Changes of Adult Population Health Status in China from 2003 to 2008

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to examine the change in health status of China’s adult population between the years of 2003 and 2008 due to rapid economic growth and medical system improvement. Methods: Data from the third and fourth Chinese national health services surveys covering 141,927 residents in 2003 and 136,371 residents in 2008 who were aged.18 years were analyzed. Results: Chinese respondents in 2008 were more likely to report disease than in 2003. Smoking slightly decreased among men and women, and regular exercise showed much improvement. Stratified analyses revealed significant subpopulation disparities in rate ratios for 2008/2003 in the presence of chronic disease, with greater increases among women, elderly, the Han nationality, unmarried and widow, illiterate, rural, and regions east of China than other groups. Conclusions: Chinese adults in 2008 had worse health status than in 2003 in terms of presence of chronic disease. China’s reform of health care will face more complex challenges in coming years from the deteriorating health status in Chinese adults

EL_PSSM-RT:DNA-binding residue prediction by integrating ensemble learning with PSSM Relation Transformation

Background: Prediction of DNA-binding residue is important for understanding the protein-DNA recognition mechanism. Many computational methods have been proposed for the prediction, but most of them do not consider the relationships of evolutionary information between residues. Results: In this paper, we first propose a novel residue encoding method, referred to as the Position Specific Score Matrix (PSSM) Relation Transformation (PSSM-RT), to encode residues by utilizing the relationships of evolutionary information between residues. PDNA-62 and PDNA-224 are used to evaluate PSSM-RT and two existing PSSM encoding methods by five-fold cross-validation. Performance evaluations indicate that PSSM-RT is more effective than previous methods. This validates the point that the relationship of evolutionary information between residues is indeed useful in DNA-binding residue prediction. An ensemble learning classifier (EL_PSSM-RT) is also proposed by combining ensemble learning model and PSSM-RT to better handle the imbalance between binding and non-binding residues in datasets. EL_PSSM-RT is evaluated by five-fold cross-validation using PDNA-62 and PDNA-224 as well as two independent datasets TS-72 and TS-61. Performance comparisons with existing predictors on the four datasets demonstrate that EL_PSSM-RT is the best-performing method among all the predicting methods with improvement between 0.02-0.07 for MCC, 4.18-21.47% for ST and 0.013-0.131 for AUC. Furthermore, we analyze the importance of the pair-relationships extracted by PSSM-RT and the results validates the usefulness of PSSM-RT for encoding DNA-binding residues. Conclusions: We propose a novel prediction method for the prediction of DNA-binding residue with the inclusion of relationship of evolutionary information and ensemble learning. Performance evaluation shows that the relationship of evolutionary information between residues is indeed useful in DNA-binding residue prediction and ensemble learning can be used to address the data imbalance issue between binding and non-binding residues. A web service of EL_PSSM-RT ( http://hlt.hitsz.edu.cn:8080/PSSM-RT_SVM/ ) is provided for free access to the biological research community

Spatial localization of resistive drift wave structure in tokamak edge plasmas with an embedded magnetic island

Resistive drift wave instability is investigated numerically in tokamak edge plasma confined by sheared slab magnetic field geometry with an embedded magnetic island. The focus is on the structural characteristics of eigenmode inside the island, where the density profile tends to be flattened. A transition of the dominant eigenmode occurs around a critical island width wc . For thinislands with a width below wc , two global long wavelength eigenmodes with approximately the same growth rate but different eigenfrequency are excited, which are stabilized by the magnetic island through two-dimensional mode coupling in both x and y (corresponding to radial and poloidal intokamak) directions. On the other hand, a short wavelength eigenmode, which is destabilized by thick islands with a width above wc , dominates the edge fluctuation, showing a prominent structural localization in the region between the X-point and the O-point of the magnetic island. The main destabilization mechanism is identified as the mode coupling in the y direction, which is similar to the so-called toroidal coupling in tokamak plasmas. These three eigenmodes may coexist in the drift wave fluctuation for the island with a width around wc . It is demonstrated that the structural localization results mainly from the quasilinear flattening of density profile inside the magnetic island