Coping with the Gulf war: Subculture differences among ischemic heart disease patients in Israel

The purpose of this study was to assess short term effects of the Gulf war on ischemic heart disease patients of different ethnic origin. Three dimensions of patients' reactions to the war situation were studied: psychological, physical and behavioral. The study first focused on changes in patients' responses on these dimensions over three stages of the war, differentiated according to degree of threat. Second, differences stemming from ethnic origin were examined among patients who live in the same geographical region, use the same health services and were exposed to the same threatening life event. One hundred ischemic heart disease patients were interviewed while waiting in outpatient hospital clinics for a regular examination at the end of the war. The results of intrapersonal comparisons showed that the intensity of responses, as expected, increased significantly on the three dimensions from the week before the war started to the first week of the war, which was the most stressful period for Israelis. During the last week of the war, however, when stress was significantly reduced, the expected change was found primarily with regard to psychologic responses. That is, worries were significantly reduced, but no significant reduction in frequency of anginal pain and in drug consumption followed, indicating differences in the adjustment process on the psychologic and physical levels. Subcultural differences were found in the studied responses: Patients of Asian or North African countries of origin reported having more frequent anginal pains, and consuming more drugs than patients from Western countries. The increase in physical symptoms indicates that a stressful event has immediate harmful physical effects on chronically ill people, which might increase in the long run. This supports the life events theory. The severity of these aversive responses varies among the different ethnic groups, probably due to cultural differences in learned coping patterns. Such findings have important practical applications for identifying groups or individuals at risk, and for planning preventive intervention programs for periods of social crisis.coping with stressors life events illness behavior subcultures coronary heart disease

Focused SANA: Speeding Up Network Alignment

Network Alignment (NA) is a generalization of the graph isomorphism problem for non-isomorphic graphs, where the goal is to find a node mapping as close as possible to isomorphism. Recent successful NA algorithms follow a search-based approach, such as simulated annealing. We propose to speed up search-based NA algorithms by pruning the search-space based on heuristic rules derived from the topological features of the aligned nodes. We define several desirable properties of such pruning rules, analyze them theoretically, and propose a pruning rule based on nodes' degrees. Experimental results show that using the proposed rule yields significant speedup and higher alignment quality compared to the state of the art. In addition, we redefine common NA objective functions in terms of established statistical analysis metrics, opening a wide range of possible objective functions

Interactions of psychological factors and family history in relation to coronary artery disease

Background: psychological factors including hostility, depression and stress have been associated with severity of coronary artery disease (CAD). However, few studies have examined interactions between such factors and typical CAD risk factors. Investigating interactive effects simulates their co-occurrence and complex effects in illness, as well as helping to identify groups of patients at greatest risk of morbidity. This study examined the interactive effects of hostility, hopelessness and daily hassles with family history of CAD in relation to CAD severity.Design: correlation design.Methods: seventy-three patients were assessed for hostility, hopelessness and daily hassles before undergoing coronary artery angiography. Severity of CAD was assessed by a cardiologist who was blind to patients' psychological data, with a scale considering type and proximity of occluded artery: the Ilia-score.Results: hostility significantly interacted with family history in relation to CAD severity. Hostility was positively correlated with CAD severity when family history was positive (r = 0.43, P < 0.05), but not when family history was absent (r = -0.10, NS). No other interaction effects were found. Interestingly, patients with family history of CAD had significantly lower hostility scores (14.4) compared to patients without such history (19.2;P = 0.002). No background or typical-risk factor correlated with CAD severity.Conclusion: hostility synergistically interacted with family history of CAD in relation to CAD severity. The mechanisms of this interaction need to be explored in future studies. Hostility-reduction interventions provided to high-hostile patients with a genetic predisposition to CAD may be relevant for primary and secondary CAD prevention

Cosmology with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) has two scientific objectives of cosmological focus: to probe the expansion rate of the universe, and to understand stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds and their implications for early universe and particle physics, from the MeV to the Planck scale. However, the range of potential cosmological applications of gravitational wave observations extends well beyond these two objectives. This publication presents a summary of the state of the art in LISA cosmology, theory and methods, and identifies new opportunities to use gravitational wave observations by LISA to probe the universe

Cosmology with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) has two scientific objectives of cosmological focus: to probe the expansion rate of the universe, and to understand stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds and their implications for early universe and particle physics, from the MeV to the Planck scale. However, the range of potential cosmological applications of gravitational wave observations extends well beyond these two objectives. This publication presents a summary of the state of the art in LISA cosmology, theory and methods, and identifies new opportunities to use gravitational wave observations by LISA to probe the universe