Use of Salivary Diurnal Cortisol as an Outcome Measure in Randomised Controlled Trials: a Systematic Review.

BACKGROUND: Dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is associated with diverse adverse health outcomes, making it an important therapeutic target. Measurement of the diurnal rhythm of cortisol secretion provides a window into this system. At present, no guidelines exist for the optimal use of this biomarker within randomised controlled trials (RCTs). PURPOSE: The aim of this study is to describe the ways in which salivary diurnal cortisol has been measured within RCTs of health or behavioural interventions in adults. METHODS: Six electronic databases (up to May 21, 2015) were systematically searched for RCTs which used salivary diurnal cortisol as an outcome measure to evaluate health or behavioural interventions in adults. A narrative synthesis was undertaken of the findings in relation to salivary cortisol methodology and outcomes. RESULTS: From 78 studies that fulfilled the inclusion criteria, 30 included healthy participants (38.5 %), 27 included patients with physical disease (34.6 %) and 21 included patients with psychiatric disease (26.9 %). Psychological therapies were most commonly evaluated (n = 33, 42.3 %). There was substantial heterogeneity across studies in relation to saliva collection protocols and reported cortisol parameters. Only 39 studies (50 %) calculated a rhythm parameter such as the diurnal slope or the cortisol awakening response (CAR). Patterns of change in cortisol parameters were inconsistent both within and across studies and there was low agreement with clinical findings. CONCLUSIONS: Salivary diurnal cortisol is measured inconsistently across RCTs, which is limiting the interpretation of findings within and across studies. This indicates a need for more validation work, along with consensus guidelines.Dr. Ryan is funded by a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Doctoral Research Fellowship Programme Award in the UK. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the National Health Service (NHS), the NIHR or the Department of Health.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Springer via https://doi.org/10.1007/s12160-015-9753-

Management Accountant's Role and Functions in the Enterprise Resource Planning Environment - Author's Own Research into Enterprises in Poland

This article seeks to answer whether the implementation of an ERP system has an effect on the management accountant's tasks and functions, especially in the field of performance measurement and internal reporting. The ERP impacts on the controller's role in the organization will be evaluated using field studies on six enterprises owned by multinational corporations. The question that should be asked here is whether controller's functions and tasks will also be unaffected.Celem badania jest próba odpowiedzi na pytanie czy zastosowanie zintegrowanego systemu informatycznego w przedsiębiorstwie zmienia zadania i funkcje specjalisty do spraw rachunkowości zarządczej. Na podstawie studium przypadku sześciu przedsiębiorstw będących częścią koncernów międzynarodowych zostaje dokonana ocena wpływu zastosowania ERP na rolę kontrolera w organizacji. Autor odpowiada również na pytanie czy w funkcjach i zadaniach kontrolera nie zaobserwowane zostaną zmiany w związku z implementacją ERP

Exploring Automatic Diagnosis of COVID-19 from Crowdsourced Respiratory Sound Data

Audio signals generated by the human body (e.g., sighs, breathing, heart, digestion, vibration sounds) have routinely been used by clinicians as indicators to diagnose disease or assess disease pro- gression. Until recently, such signals were usually collected through manual auscultation at scheduled visits. Research has now started to use digital technology to gather bodily sounds (e.g., from dig- ital stethoscopes) for cardiovascular or respiratory examination, which could then be used for automatic analysis. Some initial work shows promise in detecting diagnostic signals of COVID-19 from voice and coughs. In this paper we describe our data analysis over a large-scale crowdsourced dataset of respiratory sounds collected to aid diagnosis of COVID-19. We use coughs and breathing to under- stand how discernible COVID-19 sounds are from those in asthma or healthy controls. Our results show that even a simple binary machine learning classifier is able to classify correctly healthy and COVID-19 sounds. We also show how we distinguish a user who tested positive for COVID-19 and has a cough from a healthy user with a cough, and users who tested positive for COVID-19 and have a cough from users with asthma and a cough. Our models achieve an AUC of above 80% across all tasks. These results are preliminary and only scratch the surface of the potential of this type of data and audio-based machine learning. This work opens the door to further investigation of how automatically analysed respiratory patterns could be used as pre-screening signals to aid COVID-19 diagnosis.ER

The Nernst effect and the boundaries of the Fermi liquid picture

Following the observation of an anomalous Nernst signal in cuprates, the Nernst effect was explored in a variety of metals and superconductors during the past few years. This paper reviews the results obtained during this exploration, focusing on the Nernst response of normal quasi-particles as opposed to the one generated by superconducting vortices or by short-lived Cooper pairs. Contrary to what has been often assumed, the so-called Sondheimer cancelation does not imply a negligible Nernst response in a Fermi liquid. In fact, the amplitude of the Nernst response measured in various metals in the low-temperature limit is scattered over six orders of magnitude. According to the data, this amplitude is roughly set by the ratio of electron mobility to Fermi energy in agreement with the implications of the semi-classical transport theory.Comment: Final version, Topical review for JPC

Characterizing organic particle impacts on inert metal surfaces: Foundations for capturing organic molecules during hypervelocity transits of Enceladus plumes

The presence and accessibility of a sub‐ice‐surface saline ocean at Enceladus, together with geothermal activity and a rocky core, make it a compelling location to conduct further, in‐depth, astrobiological investigations to probe for organic molecules indicative of extraterrestrial life. Cryovolcanic plumes in the south polar region of Enceladus enable the use of remote in situ sampling and analysis techniques. However, efficient plume sampling and the transportation of captured organic materials to an organic analyzer present unique challenges for an Enceladus mission. A systematic study, accelerating organic ice‐particle simulants into soft inert metal targets at velocities ranging 0.5–3.0 km s−1, was carried out using a light gas gun to explore the efficacy of a plume capture instrument. Capture efficiency varied for different metal targets as a function of impact velocity and particle size. Importantly, organic chemical compounds remained chemically intact in particles captured at speeds up to ~2 km s−1. Calibration plots relating the velocity, crater, and particle diameter were established to facilitate future ice‐particle impact experiments where the size of individual ice particles is unknown

Feasibility of Enceladus plume biosignature analysis: Successful capture of organic ice particles in hypervelocity impacts

Enceladus is a compelling destination for astrobiological analyses due to the presence of simple and complex organic constituents in cryovolcanic plumes that jet from its subsurface ocean. Enceladus plume capture during a flyby or orbiter mission is an appealing method for obtaining pristine ocean samples for scientific studies of this organic content because of the high science return, reduced planetary protection challenges, and lower risk and expense compared to a landed mission. However, this mission profile requires sufficient amounts of plume material for sensitive analysis. To explore the feasibility and optimization of the required capture systems, light gas gun experiments were carried out to study organic ice particle impacts on indium surfaces. An organic fluorescent tracer dye, Pacific Blue™, was dissolved in borate buffer and frozen into saline ice projectiles. During acceleration, the ice projectile breaks up in flight into micron‐sized particles that impact the target. Quantitative fluorescence microscopic analysis of the targets demonstrated that under certain impact conditions, 10–50% of the entrained organic molecules were captured in over 25% of the particle impacts. Optimal organic capture was observed for small particles (d ~ 5–15 µm) with velocities ranging from 1 to 2 km s$^{−1}$. Our results reveal how organic capture efficiency depends on impact velocity and particle size; capture increases as particles get smaller and as velocity is reduced. These results demonstrate the feasibility of collecting unmodified organic molecules from the Enceladus ice plume for sensitive analysis with modern in situ instrumentation such as microfluidic capillary electrophoresis (CE) analysis with ppb organic sensitivity

Direct observation of homogeneous cavitation in nanopores

We report on the evaporation of hexane from porous alumina and silicon membranes. These membranes contain billions of independent nanopores tailored to an ink-bottle shape, where a cavity several tens of nanometers in diameter is separated from the bulk vapor by a constriction. For alumina membranes with narrow enough constrictions, we demonstrate that cavity evaporation proceeds by cavitation. Measurements of the pressure dependence of the cavitation rate follow the predictions of the bulk, homogeneous, classical nucleation theory, definitively establishing the relevance of homogeneous cavitation as an evaporation mechanism in mesoporous materials. Our results imply that porous alumina membranes are a promising new system to study liquids in a deeply metastable state.Comment: 14 pages , 4 figures. Source files also contain Supplemental Material (Doebele_HomogeneousCavitationMembranes_SM.pdf