Family Planning Decision Making in People With Multiple Sclerosis

Introduction: The majority of people diagnosed with MS are of childbearing or child fathering age, therefore family planning is an important issue for both women and men with MS. Fertility and the course of pregnancy are not affected by MS; however, people with MS (pwMS) may have concerns that there will be a greater risk of complications to the mother and/or adverse pregnancy outcomes either due to the disease or to ongoing medication. This survey aimed to understand family planning decision making in pwMS and related unmet educational needs. Methods: A total of 332 pwMS across the USA, UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain were recruited from a specialist patient panel agency to participate in a smartphone-enabled standing panel. The 80-question survey focussed on decision making and information sources for pwMS regarding family planning, as well as behavior during and after pregnancy. Male patients with MS did not respond to specific questions on pregnancy. Survey results were directly compared with the 2016 US and 2010 UN census data. Results: pwMS were more likely to have no children than the general population, particularly in the subgroup of patients aged 36–45 years. A total of 56% of pwMS reported that the disease affected, with different degrees of impact, their family planning decision making. Of these, 21% significantly changed their plans for timing of pregnancy and the number of children, and 14% decided against having children. Participants indicated that healthcare professionals were the primary source of information on family planning (81% of responses). The timing of planned pregnancy was not considered when selecting treatment by 78% of participants. Conclusion: MS was found to significantly impact family planning decision making, with pwMS significantly less likely to have children in comparison with the general population

Bringing Agroforestry Technology to Farmers in the Philippines: Identifying constraints to success using systems modelling

Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) modelling may be applied in rural extension in situations where program outputs are influenced by variables which are sequentially influenced by other variables. For a recently completed agroforestry extension program in Leyte the Philippines, BBN modelling of site factors, establishment practices and risk, predicted widely different program outputs for different levels of extension assistance and farmer inputs. In a situation where very little was known about how farmers would respond to offers of extension assistance, monitoring of the program over a period of three years revealed that extended extension assistance was crucial in determining the likely survival and growth of trees. Extended extension assistance was also important for the elimination of unsuitable sites and the use of appropriate establishment procedures. Where extension support was not available, farmers displayed a poor knowledge of the principles of tree growth, planting trees underneath complete canopies and adjacent to mature coconut palms even though they could have been expected to have extensive local knowledge of raising and growing plants. Approximately one third of planting sites were infertile and eroded and growth of newly planted trees on these sites was poor, often because site preparation and maintenance was minimal. Newly established trees were also found to be at risk from fire, typhoon, and grazing and in situations where plantations were destroyed, farmers became antagonistic towards the program. The implications of the BBN modelling for a hypothetically expanded program are that extended assistance and site inspections are necessary to eliminate planting trees on inappropriate and unsuitable sites and to improve establishment practices and weed control in order to avoid plantations of suppressed and chlorotic trees which fail to meet the expectations of farmers, thus impinging on the success of the program

Modeling of the processing and removal of trace gas and aerosol species by Arctic radiation fogs and comparison with measurements

A Lagrangian radiation fog model is applied to a fog event at Summit, Greenland. The model simulates the formation and dissipation of fog. Included in the model are detailed gas and aqueous phase chemistry, and deposition of chemical species with fog droplets. Model predictions of the gas phase concentrations of H2O2, HCOOH, SO2, and HNO3 as well as the fog fluxes of S(VI), N(V), H2O2, and water are compared with measurements. The predicted fluxes of S(VI), N(V), H2O2, and fog water generally agree with measured values. Model results show that heterogeneous SO2 oxidation contributes to approximately 40% of the flux of S(VI) for the modeled fog event, with the other 60% coming from preexisting sulfate aerosol. The deposition of N(V) with fog includes contributions from HNO3 and NO2 initially present in the air mass. HNO3 directly partitions into the aqueous phase to create N(V), and NO2 forms N(V) through reaction with OH and the nighttime chemistry set of reactions which involves N2O5 and water vapor. PAN contributes to N(V) by gas phase decomposition to NO2, and also by direct aqueous phase decomposition. The quantitative contributions from each path are uncertain since direct measurements of PAN and NO2 are not available for the fog event. The relative contributions are discussed based on realistic ranges of atmospheric concentrations. Model results suggest that in addition to the aqueous phase partitioning of the initial HNO3 present in the air mass, the gas phase decomposition of PAN and subsequent reactions of NO2 with OH as well as nighttime nitrate chemistry may play significant roles in depositing N(V) with fog. If a quasi-liquid layer exists on snow crystals, it is possible that the reactions taking place in fog droplets also occur to some extent in clouds as well as at the snow surface

A.A.L.S. Clinical Legal Education Panel: Evaluation and Assessment of Student Performance in a Clinical Setting

This article is adapted from a panel discussion held under the auspices of the Section on Clinical Legal Education of the Association of American Law Schools, presented at the annual meeting in Phoenix, Arizona on January 5, 1980. The participants were H. Russell Cort, Jack L. Sammons, Robert S. Catz, Ralph S. Tyler and Terence J. Anderson

Early-stage compositional segregation in polymer-blend films

The existence of a transient period during the surface enrichment of a binary polymer blend by one of its components has been suggested by previous theoretical and experimental studies as well as computer simulations. Taking advantage of the high depth resolution of neutron reflectivity and the slow dynamics of polymers near their glass transition, we investigate this early-stage surface compositional enrichment in a phase separating polymer blend for the first time. Two stages of surface enrichment layer growth are observed. A rapid local surface enrichment at the chain segmental level occurs first, followed by a slower growth of a diffuse layer having a scale on the order of the bulk correlation length and the radius of gyration of the surface enriching polymer chains

Have geographical influences and changing abundance led to sub-population structure in the Ahiak caribou herd, Nunavut, Canada?

We examined the premise that changing abundance and environmental conditions influence the seasonal dispersion and distribution of migratory tundra caribou (Rangifer tarandus groenlandicus). The Ahiak herd’s (north-central Nunavut Territory, Canada) calving shifted from dispersed on islands to gregarious calving on the mainland coast. As abundance further increased, the calving ground elongated east and west such that we proposed a longitudinal climate gradient. As well, the calving ground’s east and west ends are different distances from the tree-line, which dips south closer to Hudson Bay. We proposed that whether caribou winter on the tundra or within boreal forest and the different climate across the long calving ground could contribute to differential survival and productivity such that sub-population structure would result. At the scale of the individual cows (identified through satellite-collars), we did not find inter-annual spatial fidelity to either the western or eastern parts of the calving ground. At the population scale (aerial surveys of calving distribution), we also did not find discontinuities in calving distribution. The spatial association of individual cows during calving compared with their association during the rut was inconsistent among years, but overall, cows that calve together, rut together. At this time and with the available evidence, we could not infer sub-population structure from shifts in dispersion and distribution as influenced by geography and changes in abundance for the Ahiak herd

Spatial Frequency Analysis of Anisotropic Drug Transport in Tumor Samples

Directional Fourier spatial frequency analysis was used on standard histological sections to identify salient directional bias in the spatial frequencies of stromal and epithelial patterns within tumor tissue. This directional bias is shown to be correlated to the pathway of reduced fluorescent tracer transport. Optical images of tumor specimens contain a complex distribution of randomly oriented aperiodic features used for neoplastic grading that varies with tumor type, size, and morphology. The internal organization of these patterns in frequency space is shown to provide a precise fingerprint of the extracellular matrix complexity, which is well known to be related to the movement of drugs and nanoparticles into the parenchyma, thereby identifying the characteristic spatial frequencies of regions that inhibit drug transport. The innovative computational methodology and tissue validation techniques presented here provide a tool for future investigation of drug and particle transport in tumor tissues, and could potentially be used a priori to identify barriers to transport, and to analyze real-time monitoring of transport with respect to therapeutic intervention

Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 10, No. 2

• Cutting-Up for Fancy • English-Language Folk Culture in Pennsylvania • The Bench Versus the Catechism: Revivalism and Pennsylvania\u27s Lutheran and Reformed Churches • Collecting and Indexing Dialect Poetry • Folk Amusements in Western Pennsylvania • Of Plows and Ploughing • The New Year Wish of the Pennsylvania Dutch Broadsidehttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/pafolklifemag/1005/thumbnail.jp

Low-Energy Signatures of Semi-perturbative Unification

We consider the low-energy signatures of, and high-energy motivations for, scenarios of semi-perturbative gauge coupling unification. Such scenarios can leave striking imprints on the low-energy sparticle spectrum, including novel gaugino mass ratios (including $M_2/M_1\approx1$), substantial compression of the intra-generational squark-to-slepton mass ratios, and an overall lifting of scalar masses relative to the gauginos. We also demonstrate that the unification scale can be raised to $M_X \approx 4\times10^{17}$ GeV while still in the perturbative regime -- close to the 1-loop heterotic string scale. We employ a 3-loop calculation of the running of the gauge couplings as a test of the perturbativity of the high-scale theory.Comment: 21 pages in LaTeX with 4 embedded figure