Analysis of the Cochrane Review: Exercise-Based Cardiac Rehabilitation for Coronary Heart Disease. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2016;1:CD001800

A doença coronária, responsável por um terço de todas as mortes, é a causa de morte mais comum em todo o mundo. Todavia, com o decréscimo das taxas de mortalidade associadas a esta patologia, observa-se um número crescente de doentes com a doença, com aumento da necessidade de gestão dos seus sintomas e prognóstico. A reabilitação cardíaca, componente essencial do tratamento contemporâneo da doença arterial coronária, é uma intervenção complexa que envolve variadas técnicas, incluindo exercício físico, correção dos fatores de risco cardiovasculares tradicionais, terapia comportamental e apoio psicológico, sendo considerada uma prioridade em países em que a prevalência da doença é elevada. Esta revisão sistemática Cochrane constitui uma atualização de uma revisão Cochrane publicada em 2011, tendo identificado 16 novos ensaios clínicos (3872 doentes), predominantemente em status pós-enfarte agudo do miocárdio e pós-cirurgia de revascularização miocárdica. Incluiu, assim, 63 ensaios clínicos aleatorizados que estudaram a eficácia e o custo-efetividade da reabilitação cardíaca baseada no exercício físico, em pacientes com doença arterial coronária. A confiança na evidência científica variou de baixa a moderada. Dos principais resultados destaca-se o efeito da reabilitação cardíaca, em comparação com a ausência de exercício físico, na redução na mortalidade cardiovascular, todavia sem redução da mortalidade total. Apesar da reabilitação cardíaca ter diminuído o risco global de internamento hospitalar, o mesmo não se verificou para o risco de enfarte, cirurgia de revascularização miocárdica ou intervenção coronária percutânea. Neste artigo sumarizam-se e discutem-se os principais resultados, conclusões e implicações desta revisão sistemática para a prática clínica.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Glutathione Production Using Magnetic Fields Generated by Magnets

The objective of this work was to study the production of GSH by Saccharomyces cerevisiae ATCC 7754 in a fermentor (5 L) using a cell recycle system with magnets. The fermentation conditions were 20 degrees C, 500 rpm, 5% (v/v) of inoculum, pH(initial) 5, 1.1 vvm aeration and total fermentation time of 72 h. The time of application of MF ranged from 24, 48 or 72 h. In comparison to the control experiment, the best results were obtained with 72 h of application of MF. The cell concentration reached 19.5 g/L and GSH concentration was 271.9 mg/L that corresponded to an increase of 2.63 and 32.1% compared to the control experiment, respectively.55692192

Improved algorithm for neuronal ensemble inference by Monte Carlo method

Neuronal ensemble inference is one of the significant problems in the study of biological neural networks. Various methods have been proposed for ensemble inference from their activity data taken experimentally. Here we focus on Bayesian inference approach for ensembles with generative model, which was proposed in recent work. However, this method requires large computational cost, and the result sometimes gets stuck in bad local maximum solution of Bayesian inference. In this work, we give improved Bayesian inference algorithm for these problems. We modify ensemble generation rule in Markov chain Monte Carlo method, and introduce the idea of simulated annealing for hyperparameter control. We also compare the performance of ensemble inference between our algorithm and the original one.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure

Wind data extrapolation and stochastic field statistics estimation via compressive sampling and low rank matrix recovery methods

A methodology based on compressive sampling is developed for incomplete wind time-histories reconstruction and extrapolation in a single spatial dimension, as well as for related stochastic field statistics estimation. This relies on l1-norm minimization in conjunction with an adaptive basis re-weighting scheme. Indicatively, the proposed methodology can be employed for monitoring of wind turbine systems, where the objective relates to either reconstructing incomplete time-histories measured at specific points along the height of a turbine tower, or to extrapolating to other locations in the vertical dimension where sensors and measurement records are not available. Further, the methodology can be used potentially for environmental hazard modeling within the context of performance-based design optimization of structural systems. Unfortunately, a straightforward implementation of the aforementioned approach to account for two spatial dimensions is hindered by significant, even prohibitive in some cases, computational cost. In this regard, to address computational challenges associated with higher-dimensional domains, a methodology based on low rank matrices and nuclear norm minimization is developed next for wind field extrapolation in two spatial dimensions. The efficacy of the proposed methodologies is demonstrated by considering various numerical examples. These refer to reconstruction of wind time-histories with missing data compatible with a joint wavenumber-frequency power spectral density, as well as to extrapolation to various locations in the spatial domain

Adolescence and Later Life Disease Burden: Quantifying the Contribution of Adolescent Tobacco Initiation From Longitudinal Cohorts

Purpose: Adolescence is a time of initiation of behaviors leading to noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). We use tobacco to illustrate a novel method for assessing the contribution of adolescence to later burden. // Methods: Data on initiation of regular smoking during adolescence (10–19 years) and current adult smoking were obtained from the 1958 British Birth Cohort, the U.S. National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), the Pelotas 1982 Birth Cohort, and the Victorian Adolescent Health Cohort Study. We estimated an “adolescent attributable fraction” (AAF) by calculating the proportion of persisting adult daily smoking initiated 155 countries using contemporary surveillance data. // Results: In the 1958 British Birth Cohort, 81.6% of daily smokers at age 50 years initiated < age 20 years, with a risk ratio of 6.1 for adult smoking related to adolescent initiation. The adjusted AAF was 69.1. Proportions of smokers initiating <20 years, risk ratio, and AAFs were 83.3%, 7.0%, and 70.4% for Add Health; 75.5%, 3.7%, and 50.2% in Victorian Adolescent Health Cohort Study; and 70.9%, 5.8%, and 56.9% in Pelotas males and 89.9%, 6.4%, and 75.9% in females. Initiation <16 years resulted in the highest AAFs. Estimated AAFs globally ranged from 35% in China to 76% in Argentina. // Conclusions: The contribution of adolescent smoking initiation to adult smoking burden is high, suggesting a need to formulate and implement effective actions to reduce smoking initiation in adolescents. Similar trends in other NCD risks suggest that adolescents will be central to future efforts to control NCDs

Evolução na utilização e nos gastos de uma operadora de saúde

Brazil’s aging population and the rising number of people reliant upon the country’s supplementary healthcare system have elicited the concern of public and private managers regarding the increase in healthcare costs. In this paper, the costs per gender, per type of medical expenses and per age group of a major Brazilian self-managed healthcare provider between 2007 and 2013 were analyzed. This healthcare provider is of interest because, besides portraying a single condition of revenue growth restricted to the existing contributors, it also replicates the demographic profile expected for Brazil in 2050, when approximately one-third of its population will be over 60 years of age. The analyses confirm the current literature as they show an increase in healthcare plan usage by the elderly and the difference between admission rates by gender. They also reveal an increase in average length of stay in hospital and the increase in medical costs far above inflation, especially for materials and medicines. It is hoped that this study will help scholars and others interested in comparisons of medical expense trends, especially by age and sex, and that it encourages further collaboration on the sustainability of health insurance providers in Brazil

The BINGO Project: III. Optical design and optimization of the focal plane

Context. The Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from Integrated Neutral Gas Observations (BINGO) telescope was designed to measure the fluctuations of the 21 cm radiation arising from the hyperfine transition of neutral hydrogen. It is also aimed at measuring the baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) from such fluctuations, thereby serving as a pathfinder to future, deeper intensity mapping surveys. The requirements for the Phase 1 of the projects consider a large reflector system (two 40 m-class dishes in a crossed-Dragone configuration) illuminating a focal plane with 28 horns to measure the sky, with two circular polarizations in a drift scan mode to produce measurements of the radiation in intensity (I) as well as the circular (V) polarization. Aims. In this paper, we present the optical design for the instrument. We describe the optical arrangement of the horns in the focal plane to produce a homogeneous and well-sampled map after the end of Phase 1, as well as the intensity and polarization properties of the beams. Our analysis provides an optimal model for the location of the horns in the focal plane, producing a homogeneous and Nyquist-sampled map after the nominal survey time. Methods. We used the GRASP package to model the focal plane arrangement and performed several optimization tasks to arrive at the current configuration, including an estimation of the sidelobes corresponding to the diffraction patterns of the two mirrors. The final model for the focal plane was defined through a combination of neural network and other direct optimization methods. Results. We arrived at an optimal configuration for the optical system that includes the focal plane positioning and the beam behavior of the instrument. We present an estimate of the expected sidelobes both for intensity and polarization, as well as the effect of band averaging on the final sidelobes, as well as an estimation of the cross-polarization leakage for the final configuration. Conclusions. We conclude that the chosen optical design meets the requirements for the project in terms of polarization purity and area coverage as well as a homogeneity of coverage so that BINGO can perform a successful BAO experiment. We further conclude that the requirements on the placement and rms error on the mirrors are also achievable so that a successful experiment can be conducted