Ansiedade Social na Infância e Pré-Adolescência: Adaptação para o Português de Portugal da SASC-R

A Escala de Ansiedade Social para Crianças (forma revista) - SASC-R destina-se a avaliar as experiências de ansiedade social e de evitamento das crianças e pré-adolescentes no contexto das relações com os pares. Neste estudo, pretende-se validar para a população portuguesa a SASC-R, utilizando a estrutura proposta pelos autores da escala original, através da análise fatorial confirmatória (AFC). Procedemos à aplicação da SASC-R numa amostra de 486 crianças entre os 9 e os 15 anos. Os resultados indicam que a escala replica os fatores da versão original, possui boa consistência interna e uma validade de constructo bastante satisfatória. Este estudo sugere que a SASC-R é uma escala útil na avaliação da ansiedade social em crianças.The Social Anxiety Scale for Children (revised form) - SASC-R evaluates the experience of social anxiety and avoidance felt by children and pre-adolescents in the context of relationship with their peers. This study aims to validate the Portuguese version of the SASC-R by confirmatory factor analysis using the structure proposed by the authors of the original scale. In a survey donewith 486 children between the ages of nine and 15 years, the results show that the scale reproduces the original factors, has a good internal consistency and a quite satisfactory construct validity. This study suggests that the SASC-R is a useful scale on the evaluation of social anxiety among children

Clusters of Galaxies: New Results from the CLEF Hydrodynamics Simulation

Preliminary results are presented from the CLEF hydrodynamics simulation, a large (N=2(428)^3 particles within a 200 Mpc/h comoving box) simulation of the LCDM cosmology that includes both radiative cooling and a simple model for galactic feedback. Specifically, we focus on the X-ray properties of the simulated clusters at z=0 and demonstrate a reasonable level of agreement between simulated and observed cluster scaling relations.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Advances in Space Research (proceedings of the COSPAR 2004 Assembly, Paris

The Effect of Resistance Exercise on Inflammatory and Myogenic Markers in Patients with Chronic Kidney Disease

Background: Patients with Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) experience muscle wasting which is associated with morbidity and mortality. Exercise can provide physiological and psychological benefits for CKD patients, however the molecular response to exercise is unknown. The aim of our study was to investigate the molecular response to resistance exercise before and after training in patients with CKD. Methods: This is a secondary analysis of a randomized trial that investigated the effect of 8-week progressive resistance training on muscle mass and strength compared to non-exercising controls. A sub-set of the cohort consented to vastus lateralis skeletal muscle biopsies in which we have studied molecular events relating to protein degradation, myogenesis, inflammation and oxidative stress. Results: Untrained, a single bout of exercise resulted in blunted phosphorylation of Akt and reduced mRNA expression of MyoD and myogenin, which was somewhat restored after 8 weeks of resistance training. We also observed a heightened and prolonged inflammatory response to unaccustomed exercise, which was reduced after training. There was no evidence that resistance exercise training created a prolonged oxidative stress response within the muscle, or increased catabolism suggesting that the exercise was not damaging. Conclusions: These results indicate that resistance exercise training may help restore the anabolic environment that is usually created by a bout of exercise, but is initially absent in these patients. These data also suggest that if patients are similarly limited in their response to other anabolic stimuli such as feeding, this may provide part of the explanation why patients lose muscle mass

Predictors of Poor Neurocognitive Performance and Neuropsychological Phenotypes in Adolescents and Young Adults With Congenital Heart Disease

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Lightweight Testing of Communication Networks with e-Motions

This paper illustrates the use of high-level domain specific models to specify and test some performance properties of complex systems, in particular Communication Networks, using a light-weight approach. By following a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach, we show the benefits of constructing very abstract models of the systems under test, which can then be easily prototyped and analysed to explore their properties. For this purpose we use e-Motions, a language and its supporting toolkit that allows end-user modelling of real-time systems and their analysis in a graphical manner.Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-03184Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2008-0310

Cosmological parameters from SDSS and WMAP

We measure cosmological parameters using the three-dimensional power spectrum P(k) from over 200,000 galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) in combination with WMAP and other data. Our results are consistent with a ``vanilla'' flat adiabatic Lambda-CDM model without tilt (n=1), running tilt, tensor modes or massive neutrinos. Adding SDSS information more than halves the WMAP-only error bars on some parameters, tightening 1 sigma constraints on the Hubble parameter from h~0.74+0.18-0.07 to h~0.70+0.04-0.03, on the matter density from Omega_m~0.25+/-0.10 to Omega_m~0.30+/-0.04 (1 sigma) and on neutrino masses from <11 eV to <0.6 eV (95%). SDSS helps even more when dropping prior assumptions about curvature, neutrinos, tensor modes and the equation of state. Our results are in substantial agreement with the joint analysis of WMAP and the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey, which is an impressive consistency check with independent redshift survey data and analysis techniques. In this paper, we place particular emphasis on clarifying the physical origin of the constraints, i.e., what we do and do not know when using different data sets and prior assumptions. For instance, dropping the assumption that space is perfectly flat, the WMAP-only constraint on the measured age of the Universe tightens from t0~16.3+2.3-1.8 Gyr to t0~14.1+1.0-0.9 Gyr by adding SDSS and SN Ia data. Including tensors, running tilt, neutrino mass and equation of state in the list of free parameters, many constraints are still quite weak, but future cosmological measurements from SDSS and other sources should allow these to be substantially tightened.Comment: Minor revisions to match accepted PRD version. SDSS data and ppt figures available at http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~max/sdsspars.htm