Complex factors that influence patient and partner and dyad outcome 4 months after coronary artery bypass surgery

Background: Coronary heart disease (CHD) remains a major cause of death and ill- health in Scotland. Coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) aims to relieve CHD symptoms, improve quality of life and increase life expectancy in high-risk groups. Partners may positively or negatively influence patient outcome, and they too may be adversely affected by the experience of CABG. Health care is currently organised around the patient. The partner's is seen as merely assisting patient recovery. Their health and well-being is neglected despite them being at an increased risk of CHD. Research has been limited in the partner variables that have been examined. Their health needs and concerns and the influence of the patient on partner outcome have seldom been examined and the effects of CABG on the dyad. The dyad has not previously been examined as an outcome variable of interest

The time cost of care

Extensive small scale studies have documented that when people assume the role of assisting a person with impairments or an older person, care activities account for a significant portion of their daily routines. Nevertheless, little research has investigated the problem of measuring the time that carers spend in care-related activities. This paper contrasts two different measures of care time – an estimated average weekly hours question in the 1998 Australian Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers, and diary estimates from the 1997 national Australian Time Use Survey. This study finds that diaries provide information for a more robust estimate, but only after one models the time use patterns in the days of carers to identify care-related activities, which diarists do not necessarily record as care. Such a measure of care time reveals that even people who offer only occasional assistance to a person with impairments tend to spend the equivalent of more than 10 minutes a day providing care. Most caregivers undertake the equivalent of a part-time job to help a friend or family member. Summing the average caregiving time provided by all household members reveals that over a quarter of Australian households caring for an adult or child provide the equivalent of a full-time employee’s labour, and another quarter work between 20 and 39 total weekly hours to provide informal care.Care, unpaid work, time estimation, family and gender roles, informal economic activity

Soluble Fermentable Dietary Fibre (Pectin) Decreases Caloric Intake, Adiposity and Lipidaemia in High-Fat Diet-Induced Obese Rats

Funding: This work was funded by the Scottish Government Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Caracterización de cargas de baile en una plataforma experimental

La utilización de materiales ligeros y resistentes ha permitido la construcción de sistemas de entrepisos que satisfacen condiciones ideales espaciales y geométricas para albergar grandes cantidades de personas. A pesar que estas características de peso y resistencia representan una disminución de costos en la construcción, estos entrepisos tienden a ser más susceptibles a presentar problemas de vibraciones, especialmente cuando la excitación puede ser clasificada como actividad rítmica. En este artículo se presenta la caracterización de cargas producidas por personas realizando actividades de baile, a partir de mediciones en una plataforma experimental de escala real. Se identifican los factores de impacto y coeficientes de Fourier que representan la carga debida a personas que bailan, a la que es sometida la estructura. Los resultados de la presente investigación fueron obtenidos dentro de un proyecto de investigación financiado por Colciencias y la Universidad del Valle contrato .382 - 2009.

Dose-dependent effects of a soluble dietary fibre (pectin) on food intake, adiposity, gut hypertrophy and gut satiety hormone secretion in rats

Acknowledgments We thank Donna Wallace and Animal House staff at the Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health for the daily care of experimental rats and for the body weight, food intake and MRI measurements.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Review: Environmental mycobacteria as a cause of human infection

Pulmonary infections with nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) are recognized as a problem in immunodeficient individuals and are increasingly common in older people with no known immune defects. NTM are found in soil and water, but factors influencing transmission from the environment to humans are mostly unknown. Studies of the epidemiology of NTM disease have matched some clinical isolates of NTM with isolates from the patient's local environment. Definitive matching requires strain level differentiation based on molecular analyses, including partial sequencing, PCR-restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis, random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) PCR, repetitive element (rep-) PCR and pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) of large restriction fragments. These approaches have identified hospital and residential showers and faucets, hot-tubs and garden soil as sources of transmissible pathogenic NTM. However, gaps exist in the literature, with many clinical isolates remaining unidentified within environments that have been tested, and few studies investigating NTM transmission in developing countries. To understand the environmental reservoirs and transmission routes of pathogenic NTM, different environments, countries and climates must be investigated

A decision support system for QoS-enabled distributed web services architecture

Service selection is crucial for fulfilling the requirements of service requestors. While in the real service-oriented environment, Quality of Services (QoS) is one of the greatest concerns for consumers during service selection. Existing web services "standards do not tackle the QoS issue adequately when service discovery and selection are performed. In this paper, we argue that the process of services selection is a kind of decision making" to decide which service should be selected dependent on their QoS and trustworthiness values as well as their functional capabilities. Hence, we propose a service selection solution which utilizes the Decision Support Systems Module (DSS Module) to select the most appropriate service. In DSS module we introduce Service Trust to carry out the service QoS measurement based on the Context-specific Quality Aspects. The architecture of DSS module is presented in detail and the solution is also integrated into one of the components "domain broker" in our proposed distributed web services architecture. The contributions of this paper are two fold. Firstly, we apply DSS module into web services, thus opening a new, fertile ground for DSS research in web services literature and secondly, we provide a novel and feasible solution for QoS-based service selection

A proposed reductionist solution to address the methodological challenges of inconsistent reflexology maps and poor experimental controls in reflexology research: A discussion paper

Reflexology is a complex massage intervention, based on the concept that specific areas of the feet (reflex points) correspond to individual internal organs within the body. Reflexologists trained in the popular Ingham reflexology method claim that massage to these points, using massage techniques unique to reflexology, stimulates an increase in blood supply to the corresponding organ. Reflexology researchers face two key methodological challenges that need to be addressed if a specific treatment-related hemodynamic effect is to be scientifically demonstrated. The first is the problem of inconsistent reflexology foot maps; the second is the issue of poor experimental controls. This article proposes a potential experimental solution that we believe can address both methodological challenges and in doing so, allow any specific hemodynamic treatment effect unique to reflexology to experimentally reveal itself