Disabilty in Older Adults with Depression

Depression is a leading cause of disability among older adults which can change the scope of daily life for older adults and threaten their ability to live independently in the community. This dissertation explored task disability in older adults with depression in three studies. A unique aspect of the studies was the assessment of disability through performance-testing. The first study examined task disability patterns in a sample of older adults with depression being treated as inpatients (n = 60) or outpatients (n = 59). Rasch analysis revealed that the degree of disability for task domains (functional mobility [FM], basic activities of daily living [BADL], instrumental activities of daily living [IADL] with a greater physical component [IADL-physical], and IADL with a greater cognitive component [IADL-cognitive]), and task items, was different for older women whose depression resulted in inpatient versus outpatient treatment. With the same sample, the second study examined the impact of information processing speed on task disability. The patients were separated into groups by speed of processing (slower patients, n = 76; faster patients, n = 23) based on their performance on the Trail Making Test - B. Speed of processing was associated with severity of depression and both depression and slower speed of processing interfered more with effortful processing tasks (i.e., IADL-cognitive and IADL-physical) and less with tasks requiring automatic processing (i.e. FM). The third study compared physician rated disability on the Global Assessment of Function (GAF) Scale with performance-disability observed on the Performance Assessment of Self-Care Skills (PASS) in a hospitalized community-based sample separated into subgroups by readmission status (readmit patients, n = 15; non-readmit patients, n = 43). There was a lack of concordance between the measures with only the GAF Scale showing significant reduction in disability at discharge. Findings from these studies suggest that for older adults with depression, there may be sentinel tasks which are disability indicators and those tasks may differ based on speed of processing. The lack of concordance between the disability measures suggests the need for consideration of performance-based testing of daily life tasks as a component of usual care

Observation of a new \chi_b state at ATLAS and a new \Xi_b baryon at CMS

Two recent observations of new b hadrons in pp collisions at \sqrt{s} = 7 TeV at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are presented. The ATLAS collaboration has observed a new state in radiative transitions to \Upsilon(1S) and \Upsilon(2S) and interprets this as the first observation of the \chi_b(3P) states. The CMS collaboration has observed a new b baryon decaying to \Xi_b-\pi+ (plus charge conjugates). This is interpreted as a neutral J^P = 3/2^+ \Xi_b* baryon.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, Presented at Flavor Physics and CP Violation (FPCP 2012), Hefei, China, May 21-25, 201

Space Inversion of Spinors Revisited: A Possible Explanation of Chiral Behavior in Weak Interactions

We investigate a model in which spinors are considered as being embedded within the Clifford algebra that operates on them. In Minkowski space $M_{1,3}$, we have four independent 4-component spinors, each living in a different minimal left ideal of $Cl(1,3)$. We show that under space inversion, a spinor of one left ideal transforms into a spinor of another left ideal. This brings novel insight to the role of chirality in weak interactions. We demonstrate the latter role by considering an action for a generalized spinor field $\psi^{\alpha i}$ that has not only a spinor index $\alpha$ but also an extra index $i$ running over four ideals. The covariant derivative of $\psi^{\alpha i}$ contains the generalized spin connection, the extra components of which are interpreted as the SU(2) gauge fields of weak interactions and their generalization. We thus arrive at a system that is left-right symmetric due to the presence of a "parallel sector", postulated a long time ago, that contains mirror particles coupled to mirror SU(2) gauge fields.Comment: 13 pages; references and a note adde