Evaluation of work-based screening for early signs of alcohol-related liver disease in hazardous and harmful drinkers: the PrevAIL study

Background The direct cost of excessive alcohol consumption to health services is substantial but dwarfed by the cost borne by the workplace as a result of lost productivity. The workplace is also a promising setting for health interventions. The Preventing Alcohol Harm in Liverpool and Knowsley (PrevAIL) project aimed to evaluate a mechanism for detecting the prevalence of alcohol related liver disease using fibrosis biomarkers. Secondary aims were to identify the additive effect of obesity as a risk factor for early liver disease; to assess other impacts of alcohol on work, using a cross-sectional survey. Methods Participants (aged 36-55y) from 13 workplaces participated (March 2011–April 2012). BMI, waist circumference, blood pressure and self-reported alcohol consumption in the previous week was recorded. Those consuming more than the accepted UK threshold (men: >21 units; female: >14 units alcohol) provided a 20 ml venous blood sample for a biomarker test (Southampton Traffic Light Test) and completed an alcohol questionnaire (incorporating the Severity of Alcohol Dependence Questionnaire). Results The screening mechanism enrolled 363 individuals (52 % women), 39 % of whom drank above the threshold and participated in the liver screen (n = 141, complete data = 124 persons). Workplaces with successful participation were those where employers actively promoted, encouraged and facilitated attendance. Biomarkers detected that 30 % had liver disease (25 %, intermediate; 5 % probable). Liver disease was associated with the frequency of visits to the family physician (P = 0.036) and obesity (P = 0.052). Conclusions The workplace is an important setting for addressing alcohol harm, but there are barriers to voluntary screening that need to be addressed. Early detection and support of cases in the community could avert deaths and save health and social costs. Alcohol and obesity should be addressed simultaneously, because of their known multiplicative effect on liver disease risk, and because employers preferred a general health intervention to one that focused solely on alcohol consumption

SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility and COVID-19 disease severity are associated with genetic variants affecting gene expression in a variety of tissues

Variability in SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility and COVID-19 disease severity between individuals is partly due to genetic factors. Here, we identify 4 genomic loci with suggestive associations for SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility and 19 for COVID-19 disease severity. Four of these 23 loci likely have an ethnicity-specific component. Genome-wide association study (GWAS) signals in 11 loci colocalize with expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) associated with the expression of 20 genes in 62 tissues/cell types (range: 1:43 tissues/gene), including lung, brain, heart, muscle, and skin as well as the digestive system and immune system. We perform genetic fine mapping to compute 99% credible SNP sets, which identify 10 GWAS loci that have eight or fewer SNPs in the credible set, including three loci with one single likely causal SNP. Our study suggests that the diverse symptoms and disease severity of COVID-19 observed between individuals is associated with variants across the genome, affecting gene expression levels in a wide variety of tissue types

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

A first update on mapping the human genetic architecture of COVID-19

peer reviewe

The availability and price of food in rural Northern Ireland

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Implications of Sky Radiance On Deep-Space Optical Communication Links

As the number of deep-space missions that are turning to optical communications to support science operations increases, system designers are taking a more in depth look at the link budgets that govern such links. Noise sources, such as the radiance arising from scattering in the Earth’s atmosphere and light reflected from planetary bodies in close visual proximity to spacecraft, become particularly critical given the photon-starved channels normally associated with deep-space links. In the case of the Earth’s atmosphere, sky radiance becomes a significant factor when considering daytime operations especially when operators need to support spacecraft contacts close to the Sun. This paper encapsulates the implications of sky radiance on deep-space optical communication scenarios and provides an overview of the current efforts underway in Europe to further quantify its impact on future mission operations

Channel characterization for air-to-ground free-space optical communication links

The next five to ten years will see more and more free-space optical communication systems being put into practical use as technologies and techniques continue to mature, particularly in the area of mobile and satellite-to-ground communications. To meet the increasing demand of these types of systems, it is necessary to gain a deeper understanding of the various atmospheric effects at play in a free-space optical link in an effort to mitigate their impact on operational systems. In that context, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) has conducted a number of field trials between a Dornier 228 aircraft and its ground station in Oberpfaffenhofen, just south of Munich, Germany. These field trials have involved the concurrent measurement of atmospheric turbulence using three different techniques: pupil plane imaging, focus spot imaging and Shack-Hartmann wave-front sensing. To ensure the accurate synchronization of measurements between the three techniques, a concerted effort was made in the selection of computer hardware and the development of image acquisition software. Furthermore, power measurements in up- and downlink have been taken to be further correlated with the 3 primary instruments. It is envisioned that the resulting analysis of these measurements shall contribute to the implementation of new adaptive optics techniques to facilitate various air and space communication links. This paper shall describe the overall experiment design as well as some of the design decisions that led to the final experiment configuration

Performance, cost analysis, and ground segment design of ultra high throughput multi-spot beam satellite networks applying different capacity enhancing techniques

There is an ever present demand for increasingly higher data rates in multi-spot beam satellite networks. This can be enabled, by shifting carrier frequencies to higher bands, such as the Q/V-band, where more bandwidth is available. Furthermore, the available bandwidth has to be used as efficiently as possible, which requires efficient capacity enhancing techniques. The present paper identifies and analyzes ground segment capacity enhancing techniques for ultra high throughput multi-spot beam satellite networks operating in Q/V-band in the feeder link and in Ka-band in the user link. The impact of several capacity enhancing techniques on system performance is analyzed using a realistic time step-based system simulator. Their impact on the ground segment costs is also analyzed. The examined capacity enhancing techniques are as follows: (i) reduced carrier spacing with adjacent channel interference cancellation; (ii) full frequency reuse with co-channel interference cancellation and scheduling; (iii) four different smart gateway diversity techniques and; (iv) employing optical feeder links as an alternative to radio frequency feeder links. The paper shows that these techniques are capable of improving system performance at the expense of an increase in cost related to the complexity and maturity of the applied capacity-increasing technique