Historical cohort study examining comparative effectiveness of albuterol inhalers with and without integrated dose counter for patients with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

This study was supported financially by an unrestricted grant from Teva Pharmaceuticals, Frazer, PA, USA. The authors thank Jenny Fanstone of Fanstone Medical Communications Ltd., UK, and Elizabeth V Hillyer for medical writing support, funded by Research in Real-Life. We acknowledge with gratitude Dr Ruchir Parikh for his review of and contributions to the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Promoting Partnerships for Student Success: Lessons from the SSPIRE Initiative

The Student Support Partnership Integrating Resources and Education (SSPIRE) initiative aimed to increase the success of young, low-income, and academically underprepared California community college students by helping colleges strengthen their support services and better integrate these services with academic instruction. This report describes what the nine participating community colleges did to meet the goals of SSPIRE and offers lessons for other institutions drawn from MDRC's research on the initiative

The Values of Presidential Leadership

In this volume, presidential scholars from communication, history, law, philosophy, political science, and psychology explore the broader phenomenon of leadership. Like leadership more generally, presidential leadership is a value-laden activity, an exercise in communication, and a collective enterprise. It is also subject to psychological and historical barriers to interpretation. Finally, presidential leadership is instrumental: presidents must achieve their valued ends. Contributors address each of these aspects of leadership in essays on how presidential values are determined or constructed, how they are condoned and criticized, how they are packaged and conveyed, and how they are interpreted and acted upon.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1021/thumbnail.jp

Smoothed Particle Magnetohydrodynamics III. Multidimensional tests and the div B = 0 constraint

In two previous papers (Price & Monaghan 2004a,b) (papers I,II) we have described an algorithm for solving the equations of Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) using the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method. The algorithm uses dissipative terms in order to capture shocks and has been tested on a wide range of one dimensional problems in both adiabatic and isothermal MHD. In this paper we investigate multidimensional aspects of the algorithm, refining many of the aspects considered in papers I and II and paying particular attention to the code's ability to maintain the div B = 0 constraint associated with the magnetic field. In particular we implement a hyperbolic divergence cleaning method recently proposed by Dedner et al. (2002) in combination with the consistent formulation of the MHD equations in the presence of non-zero magnetic divergence derived in papers I and II. Various projection methods for maintaining the divergence-free condition are also examined. Finally the algorithm is tested against a wide range of multidimensional problems used to test recent grid-based MHD codes. A particular finding of these tests is that in SPMHD the magnitude of the divergence error is dependent on the number of neighbours used to calculate a particle's properties and only weakly dependent on the total number of particles. Whilst many improvements could still be made to the algorithm, our results suggest that the method is ripe for application to problems of current theoretical interest, such as that of star formation.Comment: Here is the latest offering in my quest for a decent SPMHD algorithm. 26 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS. Version with high res figures available from http://www.astro.ex.ac.uk/people/dprice/pubs/spmhd/spmhdpaper3.pd

Monitoring asthma in childhood : symptoms, exacerbations and quality of life

Acknowledgements The Task Force members and their affiliations are as follows. Paul L.P. Brand: Princess Amalia Children’s Centre, Isala Hospital, Zwolle, and UMCG Postgraduate School of Medicine, University Medical Centre and University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands; Mika J. Mäkelä: Skin and Allergy Hospital, Helsinki University Hospital, Helsinki, Finland; Stanley J. Szefler: Children’s Hospital Colorado and University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine, Denver, CO, USA; Thomas Frischer: Dept of Paediatrics and Paediatric Surgery, Wilhelminenspital, Vienna, Austria; David Price: Dept of Primary Care Respiratory Medicine, Academic Primary Care, Division of Applied Health Sciences, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK; Eugenio Baraldi: Women’s and Children’s Health Dept, Unit of Respiratory Medicine and Allergy, University of Padova, Padova, Italy; Kai-Hakon Carlsen: Dept of Paediatrics, Women and Children’s Division, University of Oslo, and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway; Ernst Eber: Respiratory and Allergic Disease Division, Dept of Paediatrics and Adolescence Medicine, Medical University of Graz, Graz, Austria; Gunilla Hedlin: Dept of Women’s and Children’s Health and Centre for Allergy Research, Karolinska Institutet, and Astrid Lindgren Children’s hospital, Stockholm, Sweden; Neeta Kulkarni: Leicestershire Partnership Trust and Dept of Infection, Immunity and Inflammation, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK; Christiane Lex: Dept of Paediatric Cardiology and Intensive Care Medicine, Division of Paediatric Respiratory Medicine, University Hospital Goettingen, Goettingen, Germany; Karin C. Lødrup Carlsen: Dept of Paediatrics, Women and Children’s Division, Oslo University Hospital, and Dept of Paediatrics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway; Eva Mantzouranis: Dept of Paediatrics, University Hospital of Heraklion, University of Crete, Heraklion, Greece; Alexander Moeller: Division of Respiratory Medicine, University Children’s Hospital Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; Ian Pavord: Dept of Respiratory Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; Giorgio Piacentini: Paediatric Section, Dept of Life and Reproduction Sciences, University of Verona, Verona, Italy; Mariëlle W. Pijnenburg: Dept Paediatrics/Paediatric Respiratory Medicine, Erasmus MC - Sophia Children’s Hospital, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Bart L. Rottier: Dept of Pediatric Pulmonology and Allergology, GRIAC Research Institute, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands; Sejal Saglani: Leukocyte Biology and Respiratory Paediatrics, National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, London, UK; Peter D. Sly: Queensland Children’s Medical Research Institute, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia; Steve Turner: Dept of Paediatrics, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK; Edwina Wooler: Royal Alexandra Children’s Hospital, Brighton, UK.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Current advances in ligand design for inorganic positron emission tomography tracers ⁶⁸Ga, ⁶⁴Cu, ⁸⁹Zr and ⁴⁴Sc

A key part of the development of metal based Positron Emission Tomography probes is the chelation of the radiometal. In this review the recent developments in the chelation of four positron emitting radiometals, 68Ga, 64Cu, 89Zr and 44Sc, are explored. The factors that effect the chelation of each radio metal and the ideal ligand system will be discussed with regards to high in vivo stability, complexation conditions, conjugation to targeting motifs and complexation kinetics. A series of cyclic, cross-bridged and acyclic ligands will be discussed, such as CP256 which forms stable complexes with 68Ga under mild conditions and PCB-TE2A which has been shown to form a highly stable complex with 64Cu. 89Zr and 44Sc have seen significant development in recent years with a number of chelates being applied to each metal – eight coordinate di-macrocyclic terephthalamide ligands were found to rapidly produce more stable complexes with 89Zr than the widely used DFO

Foxg1 is required to limit the formation of ciliary margin tissue and Wnt/β-catenin signalling in the developing nasal retina of the mouse

AbstractThe ciliary margin (CM) develops in the peripheral retina and gives rise to the iris and the ciliary body. The Wnt/β-catenin signalling pathway has been implicated in ciliary margin development. Here, we tested the hypothesis that in the developing mouse retina Foxg1 is responsible for suppressing the Wnt/β-catenin pathway and restricting CM development. We showed that there is excess CM tissue in Foxg1−/− null embryos and this expansion is more pronounced in the nasal retina where Foxg1 normally shows its highest expression levels. Results on expression of a reporter allele for Wnt/β-catenin signalling and of Lef1, a target of Wnt/β-catenin signalling, displayed significant upregulation of this pathway in Foxg1−/− nulls at embryonic days 12.5 and 14.5. Interestingly, this upregulation was observed specifically in the nasal retina, where normally very few Wnt-responsive cells are observed. These results indicate a suppressive role of Foxg1 on this signalling pathway. Our results reveal a new role of Foxg1 in limiting CM development in the nasal peripheral retina and add a new molecular player in the developmental network involved in CM specification

Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics and Magnetohydrodynamics

This paper presents an overview and introduction to Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics and Magnetohydrodynamics in theory and in practice. Firstly, we give a basic grounding in the fundamentals of SPH, showing how the equations of motion and energy can be self-consistently derived from the density estimate. We then show how to interpret these equations using the basic SPH interpolation formulae and highlight the subtle difference in approach between SPH and other particle methods. In doing so, we also critique several `urban myths' regarding SPH, in particular the idea that one can simply increase the `neighbour number' more slowly than the total number of particles in order to obtain convergence. We also discuss the origin of numerical instabilities such as the pairing and tensile instabilities. Finally, we give practical advice on how to resolve three of the main issues with SPMHD: removing the tensile instability, formulating dissipative terms for MHD shocks and enforcing the divergence constraint on the particles, and we give the current status of developments in this area. Accompanying the paper is the first public release of the NDSPMHD SPH code, a 1, 2 and 3 dimensional code designed as a testbed for SPH/SPMHD algorithms that can be used to test many of the ideas and used to run all of the numerical examples contained in the paper.Comment: 44 pages, 14 figures, accepted to special edition of J. Comp. Phys. on "Computational Plasma Physics". The ndspmhd code is available for download from http://users.monash.edu.au/~dprice/ndspmhd