ABC of sexually transmitted infections - Main presentations of sexually transmitted infections in men

This article is adapted from the fifth edition of the ABC ofSexually Transmitted Diseases, which is published by BMJBooks (www.bmjbooks.com).Some sexually transmitted infections, such as gonorrhoea and chlamydial infection, have different presentations in the two sexes because of differences in genital anatomy. This chapter focuses on infections of the male urethra, epididymis, testis, and prostate. Anal and oral symptoms are also covered because these are encountered more often among men, especially men who have sex with men

Genital manifestations of tropical diseases

Genital symptoms in tropical countries and among returned travellers can arise from a variety of bacterial, protozoal, and helminthic infections which are not usually sexually transmitted. The symptoms may mimic classic sexually transmitted infections (STIs) by producing ulceration (for example, amoebiasis, leishmaniasis), wart-like lesions (schistosomiasis), or lesions of the upper genital tract (epididymo-orchitis caused by tuberculosis, leprosy, and brucellosis; salpingitis as a result of tuberculosis, amoebiasis, and schistosomiasis). A variety of other genital symptoms less suggestive of STI are also seen in tropical countries. These include hydrocele (seen with filariasis), which can be no less stigmatising than STI, haemospermia (seen with schistosomiasis), and hypogonadism (which may occur in lepromatous leprosy). This article deals in turn with genital manifestations of filariasis, schistosomiasis, amoebiasis, leishmaniasis, tuberculosis and leprosy and gives clinical presentation, diagnosis, and treatment

HIV risk: is it possible to dissuade people from having unsafe sex?

The cumulative number of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections worldwide has reached 60 million in little over 30 years. HIV continues to spread despite a detailed understanding of the manner in which it spreads and measures which can prevent spread. Some governments have been highly successful in containing the spread of HIV through blood products and from mother to child and among injecting drug users. Lack of political will, lack of resources or challenges to widely accepted scientific evidence have held back similar interventions in other countries. It has proved much more difficult to reduce the sexual transmission of HIV in both high and low income countries. A wide range of strategies has been identified but it remains unclear which strategies deserve priority and what methods of promoting them have the greatest effect.There is ample evidence that awareness of HIV and changes in sexual behaviour have occurred widely but the penetration of information remains poor in some vulnerable groups especially adolescents and women in poorer countries. Further obstacles face those who have information about the risk.The subordinate position of women and a desire for large families are important obstacles to condom negotiation and use. Urbanization, poverty, conflict and declining public services all exacerbate unsafe sexual behaviour.We argue that so-called ‘structural’ interventions directed at these wider contexts of unsafe behaviour merit greater attention. Such approaches have the added benefit of being less susceptible to ‘risk compensation’ which has the potential to undermine strategies directed at reducing the transmission efficiency of HIV

The relationship between the number of repetitions performed at given intensities is different in endurance and strength trained athletes.

escribing training intensity and volume is a key problem when designing resistance training programmes. One approach is to base training prescription on the number of repetitions performed at a given percentage of repetition maximum due to the correlation found between these two measures. However, previous research has raised questions as to the accuracy of this method, as the repetitions completed at different percentages of 1RM can differ based upon the characteristics of the athlete. The objective of this study was therefore to evaluate the effect of an athlete’s training background on the relationship between the load lifted (as a percentage of one repetition maximum) and the number of repetitions achieved. Eight weightlifters and eight endurance runners each completed a one repetition maximum test on the leg press and completed repetitions to fatigue at 90, 80 and 70% of their one repetition maximum. The endurance runners completed significantly more repetitions than the weightlifters at 70% (39.9 ± 17.6 versus 17.9 ± 2.8; p 0.05) of one repetition maximum. These differences could be explained by the contrasting training adaptations demanded by each sport. This study suggests that traditional guidelines may underestimate the potential number of repetitions that can be completed at a given percentage of 1RM, particularly for endurance trained athletes

Reducing parental anxiety using a family based intervention for youth mental health : a randomized controlled trial

This paper presents findings on parent anxiety and attachment relationship style from the Deakin Family Options (DFO) pilot study, a randomized controlled pilot study comparing a family-based treatment (BEST Plus), versus a youth only treatment (CBT) versus a group who received both of these treatments (COMBINED). Eligible participants were families with a young person (aged 12 - 25 years) with a high prevalence mental health problem. Youth from participating families scored in the clinical or subclinical range for depression, anxiety and/or substance misuse symptoms on standardized measures during the initial assessment. The collected sample was drawn from regional and urban centers in Victoria, Australia and allocated to treatment condition using a simple randomization procedure (parallel design). It was hypothesized that families receiving the BEST Plus would experience greater reductions in youth and parent mental health symptoms, and improved parent-child relationships, compared with those in the CBT condition. This paper describes and discusses changes in parent anxiety and parent attachment, according to whether the parent participated in a treatment (BEST Plus) or did not (NONBEST Plus). Participants were blind to the study hypotheses. In total 71 parent participants returned pre data and were allocated to a treatment group. In this paper, data from parent participants who completed pre and post measures (n = 48) and pre, post, and 6-month follow-up measures (n = 28) on anxiety and attachment were analyzed by group (BEST Plus versus NONBEST Plus). The results of this study suggest that parent anxiety decreased significantly more following parent involvement in a group treatment, than for parents that did not receive treatment. Unexpectedly, avoidant attachment increased in the no treatment group, but remained relatively stable following the BEST Plus group. There were no significant findings in relation to compulsive traits and anxious attachment. These findings are discussed in light of the study limitations.<br /

Protein Tracking by CNN-Based Candidate Pruning and Two-Step Linking with Bayesian Network

Protein trafficking plays a vital role in understanding many biological processes and disease. Automated tracking of protein vesicles is challenging due to their erratic behaviour, changing appearance, and visual clutter. In this paper we present a novel tracking approach which utilizes a two-step linking process that exploits a probabilistic graphical model to predict tracklet linkage. The vesicles are initially detected with help of a candidate selection process, where the candidates are identified by a multi-scale spot enhancing filter. Subsequently, these candidates are pruned and selected by a light weight convolutional neural network. At the linking stage, the tracklets are formed based on the distance and the detection assignment which is implemented via combinatorial optimization algorithm. Each tracklet is described by a number of parameters used to evaluate the probability of tracklets connection by the inference over the Bayesian network. The tracking results are presented for confocal fluorescence microscopy data of protein trafficking in epithelial cells. The proposed method achieves a root mean square error (RMSE) of 1.39 for the vesicle localisation and of 0.7 representing the degree of track matching with ground truth. The presented method is also evaluated against the state-of-the-art “Trackmate“ framework

Energy Level Quasi-Crossings: Accidental Degeneracies or Signature of Quantum Chaos?

In the field of quantum chaos, the study of energy levels plays an important role. The aim of this review paper is to critically discuss some of the main contributions regarding the connection between classical dynamics, semi-classical quantization and spectral statistics of energy levels. In particular, we analyze in detail degeneracies and quasi-crossings in the eigenvalues of quantum Hamiltonians which are classically non-integrable. Summary: 1. Introduction; 2. Quasi-Crossing and Chaos; 3. Molecular Spectroscopy; 4. Nuclear Models; 4.1 Zirnbauer-Verbaashot-Weidenmuller Model; 4.2 Lipkin-Meshow-Glick Model; 5. Particle Physics and Field Theory; 6. Conclusions.Comment: 26 pages, Latex, 9 figures, to be published in International Journal of Modern Physics

Asymptotic behaviour of multiple scattering on infinite number of parallel demi-planes

The exact solution for the scattering of electromagnetic waves on an infinite number of parallel demi-planes has been obtained by J.F. Carlson and A.E. Heins in 1947 using the Wiener-Hopf method. We analyze their solution in the semiclassical limit of small wavelength and find the asymptotic behaviour of the reflection and transmission coefficients. The results are compared with the ones obtained within the Kirchhoff approximation