Preventing and Reducing Falls in Assisted Living Facilities: An Educational Intervention

As the number of older adults continues to rise, falling in older adults has become a national health care issue. Many older adults who fall reside in assisted living facilities. Every time a fall incident occurs, first responders are called, utilizing a significant amount of first responder’s time and resources. Therefore, the purpose of this project was to implement a fall prevention program for residents of an assisted living facility (ALF) to reduce fall risk and fall-related calls to the local fire department. The project consisted of a four-week course given once weekly for 60 minutes to residents at an ALF. Course content was evidence-based and included information on the role of occupational therapy in fall prevention, strength and balance exercises, environmental fall risks, and how hydration, nutrition, vitamin D intake, bone health, and medication management impact fall risk. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, indicating that participants found the information helpful and relevant. Occupational therapists and other health professionals can play an important role in the education of residents and staff of ALFs to increase awareness of fall risks, promote health and well-being among older adults, and help decrease fall-related calls to first responders.https://scholar.dominican.edu/ug-student-posters/1018/thumbnail.jp

Preventing and Reducing Falls in Assisted Living Facilities: An Educational Intervention

As the number of older adults continues to rise, falling in older adults has become a national health care issue. Many older adults who fall reside in assisted living facilities. Every time a fall incident occurs, first responders are called, utilizing a significant amount of first responder’s time and resources. Therefore, the purpose of this project was to implement a fall prevention program for residents of an assisted living facility (ALF) to reduce fall risk and fall-related calls to the local fire department. The project consisted of a four-week course given once weekly for 60 minutes to residents at an ALF. Course content was evidence-based and included information on the role of occupational therapy in fall prevention, strength and balance exercises, environmental fall risks, and how hydration, nutrition, vitamin D intake, bone health, and medication management impact fall risk. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, indicating that participants found the information helpful and relevant. Occupational therapists and other health professionals can play an important role in the education of residents and staff of ALFs to increase awareness of fall risks, promote health and well-being among older adults, and help decrease fall-related calls to first responders

Experimental study on the seismic behavior of masonry wall-to-floor connections

The global structural performance of masonry buildings, under earthquake loading, is affected by the efficiency of wall-to-floor connections, since they assure the continuity of the energy path and prevent the occurrence of most of the local collapse mechanisms. In fact, out-of-plane behaviour of masonry walls observed in recent seismic events showed the critical importance of proper connections in historical buildings. A review of current literature yields little in terms of experimental and numerical data on the subject. Thus, there is an urgent need to study the behaviour of these connections. The present paper presents a series of tests carried out to characterize the wall-to-floor connections. Different specimens were constructed in laboratory to represent connections found in ‘Gaioleiro’ and Late ‘Pombalino’ buildings in downtown Lisbon. Pull-out tests of wall-to-floor connections were carried out on unstrengthened and strengthened specimens in order to study failure modes, maximum pullout forces, and corresponding displacements. These parameters allow better understanding of this type of connection and also the development of design recommendations for the strengthening

THE USE OF N400 IN STUDIES OF STIMULUS EQUIVALENCE: A REVIEW OF METHODS AND PARAMETERS

The N400 is defined as an event-related brain potential that is sensitive to the semantic relations between stimuli. For instance, when a pair of words belong to the same semantic domain (e.g., monkey-banana), the N400 will be significantly reduced in comparison to the N400 evoked by unrelated words (e.g., monkey-carburetor). Notably, the N400 responses are also sensitive to the arbitrary stimulus-stimulus relations formed by matching-to-sample procedures (MTS), supporting the notion that stimulus equivalence is a behavioristic model of semantic relations. In this study, we presented a methodological review of studies on stimulus equivalence that used the N400 as dependent measure of “equivalent” and “non-equivalent” stimulus-stimulus relations formed by MTS procedures. First, we searched on databases for studies that used the descriptive terms “equivalence relations”, “matching-to-sample”, “MTS”, “N400”, “relational learning”, and “derived relations” on the title and the abstract. Then, we categorized the number of experiments in each study, population, nature of stimuli, the event-related brain potential used as a dependent measure and whether the critical probes comprised baseline, reflexive, symmetric or transitive relations. We found that the MTS variables differed substantially from one study to another. Considering that most of these MTS variables may be critical to the establishment of stimulus equivalence, we encourage follow-up studies that aim at verifying whether and to what extent they can be related to the N400 outcomes.Key-words: Matching-to-sample, equivalence-relatedness-based-procedure, stimulus equivalence, N400, semantic relations, methodological review

Impact of Euro-Atlantic blocking patterns in Iberia precipitation using a novel high resolution dataset

In this work we reassess the impacts of blocking patterns on precipitation regimes in the Iberian Peninsula, distinguishing between north Atlantic and European blocking. For this we take full advantage of the recently developed high-resolution datasets for the Iberian countries. Precipitation anomalies during blocking events obtained with this dataset allow a much finer regional characterization of the impacts in both average and extreme daily precipitation, particularly when compared to widely used low-resolution reanalysis datasets. Blocked patterns induce a negative-positive dipole of precipitation anomalies from northwest to southeast Iberia. Increases are widespread during Atlantic blocks and pronounced in southern and eastern areas of Iberia, while during European blocks they are more spatially restricted, with increases above 50 % in coastal Mediterranean areas, which represents a considerable fraction of the annual precipitation. Blocking impacts in precipitation are nearly opposite to those found during strong zonal flow situations, but there are also some asymmetries in the precipitation responses. A significant increase in cyclones and cut-off lows frequency southwards of blocking structures is related to precipitation excesses over southern and eastern areas, where dynamical factors and local processes play a crucial role. On the contrary, precipitation deficits in northwest Iberia during blocking episodes are better explained by a reduction in north Atlantic frontal activity and simultaneous decreases in large-scale moisture advection towards northern Iberia. We show that these anomalies during blocking result from changes in precipitation amount rather than from increases in rainy days, pointing to more extreme rainfall regimes, particularly in southeastern Iberia. Finally, an Extreme Value Analysis was performed, fitting Generalized Pareto Distributions to precipitation extremes. Results show that the different extreme precipitation regimes of northwest and Mediterranean regions are partially determined by opposite anomalies of the zonal flow. Thus, heavy precipitation events in Mediterranean areas are usually short-lived and frequently associated with blocking conditions, while in northwest Iberia the total accumulations during rainfall episodes are more important for triggering extreme events and they are mainly related to strong westerly flows.Peer reviewe

Weak decays of heavy hadrons into dynamically generated resonances

In this paper, we present a review of recent works on weak decay of heavy mesons and baryons with two mesons, or a meson and a baryon, interacting strongly in the final state. The aim is to learn about the interaction of hadrons and how some particular resonances are produced in the reactions. It is shown that these reactions have peculiar features and act as filters for some quantum numbers which allow to identify easily some resonances and learn about their nature. The combination of basic elements of the weak interaction with the framework of the chiral unitary approach allow for an interpretation of results of many reactions and add a novel information to different aspects of the hadron interaction and the properties of dynamically generated resonances.We would like to thank C. Hanhart and S. Stone for valuable comments on the manuscript. One of us, E. O., wishes to acknowledge support from the Chinese Academy of Science in the Program of Visiting Professorship for Senior International Scientists (Grant No. 2013T2J0012). This work is partly supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad and European FEDER funds under the contract numbers FIS2011-28853-C02-01, FIS2011-28853-C02-02, FIS2014-57026-REDT, FIS2014-51948-C2-1-P, and FIS2014-51948-C2-2-P, and the Generalitat Valenciana in the program Prometeo II-2014/068. This work is also partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 11165005, 11565007, 11475227, 11375080 and 11575076. We acknowledge the support of the European Community-Research Infrastructure Integrating Activity Study of Strongly Interacting Matter (acronym HadronPhysics3, Grant Agreement n. 283286) under the Seventh Framework Programme of EU. It is also supported by the Open Project Program of State Key Laboratory of Theoretical Physics, Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China (No. Y5KF151CJ1). M. D. gratefully acknowledges support from the NSF/PIF Grant No. PHY 1415459 and the NSF/Career grant No. 1452055.Peer reviewe

Development and validation of a nomogram to predict kidney survival at baseline in patients with C3 glomerulopathy

Background C3 glomerulopathy is a rare and heterogeneous complement-driven disease. It is often challenging to accurately predict in clinical practice the individual kidney prognosis at baseline. We herein sought to develop and validate a prognostic nomogram to predict long-term kidney survival. Methods We conducted a retrospective, multicenter observational cohort study in 35 nephrology departments belonging to the Spanish Group for the Study of Glomerular Diseases. The dataset was randomly divided into a training group (n = 87) and a validation group (n = 28). The least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression was used to screen the main predictors of kidney outcome and to build the nomogram. The accuracy of the nomogram was assessed by discrimination and risk calibration in the training and validation sets. Results The study group comprised 115 patients, of whom 46 (40%) reached kidney failure in a median follow-up of 49 months (range 24?112). No significant differences were observed in baseline estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), proteinuria or total chronicity score of kidney biopsies, between patients in the training versus those in the validation set. The selected variables by LASSO were eGFR, proteinuria and total chronicity score. Based on a Cox model, a nomogram was developed for the prediction of kidney survival at 1, 2, 5 and 10 years from diagnosis. The C-index of the nomogram was 0.860 (95% confidence interval 0.834?0.887) and calibration plots showed optimal agreement between predicted and observed outcomes. Conclusions We constructed and validated a practical nomogram with good discrimination and calibration to predict the risk of kidney failure in C3 glomerulopathy patients at 1, 2, 5 and 10 years.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Work on this study was supported by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III / Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (ISCIII/FEDER; grants PI16/01685 and PI19/1624) and Red de Investigación Renal (RD12/0021/0029; to M.P.) and the Autonomous Region of Madrid (S2017/BMD-3673; to M.P.). S.R.d.C. is supported by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (grant PID2019-104912RB-I00) and the Autonomous Region of Madrid (grant S2017/BMD-3673). None of the funders had any role in the study design, data collection, analyses, reporting or decision to submit for publication