Utility of measuring allergen content in house dust samples in a cross-sectional study of respiratory health and atopy in a cohort of immigrant families in poor-quality housing in Malmö, Sweden

Background. Exposure to allergens plays a role in the development of atopic sensitization and influences allergic phenotype. House dust mites (HDM) are a common source of aeroallergens in many parts of the world. The relationship between indoor environment factors such as temperature, moisture/humidity, and ventilation and HDM allergen load is complex. Methods. Part of a larger study into the health in its social context of an immigrant population living in poor-quality housing in Malmö, Sweden. Families with small children were identified from health care records (child treated in primary care with respiratory illness), and school records (matched for age range). Families were visited in their homes by health communicators fluent in their language. Family and individual level health data, including skin-prick-tests for a standard panel of aeroallergens, were analyzed together with environmental exposures (mould, dampness, ETS, crowding and allergen content- in the part of the study presented here). Allergen content was analyzed for house dust mite and cockroach allergens: Der pt1, Der f2, and Bla g, from dust samples collected in the affected apartments. Allergen content was measured using sandwich ELISA. Results. 130 families participated, with usable data for 359 children under the age of 12, 61 older children and 230 parents. The overall exposure to potentially harmful factors was relatively high, the burden of atopy and respiratory diseases was significant. Dust samples were collected in all 130 apartments. Correlations between apartment characteristics , allergen content and health outcomes in this vulnerable population are explored and discussed against the framework of a model explicitly accounting for social determinants of health. Conclusions. The utility of allergen content measurements in the context of this study was rather limited, as it did not add vital information that could further elucidate pathways and connections between environmental exposures and health outcome

Main Memory Adaptive Indexing for Multi-core Systems

Adaptive indexing is a concept that considers index creation in databases as a by-product of query processing; as opposed to traditional full index creation where the indexing effort is performed up front before answering any queries. Adaptive indexing has received a considerable amount of attention, and several algorithms have been proposed over the past few years; including a recent experimental study comparing a large number of existing methods. Until now, however, most adaptive indexing algorithms have been designed single-threaded, yet with multi-core systems already well established, the idea of designing parallel algorithms for adaptive indexing is very natural. In this regard only one parallel algorithm for adaptive indexing has recently appeared in the literature: The parallel version of standard cracking. In this paper we describe three alternative parallel algorithms for adaptive indexing, including a second variant of a parallel standard cracking algorithm. Additionally, we describe a hybrid parallel sorting algorithm, and a NUMA-aware method based on sorting. We then thoroughly compare all these algorithms experimentally; along a variant of a recently published parallel version of radix sort. Parallel sorting algorithms serve as a realistic baseline for multi-threaded adaptive indexing techniques. In total we experimentally compare seven parallel algorithms. Additionally, we extensively profile all considered algorithms. The initial set of experiments considered in this paper indicates that our parallel algorithms significantly improve over previously known ones. Our results suggest that, although adaptive indexing algorithms are a good design choice in single-threaded environments, the rules change considerably in the parallel case. That is, in future highly-parallel environments, sorting algorithms could be serious alternatives to adaptive indexing.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figure

Identifying potentially unhealthy housing conditions in Rosengård – a cross-sectional study in immigrant households with small children in Sweden

The social determinants of health form a complex and dynamic web, shaping both population and individual health and disease. The built environment and especially human dwellings influence health in many ways. Associations between factors such as dampness, mould growth, heating/insulation, and crowding on the one hand and respiratory health and infectious diseases on the other hand have been studied in several populations. In Sweden, social and health inequalities have slowly been increasing. The linkages between them have however not been characterized in detail. In this cross-sectional study, the apartments of families of children with respiratory symptoms living in a socially disadvantaged immigrant neighbourhood in Malmö, in which the incidence of bad housing was known to be high, were assessed for potentially harmful housing-related exposures. This information was correlated with subjective questionnaire-based assessments of dampness and mould in the apartments. While agreement between objective and subjective assessments was generally only fair, the questions performed better at excluding relevant exposures. The utility of screening questions related to housing is related to the prevalence of the exposure in the population and to the default plan of action. A case is made for interdisciplinary home visits to be the default option in families of children with respiratory symptoms. The overall prevalence of other contributory factors that are potentially harmful to health was high in this population; potentially protective factors were distributed unevenly as well. Factors related to the built environment cannot and should not be seen in isolation, as they often co-vary with other social determinants of health. Housing is however an important pathway along which social inequalities translate into health inequalities

Thermopower of a superconducting single-electron transistor

We present a linear-response theory for the thermopower of a single-electron transistor consisting of a superconducting island weakly coupled to two normal-conducting leads (NSN SET). The thermopower shows oscillations with the same periodicity as the conductance and is rather sensitive to the size of the superconducting gap. In particular, the previously studied sawtooth-like shape of the thermopower for a normal-conducting single-electron device is qualitatively changed even for small gap energies.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure

Only Aggressive Elephants are Fast Elephants

Yellow elephants are slow. A major reason is that they consume their inputs entirely before responding to an elephant rider's orders. Some clever riders have trained their yellow elephants to only consume parts of the inputs before responding. However, the teaching time to make an elephant do that is high. So high that the teaching lessons often do not pay off. We take a different approach. We make elephants aggressive; only this will make them very fast. We propose HAIL (Hadoop Aggressive Indexing Library), an enhancement of HDFS and Hadoop MapReduce that dramatically improves runtimes of several classes of MapReduce jobs. HAIL changes the upload pipeline of HDFS in order to create different clustered indexes on each data block replica. An interesting feature of HAIL is that we typically create a win-win situation: we improve both data upload to HDFS and the runtime of the actual Hadoop MapReduce job. In terms of data upload, HAIL improves over HDFS by up to 60% with the default replication factor of three. In terms of query execution, we demonstrate that HAIL runs up to 68x faster than Hadoop. In our experiments, we use six clusters including physical and EC2 clusters of up to 100 nodes. A series of scalability experiments also demonstrates the superiority of HAIL.Comment: VLDB201

Exophytic benign mixed epithelial stromal tumour of the kidney: case report of a rare tumour entity

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Mixed epithelial and stromal tumour (MEST) represents a recently described benign composite neoplasm of the kidney, which predominantly affects perimenopausal females. Most tumours are benign, although rare malignant cases have been observed.</p> <p>Case report</p> <p>A 47-year-old postmenopausal female presented to the urologist with flank pain. A CT scan of the abdomen showed a 30-mm-in-diameter uniform mass adjacent to the pelvis of the left kidney. Surgical exploration showed a tumour arising from the lower anterior hilus of the left kidney. The tumour could be excised by preserving the kidney. By intraoperative frozen section the tumour showed characteristic features of MEST with epithelial-covered cysts embedded in an "ovarian-like" stroma. Additional immunohistochemistry investigations showed expression for hormone receptors by the stromal component of the tumour.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>MEST typically presents in perimenopausal women as a primarily cystic mass. Commonly, the tumour arises from the renal parenchyma or pelvis. The tumour is composed of an admixture of cystic and sometimes more solid areas. The stromal cells typically demonstrate an ovarian-type stroma showing expression for the estrogen and progesterone receptors.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>MEST represents a distinctive benign tumour entity of the kidney, which affects perimenopausal woman. The tumour should be distinguished from other cystic renal neoplasms. By imaging studies it is difficult to distinguish between a benign or malignant nature of the tumour. Thus, intraoperative frozen section is necessary for conservative surgery, since the overall prognosis is favourable and renal function can be preserved in most cases.</p

Smoking behaviour and passive smoke exposure of adults – Results from GEDA 2019/2020-EHIS

Background: Smoking is a significant health risk and the leading cause of premature death. Passive smoke causes the same negative effects on health as smoking, albeit to a lesser extent. The reduction of tobacco consumption and the protection against passive smoke are thus important health objectives. Methods: The study German Health Update (GEDA 2019/2020-EHIS) is a cross-sectional telephone survey (04/2019 to 09/2020) of the resident population in Germany with questions relating to the current smoking behaviour and relating to the passive smoke exposure. The analysis sample comprises 22,708 persons from 18 years of age. Results: 24.0% of women and 33.9% of men from 18 years of age smoke currently, at least occasionally. Among both sexes, adults from 65 years of age smoke significantly more rarely than adults in the younger age groups. 4.1% of adults, who do not smoke themselves, are subjected daily to passive smoke exposure indoors. This affects in particular young adults and men. There are educational differences in tobacco consumption and in passive smoke exposure to the disadvantage of adults from lower educational groups. Conclusions: In Germany, there is still a need for action for effective measures for tobacco prevention, smoking cessation and tobacco control policy, which are effective in all population groups and which take into account the concerns of socially disadvantaged groups

Deep brain stimulation for movement disorder treatment: Exploring frequency-dependent efficacy in a computational network model

A large scale computational model of the basal ganglia (BG) network is proposed to describes movement disorder including deep brain stimulation (DBS). The model of this complex network considers four areas of the basal ganglia network: the subthalamic nucleus (STN) as target area of DBS, globus pallidus, both pars externa and pars interna (GPe-GPi), and the thalamus (THA). Parkinsonian conditions are simulated by assuming reduced dopaminergic input and corresponding pronounced inhibitory or disinhibited projections to GPe and GPi. Macroscopic quantities can be derived which correlate closely to thalamic responses and hence motor programme fidelity. It can be demonstrated that depending on different levels of striatal projections to the GPe and GPi, the dynamics of these macroscopic quantities switch from normal conditions to parkinsonian. Simulating DBS on the STN affects the dynamics of the entire network, increasing the thalamic activity to levels close to normal, while differing from both normal and parkinsonian dynamics. Using the mentioned macroscopic quantities, the model proposes optimal DBS frequency ranges above 130 Hz.Comment: 40 pages, 16 figure