Association Between Alpha 1 Antitrypsin Deficiency And Cystic Fibrosis Severity

Objective: To ascertain the distribution of alpha 1 antitrypsin genotypes and correlate it with the severity of pulmonary disease in patients with cystic fibrosis. Method: A clinical and laboratory cross sectional study of 70 patients at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas teaching hospital. Cystic fibrosis diagnoses was confirmed by both clinical and laboratory methods. The severity of cystic fibrosis was evaluated by Shwachman score. All the patients were tested for the presence of S and Z alleles for alpha 1 antitrypsin deficiency using polymerase chain reaction. Results: Nine (12.8%) patients were heterozygous for S or Z alleles or the heterozygote compound (SZ). No significant differences were found in clinical severity of Cystic fibrosis between genotypes of alpha 1 antitrypsin. No significant differences were found when the patients were divided according to the presence or absence of the DF508 mutation. Conclusion: In this study, the first undertaken in Brazil into the association of alpha 1 antitrypsin deficiency and cystic fibrosis, we did not find an association between the deficiency and cystic fibrosis severity. 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Time series forecasting with the WARIMAX-GARCH method

It is well-known that causal forecasting methods that include appropriately chosen Exogenous Variables (EVs) very often present improved forecasting performances over univariate methods. However, in practice, EVs are usually difficult to obtain and in many cases are not available at all. In this paper, a new causal forecasting approach, called Wavelet Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average with eXogenous variables and Generalized Auto-Regressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (WARIMAX-GARCH) method, is proposed to improve predictive performance and accuracy but also to address, at least in part, the problem of unavailable EVs. Basically, the WARIMAX-GARCH method obtains Wavelet “EVs” (WEVs) from Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average with eXogenous variables and Generalized Auto-Regressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (ARIMAX-GARCH) models applied to Wavelet Components (WCs) that are initially determined from the underlying time series. The WEVs are, in fact, treated by the WARIMAX-GARCH method as if they were conventional EVs. Similarly to GARCH and ARIMA-GARCH models, the WARIMAX-GARCH method is suitable for time series exhibiting non-linear characteristics such as conditional variance that depends on past values of observed data. However, unlike those, it can explicitly model frequency domain patterns in the series to help improve predictive performance. An application to a daily time series of dam displacement in Brazil shows the WARIMAX-GARCH method to remarkably outperform the ARIMA-GARCH method, as well as the (multi-layer perceptron) Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and its wavelet version referred to as Wavelet Artificial Neural Network (WANN) as in [1], on statistical measures for both in-sample and out-of-sample forecasting

Search for displaced vertices arising from decays of new heavy particles in 7 TeV pp collisions at ATLAS

We present the results of a search for new, heavy particles that decay at a significant distance from their production point into a final state containing charged hadrons in association with a high-momentum muon. The search is conducted in a pp-collision data sample with a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 33 pb^-1 collected in 2010 by the ATLAS detector operating at the Large Hadron Collider. Production of such particles is expected in various scenarios of physics beyond the standard model. We observe no signal and place limits on the production cross-section of supersymmetric particles in an R-parity-violating scenario as a function of the neutralino lifetime. Limits are presented for different squark and neutralino masses, enabling extension of the limits to a variety of other models.Comment: 8 pages plus author list (20 pages total), 8 figures, 1 table, final version to appear in Physics Letters

Measurement of the polarisation of W bosons produced with large transverse momentum in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the ATLAS experiment

This paper describes an analysis of the angular distribution of W->enu and W->munu decays, using data from pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector at the LHC in 2010, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of about 35 pb^-1. Using the decay lepton transverse momentum and the missing transverse energy, the W decay angular distribution projected onto the transverse plane is obtained and analysed in terms of helicity fractions f0, fL and fR over two ranges of W transverse momentum (ptw): 35 < ptw < 50 GeV and ptw > 50 GeV. Good agreement is found with theoretical predictions. For ptw > 50 GeV, the values of f0 and fL-fR, averaged over charge and lepton flavour, are measured to be : f0 = 0.127 +/- 0.030 +/- 0.108 and fL-fR = 0.252 +/- 0.017 +/- 0.030, where the first uncertainties are statistical, and the second include all systematic effects.Comment: 19 pages plus author list (34 pages total), 9 figures, 11 tables, revised author list, matches European Journal of Physics C versio

Observation of a new chi_b state in radiative transitions to Upsilon(1S) and Upsilon(2S) at ATLAS

The chi_b(nP) quarkonium states are produced in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV and recorded by the ATLAS detector. Using a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.4 fb^-1, these states are reconstructed through their radiative decays to Upsilon(1S,2S) with Upsilon->mu+mu-. In addition to the mass peaks corresponding to the decay modes chi_b(1P,2P)->Upsilon(1S)gamma, a new structure centered at a mass of 10.530+/-0.005 (stat.)+/-0.009 (syst.) GeV is also observed, in both the Upsilon(1S)gamma and Upsilon(2S)gamma decay modes. This is interpreted as the chi_b(3P) system.Comment: 5 pages plus author list (18 pages total), 2 figures, 1 table, corrected author list, matches final version in Physical Review Letter

Measurement of the inclusive isolated prompt photon cross-section in pp collisions at sqrt(s)= 7 TeV using 35 pb-1 of ATLAS data

A measurement of the differential cross-section for the inclusive production of isolated prompt photons in pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy sqrt(s) = 7 TeV is presented. The measurement covers the pseudorapidity ranges |eta|<1.37 and 1.52<=|eta|<2.37 in the transverse energy range 45<=E_T<400GeV. The results are based on an integrated luminosity of 35 pb-1, collected with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The yields of the signal photons are measured using a data-driven technique, based on the observed distribution of the hadronic energy in a narrow cone around the photon candidate and the photon selection criteria. The results are compared with next-to-leading order perturbative QCD calculations and found to be in good agreement over four orders of magnitude in cross-section.Comment: 7 pages plus author list (18 pages total), 2 figures, 4 tables, final version published in Physics Letters