sequences, the closest living relatives of birds. In both birds and crocodilians, we have also identified a highly proline-enriched region at the N terminus of FoxP3, a region previously identified only in mammals