Metastatic pancreatic cancer

A 69-year-old Caucasian woman who had recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer presented with severe low back pain associated with weakness and paresthesiae in her lower extremities. She had also developed urinary retention. She was diagnosed with spinal cord compression at T10-11 secondary to vertebral and epidural metastasis. In view of the poor prognosis, the patient was referred for palliative care. This case documents spinal cord compression secondary to bone metastasis, a rare complication of pancreatic cancer.peer-reviewe

Weak universality in sensory tradeoffs

For many organisms, the number of sensory neurons is largely determined during development, before strong environmental cues are present. This is despite the fact that environments can fluctuate drastically both from generation to generation and within an organism's lifetime. How can organisms get by by hard-coding the number of sensory neurons? We approach this question using rate-distortion theory. A combination of simulation and theory suggests that when environments are large, the rate-distortion function---a proxy for material costs, timing delays, and energy requirements---depends only on coarse-grained environmental statistics that are expected to change on evolutionary, rather than ontogenetic, timescales

New Approaches for Air-Sea Fluxes in the Southern Ocean

Air-Sea Fluxes for the Southern Ocean: Strategies and Requirements for Detecting Physical and Biogeochemical Exchanges; Frascati, Italy, 21–23 September 201

The impact of climate change on the archaeology of New Zealand’s coastline

Abstract: With rising sea levels, changes in precipitation patterns and an increased incidence of severe weather events being predicted as a result of global climate change, the Department of Conservation commissioned a study to determine the potential impacts of these effects on New Zealand’s archaeological sites, which are mostly located near the coast. A Geographic Information System (GIS)-based case study examined the distribution of archaeological sites in the Whangarei District and assessed the risk to the archaeological resource primarily from sea level rise associated with future climate change.The results of the analysis are fairly conclusive. Currently, the major threats to archaeological sites in coastal areas are erosion, flooding and ground instability, and some sites are at risk from more than one of these threats. Approximately one-third of the recorded site locations in the Whangarei District are potentially threatened by these hazards, regardless of any future climate change effects. Climate change will exacerbate existing coastal hazards, and increase the likelihood and severity of impacts on archaeological sites. An additional 2.5–10% of archaeological sites might be affected by increased threats due to predicted changes in climate, including rising sea levels. The types of sites that are most likely to be affected in the Whangarei District are coastal midden and small habitation sites relating to Māori occupation. Although these could be affected by all three of the major hazards identified, they are particularly susceptible to coastal erosion. Land stability issues and flooding are likely to affect a greater range of sites, including larger sites such as pā and sites relating to early European settlement. It is not possible to quantify the risk to sites from increased land instability as a result of global climate change, but it is noted that any increase in extreme weather events would not be confined to coastal areas. These sites potentially hold significant information relating to the history of both the district and New Zealand. The implications of the study are that coastal sites are already under considerable threat, and that important archaeological information is being lost at a rate that may increase significantly in the future. Action is needed now to protect or retrieve the information from significant sites under threat in coastal areas before these sites disappear completely

The Role of Doctor-Patient Race Concordance in U.S. Health Disparities

It has been established that much of the disparity in health outcomes between blacks and whites can be explained by accounting for education and income. Once education and income have been taken into consideration, research has found racial disparities in health outcomes for low-income populations are small, and in some cases no longer significant. For middle and upper income populations, however, a significant racial disparity in health outcomes persists even after accounting for education and income. Seeking to explain this variation, I analyze the literature concerning health disparities, race and class, the prevalence and distribution of black physicians, and issues and trends surrounding physician-patient communication and discrimination. I find that black physicians tend to be concentrated in low-income, minority-dense areas, therefore, the likelihood of a black middle or upper class person seeing a doctor of their same race may be less than that for lower class blacks. I hypothesize that doctor-patient racial concordance, and the associated possibility of diminished communication and cultural hurdles endured by black patients visiting a black doctor, may explain some of this variation in the magnitude of racial health disparities along the education/income spectrum, explaining the larger racial health disparities in middle and upper-income populations. Using data from the 2006 Commonwealth Fund Health Care Quality Survey (N=1591), I conducted bivariate (chi-sq/t-tests) and step-wise multivariate, logistic regression statistical tests to explore if doctor-patient racial concordance affects the self-rated health of American adults. This analysis showed concordance as a significant predictor of self-rated health in the unadjusted model, but not in the full model. Simply put, concordance is a significant predictor of self-rated health, but not independent of socioeconomic factors. My modeling is consistent with the literature in showing education and income as the most significant predictors of health status