The effect of a very brief smoking-reduction intervention in smokers who have no intention to quit: Study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

BACKGROUND: Tobacco use is one of the most common preventable causes of death, but more than half of the Chinese men still use tobacco products. Moreover, 63.6% of Chinese smokers have stated that they would not consider quitting. Specialized and intensive smoking-cessation services are too expensive and passive to have major clinical and public health impacts in developing countries like China. Smoking cessation medications are not covered by medical insurance, and their high price prevents Chinese smokers from using them. Brief interventions are needed to provide cost-effective and timesaving tobacco dependence treatments in China mainland. METHODS/DESIGN: We describe a two-arm randomized controlled trial for smokers who have no intention to quit. The project will be conducted in outpatient clinics at a large hospital in Beijing, China. Both arms include one face-to-face interview plus five follow-up interventions. Each intervention will last approximately one minute. Subjects allocated to the smoking-reduction intervention arm (SRI) will be advised to reduce smoking consumption to at least half of their current consumption level within the next month. All subjects in the SRI will be warned to bear in mind that an attempt to reduce smoking is an intermediate step before complete cessation. Smokers who have successfully reduced their smoking consumption will be encouraged to completely cease smoking. Controls are subjects allocated to the exercise- and diet-advice arm (EDA) and will be given advice about healthy diet and physical activity, but the advice will not include smoking cessation or reduction. Data collection will be done at baseline and at each follow-up interview using standardized questionnaires. The primary outcomes include self-reported and biochemically verified 7-day point prevalence and prolonged abstinence rates at 12-month follow-up. DISCUSSION: We expect that an intention to quit in smoking outpatients can be motivated by physicians in the clinic setting. If this very brief smoking-reduction intervention can be demonstrated to have a positive impact on long-term smoking cessation, this strategy has the potential to be a viable and acceptable approach and may be used widely in China and elsewhere. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT02370147 (date of registration: 23th February, 2015).published_or_final_versio

Childhood secondhand smoke exposure and pregnancy loss in never smokers: The Guangzhou Biobank Cohort Study

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Spatially resolved ultrafast precessional magnetization reversal

Spatially resolved measurements of quasi-ballistic precessional magnetic switching in a microstructure are presented. Crossing current wires allow detailed study of the precessional switching induced by coincident longitudinal and transverse magnetic field pulses. Though the response is initially spatially uniform, dephasing occurs leading to nonuniformity and transient demagnetization. This nonuniformity comes in spite of a novel method for suppression of end domains in remanence. The results have implications for the reliability of ballistic precessional switching in magnetic devices.Comment: 17 pages (including 4 figures), submitted to Phys. Rev. Let

Entropy Projection Curved Gabor with Random Forest and SVM for Face Recognition

In this work, we propose a workflow for face recognition under occlusion using the entropy projection from the curved Gabor filter, and create a representative and compact features vector that describes a face. Despite the reduced vector obtained by the entropy projection, it still presents opportunity for further dimensionality reduction. Therefore, we use a Random Forest classifier as an attribute selector, providing a 97% reduction of the original vector while keeping suitable accuracy. A set of experiments using three public image databases: AR Face, Extended Yale B with occlusion and FERET illustrates the proposed methodology, evaluated using the SVM classifier. The results obtained in the experiments show promising results when compared to the available approaches in the literature, obtaining 98.05% accuracy for the complete AR Face, 97.26% for FERET and 81.66% with Yale with 50% occlusion

Kinks in the dispersion of strongly correlated electrons

The properties of condensed matter are determined by single-particle and collective excitations and their interactions. These quantum-mechanical excitations are characterized by an energy E and a momentum \hbar k which are related through their dispersion E_k. The coupling of two excitations may lead to abrupt changes (kinks) in the slope of the dispersion. Such kinks thus carry important information about interactions in a many-body system. For example, kinks detected at 40-70 meV below the Fermi level in the electronic dispersion of high-temperature superconductors are taken as evidence for phonon or spin-fluctuation based pairing mechanisms. Kinks in the electronic dispersion at binding energies ranging from 30 to 800 meV are also found in various other metals posing questions about their origins. Here we report a novel, purely electronic mechanism yielding kinks in the electron dispersions. It applies to strongly correlated metals whose spectral function shows well separated Hubbard subbands and central peak as, for example, in transition metal-oxides. The position of the kinks and the energy range of validity of Fermi-liquid (FL) theory is determined solely by the FL renormalization factor and the bare, uncorrelated band structure. Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) experiments at binding energies outside the FL regime can thus provide new, previously unexpected information about strongly correlated electronic systems.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Effectiveness of varenicline and counseling for smoking cessation in an observational cohort study in China

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Removing epoxy underfill between neighbouring components using acid for component chip-off

International audienc

Pathogenic challenge reveals immune trade-off in mussels exposed to reduced seawater pH and increased temperature

Mussels tolerant to seawater pH's that are projected to occur by 2300 due to ocean acidification.•Exposure to pH 6.50 reduced mussel immune response, yet in the absence of a pathogen.•Subsequent pathogenic challenge led to a reversal of immune suppression at pH 6.50.•Study highlights the importance of undertaking multiple stressor exposures.•Shows a need to consider physiological trade-offs and measure responses functionall

Effectiveness of additional follow-up telephone counseling in a smoking cessation clinic in Beijing and predictors of quitting among Chinese male smokers

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Changes in BMI before and during economic development and subsequent risk of cardiovascular disease and total mortality: A 35-year follow-up study in China

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