Corticosterone enhances CSD susceptibility via glucocorticoid receptor activation in familial hemiplegic migraine 1 Cacna1a knock-in mice

Paroxysmal Cerebral Disorder

Can environment or allergy explain international variation in prevalence of wheeze in childhood?

Asthma prevalence in children varies substantially around the world, but the contribution of known risk factors to this international variation is uncertain. The International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC) Phase Two studied 8–12 year old children in 30 centres worldwide with parent-completed symptom and risk factor questionnaires and aeroallergen skin prick testing. We used multilevel logistic regression modelling to investigate the effect of adjustment for individual and ecological risk factors on the between-centre variation in prevalence of recent wheeze. Adjustment for single individual-level risk factors changed the centre-level variation from a reduction of up to 8.4% (and 8.5% for atopy) to an increase of up to 6.8%. Modelling the 11 most influential environmental factors among all children simultaneously, the centre-level variation changed little overall (2.4% increase). Modelling only factors that decreased the variance, the 6 most influential factors (synthetic and feather quilt, mother’s smoking, heating stoves, dampness and foam pillows) in combination resulted in a 21% reduction in variance. Ecological (centre-level) risk factors generally explained higher proportions of the variation than did individual risk factors. Single environmental factors and aeroallergen sensitisation measured at the individual (child) level did not explain much of the between-centre variation in wheeze prevalence

Analytical Modeling of Jitter in Bang-Bang CDR Circuits Featuring Phase Interpolation

This article proposes compact expressions for the jitter in clock and data recovery (CDR) circuits based on bang-bang phase detector including the phase noise of the transmitter and receiver oscillators as well as the quantization noise associated with the finite number of phases of the phase interpolator (PI) that align the receiver clock to the incoming data. Different approaches to perform the Early/Late detection on deserialized data and edge samples are compared: the use of majority voting degrades the CDR bandwidth, increasing the impact of the clock jitter on the CDR jitter; on the other hand, counting the single Early/Late occurrences does not degrade the bandwidth but increases the noise related to the finite phases of the PI. The proposed analytical formulas are validated against event-driven behavioral simulations of the CDR system including free-running oscillators as well as phase-locked loop (PLL) for clock generation

The Non Negative Least Square Applied to the Full Spectrum Analysis

An increasing demand of environmental radioactivity monitoring comes both from the scientific community and from the society. This requires accurate, reliable and fast response preferably from portable radiation detectors. Thanks to recent improvements in the technology, γ-spectroscopy with sodium iodide scintillators has been proved to be an excellent tool for in-situ measurements for the identification and quantitative determination of γ-ray emitting radioisotopes, reducing time and costs. Both for geological and civil purposes not only 40K, 238U, and 232Th have to be measured, but there is also a growing interest to determine the abundances of anthropic elements, like 137Cs and 131I, which are used to monitor the effect of nuclear accidents or other human activities. Among the RAD-MONITOR experiment several detection systems have been developed following the request of fast and portable measurements, and a careful selection of the γ-spectra analysis procedure has been consequently performed. The three windows method, suggested by the IAEA [1] has shown limitations, since it becomes imprecise for short time acquisitions and it suffers the poor intrinsic energetic resolution of NaI(Tl) detector. In particular, the Compton continuum around 137Cs photopeak is generally very intense compared to the intensity of 661 keV γ-line. This translates into long acquisition times. Moreover, the intrinsic energetic resolution of sodium iodide detectors prevents to resolve the doublet at 609 keV (214Bi) and 661 keV (137Cs). This issue can be solved only by post processing the data. In any case the windows analysis method requires a prior knowledge of the presence on site of such radioisotope. As a matter of fact, this method is blind to unexpected radionuclides

Can environment or allergy explain international variation in prevalence of wheeze in childhood?

Asthma prevalence in children varies substantially around the world, but the contribution of known risk factors to this international variation is uncertain. The International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC) Phase Two studied 8–12 year old children in 30 centres worldwide with parent-completed symptom and risk factor questionnaires and aeroallergen skin prick testing. We used multilevel logistic regression modelling to investigate the effect of adjustment for individual and ecological risk factors on the between-centre variation in prevalence of recent wheeze. Adjustment for single individual-level risk factors changed the centre-level variation from a reduction of up to 8.4% (and 8.5% for atopy) to an increase of up to 6.8%. Modelling the 11 most influential environmental factors among all children simultaneously, the centre-level variation changed little overall (2.4% increase). Modelling only factors that decreased the variance, the 6 most influential factors (synthetic and feather quilt, mother’s smoking, heating stoves, dampness and foam pillows) in combination resulted in a 21% reduction in variance. Ecological (centre-level) risk factors generally explained higher proportions of the variation than did individual risk factors. Single environmental factors and aeroallergen sensitisation measured at the individual (child) level did not explain much of the between-centre variation in wheeze prevalence.</p