907 research outputs found
A mediation approach to understanding socio-economic inequalities in maternal health-seeking behaviours in Egypt.
BACKGROUND: The levels and origins of socio-economic inequalities in health-seeking behaviours in Egypt are poorly understood. This paper assesses the levels of health-seeking behaviours related to maternal care (antenatal care [ANC] and facility delivery) and their accumulation during pregnancy and childbirth. Secondly, it explores the mechanisms underlying the association between socio-economic position (SEP) and maternal health-seeking behaviours. Thirdly, it examines the effectiveness of targeting of free public ANC and delivery care. METHODS: Data from the 2008 Demographic and Health Survey were used to capture two latent constructs of SEP: individual socio-cultural capital and household-level economic capital. These variables were entered into an adjusted mediation model, predicting twelve dimensions of maternal health-seeking; including any ANC, private ANC, first ANC visit in first trimester, regular ANC (four or more visits during pregnancy), facility delivery, and private delivery. ANC and delivery care costs were examined separately by provider type (public or private). RESULTS: While 74.2% of women with a birth in the 5-year recall period obtained any ANC and 72.4% delivered in a facility, only 48.8% obtained the complete maternal care package (timely and regular facility-based ANC as well as facility delivery) for their most recent live birth. Both socio-cultural capital and economic capital were independently positively associated with receiving any ANC and delivering in a facility. The strongest direct effect of socio-cultural capital was seen in models predicting private provider use of both ANC and delivery. Despite substantial proportions of women using public providers reporting receipt of free care (ANC: 38%, delivery: 24%), this free-of-charge public care was not effectively targeted to women with lowest economic resources. CONCLUSIONS: Socio-cultural capital is the primary mechanism leading to inequalities in maternal health-seeking in Egypt. Future studies should therefore examine the objective and perceived quality of care from different types of providers. Improvements in the targeting of free public care could help reduce the existing SEP-based inequalities in maternal care coverage in the short term
Achieving consensus through professionalized head nods: The role of nodding in service encounters in Japan
While the interactional functions of head nodding in everyday Japanese conversation have been frequently studied, a discourse on head nodding as a professional communicative practice has yet to be explored. With the method of multimodal conversation analysis, the current study examines the role of nodding in a particular professional-client setting, namely, hair salon interactions. My interest specifically lies in the frequent occurrence of synchronized head nods during the “service-assessment sequence,” where both service provider and customer inspect and determine whether the completed work is adequate. I pursue mechanisms of synchronized head nods by revealing exactly how participants collaborate in producing a nod, and how their verbal actions may at times be designed accordingly. In doing so, the study provides insight into what consensus may look like at service encounters in Japan, and discusses how such nodding practices may contribute to a satisfactory closure of a business negotiation
Gluon mass generation in the PT-BFM scheme
In this article we study the general structure and special properties of the
Schwinger-Dyson equation for the gluon propagator constructed with the pinch
technique, together with the question of how to obtain infrared finite
solutions, associated with the generation of an effective gluon mass.
Exploiting the known all-order correspondence between the pinch technique and
the background field method, we demonstrate that, contrary to the standard
formulation, the non-perturbative gluon self-energy is transverse
order-by-order in the dressed loop expansion, and separately for gluonic and
ghost contributions. We next present a comprehensive review of several subtle
issues relevant to the search of infrared finite solutions, paying particular
attention to the role of the seagull graph in enforcing transversality, the
necessity of introducing massless poles in the three-gluon vertex, and the
incorporation of the correct renormalization group properties. In addition, we
present a method for regulating the seagull-type contributions based on
dimensional regularization; its applicability depends crucially on the
asymptotic behavior of the solutions in the deep ultraviolet, and in particular
on the anomalous dimension of the dynamically generated gluon mass. A
linearized version of the truncated Schwinger-Dyson equation is derived, using
a vertex that satisfies the required Ward identity and contains massless poles
belonging to different Lorentz structures. The resulting integral equation is
then solved numerically, the infrared and ultraviolet properties of the
obtained solutions are examined in detail, and the allowed range for the
effective gluon mass is determined. Various open questions and possible
connections with different approaches in the literature are discussed.Comment: 54 pages, 24 figure
Genetic predisposition to adiposity is associated with increased objectively assessed sedentary time in young children.
Increased sedentariness has been linked to the growing prevalence of obesity in children, but some longitudinal studies suggest that sedentariness may be a consequence rather than a cause of increased adiposity. We used Mendelian randomization to examine the causal relations between body mass index (BMI) and objectively assessed sedentary time and physical activity in 3-8 year-old children from one Finnish and two Danish cohorts [NTOTAL=679]. A genetic risk score (GRS) comprised of 15 independent genetic variants associated with childhood BMI was used as the instrumental variable to test causal effects of BMI on sedentary time, total physical activity, and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA). In fixed effects meta-analyses, the GRS was associated with 0.05 SD/allele increase in sedentary time (P=0.019), but there was no significant association with total physical activity (beta=0.011 SD/allele, P=0.58) or MVPA (beta=0.001 SD/allele, P=0.96), adjusting for age, sex, monitor wear-time and first three genome-wide principal components. In two-stage least squares regression analyses, each genetically instrumented one unit increase in BMI z-score increased sedentary time by 0.47 SD (P=0.072). Childhood BMI may have a causal influence on sedentary time but not on total physical activity or MVPA in young children. Our results provide important insights into the regulation of movement behaviour in childhood
Industrial relations and works councils in the Netherlands—Results from interviews and a survey among HR managers
Quark mixing from softly broken symmetries
Quark flavor mixing may originate in the soft breaking of horizontal
symmetries. Those symmetries, which in the simplest case are three family U(1)
groups, are obeyed only by the dimension-4 Yukawa couplings and lead, when
unbroken, to the absence of mixing. Their breaking may arise from the
dimension-3 mass terms of SU(2)-singlet vector-like quarks. Those gauge-singlet
mass terms break the horizontal symmetries at a scale much higher than the
Fermi scale, yet softly, leading to quark mixing while the quark masses remain
unsuppressed.Comment: 9 pages, plain Latex, no figure
The influence of transmitted and non-transmitted parental BMI-associated alleles on the risk of overweight in childhood
Overweight in children is strongly associated with parental body mass index (BMI) and overweight. We assessed parental transmitted and non-transmitted genetic contributions to overweight in children from the Danish National Birth Cohort by constructing genetic risk scores (GRSs) from 941 common genetic variants associated with adult BMI and estimating associations of transmitted maternal/paternal and non-transmitted maternal GRS with child overweight. Maternal and paternal BMI (standard deviation (SD) units) had a strong association with childhood overweight [Odds ratio (OR): 2.01 (95% confidence interval (CI) 1.74; 2.34) and 1.64 (95% CI 1.43; 1.89)]. Maternal and paternal transmitted GRSs (SD-units) increased odds for child overweight equally [OR: 1.30 (95% CI 1.16; 1.46) and 1.30 (95% CI 1.16; 1.47)]. However, both the parental phenotypic and the GRS associations may depend on maternal BMI, being weaker among mothers with overweight. Maternal non-transmitted GRS was not associated with child overweight [OR 0.98 (95% CI 0.88; 1.10)] suggesting no specific influence of maternal adiposity as such. In conclusion, parental transmitted GRSs, based on adult BMI, contribute to child overweight, but in overweight mothers other genetic and environmental factors may play a greater role.This article is freely available via Open Access. Click on the Publisher URL to access it via the publisher's site.WT104150/Wellcome Trust (Wellcome)published version, accepted version, submitted versio
Supersymmetry Without Prejudice
We begin an exploration of the physics associated with the general
CP-conserving MSSM with Minimal Flavor Violation, the pMSSM. The 19 soft SUSY
breaking parameters in this scenario are chosen so as to satisfy all existing
experimental and theoretical constraints assuming that the WIMP is a
conventional thermal relic, ie, the lightest neutralino. We scan this parameter
space twice using both flat and log priors for the soft SUSY breaking mass
parameters and compare the results which yield similar conclusions. Detailed
constraints from both LEP and the Tevatron searches play a particularly
important role in obtaining our final model samples. We find that the pMSSM
leads to a much broader set of predictions for the properties of the SUSY
partners as well as for a number of experimental observables than those found
in any of the conventional SUSY breaking scenarios such as mSUGRA. This set of
models can easily lead to atypical expectations for SUSY signals at the LHC.Comment: 61 pages, 24 figs. Refs., figs, and text added, typos fixed; This
version has reduced/bitmapped figs. For a version with better figs please go
to http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~rizz
Aspartic proteinase napsin is a useful marker for diagnosis of primary lung adenocarcinoma
Napsin A is an aspartic proteinase expressed in lung and kidney. We have reported that napsin A is expressed in type II pneumocytes and in adenocarcinomas of the lung. The expression of napsin was examined in 118 lung tissues including 16 metastases by in situ hybridisation. Napsin was expressed in the tumour cell compartment in 33 of 39 adenocarcinomas (84.6%), in two of 11 large cell carcinomas and in one lung metastasis of a renal cell carcinoma. Expression of napsin was found to be associated with a high degree of differentiation in adenocarcinoma. Immunohistochemistry was performed for three proteins currently used as markers for lung adenocarcinoma : surfactant protein-A, surfactant protein-B and thyroid transcription factor-1. Thyroid transcription factor-1 showed the same sensitivity (84.6%) as napsin for adenocarcinoma, whereas surfactant protein-A and surfactant protein-B showed lower sensitivities. Among these markers, napsin showed the highest specificity (94.3%) for adenocarcinoma in nonsmall cell lung carcinoma. We conclude that napsin is a promising marker for the diagnosis of primary lung adenocarcinoma
Debating the Desirability of New Biomedical Technologies: Lessons from the Introduction of Breast Cancer Screening in the Netherlands
Health technology assessment (HTA) was developed in the 1970s and 1980s to facilitate decision making on the desirability of new biomedical technologies. Since then, many of the standard tools and methods of HTA have been criticized for their implicit normativity. At the same time research into the character of technology in practice has motivated philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists to criticize the traditional view of technology as a neutral instrument designed to perform a specific function. Such research suggests that the tools and methods of more traditional forms of HTA are often inspired by an ‘instrumentalist’ conception of technology that does not fit the way technology actually works. This paper explores this hypothesis for a specific case: the assessments and deliberations leading to the introduction of breast cancer screening in the Netherlands. After reconstructing this history of HTA ‘in the making’ the stepwise model of HTA that emerged during the process is discussed. This model was rooted indeed in an instrumentalist conception of technology. However, a more detailed reconstruction of several episodes from this history reveals how the actors already experienced the inadequacy of some of the instrumentalist presuppositions. The historical case thus shows how an instrumentalist conception of technology may result in implicit normative effects. The paper concludes that an instrumentalist view of technology is not a good starting point for HTA and briefly suggests how the fit between HTA methods and the actual character of technology in practice might be improved
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