The effect of chronic lower respiratory tract disease on survival of patients hospitalised with stroke in Scotland

Stroke is of great medical concern worldwide, being the 6th most common cause of adult disability and second leading cause of death. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a similarly important cause of mortality and morbidity. The World Health Organisation (WHO) predictions place COPD as the third most common cause of death by the year 2020. There is some pathophysiological overlap between COPD, asthma and bronchiectasis. Many studies exist which examine stroke incidence and mortality. Fewer studies explore other outcomes or the impact of specific comorbidities on outcomes. The aim of this thesis is to determine whether COPD, asthma and bronchiectasis have a bearing on the survival of patients hospitalised with their first stroke in Scotland. 157,639 individuals were included in the study, 44.9% of whom were male. 58.1% of all patients had one or more comorbidities and 6.9% had a respiratory comorbidity. 74.1% of all patients survived for 30 days following stroke. 58.1% survived for 1 year and 35.2% for 5 years. The proportions of patients with a comorbid respiratory condition surviving were 71.8% at 30 days, 53.5% at 1 year and 25.9% at 5 years. Median survival for all patients was 818 days. For those with no respiratory comorbidity, median survival was 851 days. For patients with a respiratory condition, median survival was 501 days. Median survival was consistently worse for individuals with a respiratory comorbidity, when further examined by age and deprivation category. The difference in survival was more marked in the younger age groups. A respiratory comorbidity adversely and significantly affects the outcome, in terms of survival, following first stroke. The reasons for this are not entirely clear and more studies are needed to evaluate this effect further

Federal Jurisdiction over Juveniles: Who Decides

Because of the increase in the number and severity of violent crimes committed by juveniles, public demand for harsher penalties and proceedings for young offenders also increases each year.2 Congress has responded to the public outcry by enacting numerous pieces of legislation that mandate federal juvenile accountability. This legislation represents a drastic departure from the federal government\u27s traditional policy of leaving juvenile justice affairs to the states. One of the many congressional acts in the past decades confers federal jurisdiction upon prosecution of juveniles who commit serious violent or drug related crimes if the United States Attorney certifies that the case involves a substantial federal interest. 3 The various courts of appeals are split on the question of who ultimately decides? Does the United States Attorney make the ultimate decision, or do the courts have the authority to review when the decision is contested? As the conflict among the circuits and within the Missouri Eastern District Court reveals, this question is open to divergent interpretations

Cracks in anisotropic bodies in a state of generalized plane deformation

Studied in detail is the influence of the rotation of the axes of elastic symmetry on the elastic strain energy stored in the cracked body undergoing plane deformation. It is found that when one of the preferred directions coincides with the crack line, the strain energy becomes a maximum or minimum depending upon the orthotropic nature of the material. Such information can assist in the understanding of the possible direction of crack propagation in materials possessing anisotropy

Identifying Web Tables - Supporting a Neglected Type of Content on the Web

The abundance of the data in the Internet facilitates the improvement of extraction and processing tools. The trend in the open data publishing encourages the adoption of structured formats like CSV and RDF. However, there is still a plethora of unstructured data on the Web which we assume contain semantics. For this reason, we propose an approach to derive semantics from web tables which are still the most popular publishing tool on the Web. The paper also discusses methods and services of unstructured data extraction and processing as well as machine learning techniques to enhance such a workflow. The eventual result is a framework to process, publish and visualize linked open data. The software enables tables extraction from various open data sources in the HTML format and an automatic export to the RDF format making the data linked. The paper also gives the evaluation of machine learning techniques in conjunction with string similarity functions to be applied in a tables recognition task.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

Morphology and phylogeny of a new species of anaerobic ciliate, Trimyema finlayi n. sp., with endosymbiotic methanogens

Many anaerobic ciliated protozoa contain organelles of mitochondrial ancestry called hydrogenosomes. These organelles generate molecular hydrogen that is consumed by methanogenic Archaea, living in endosymbiosis within many of these ciliates. Here we describe a new species of anaerobic ciliate, Trimyema finlayi n. sp., by using silver impregnation and microscopy to conduct a detailed morphometric analysis. Comparisons with previously published morphological data for this species, as well as the closely related species, Trimyema compressum, demonstrated that despite them being similar, both the mean cell size and the mean number of somatic kineties are lower for T. finlayi than for T. compressum, which suggests that they are distinct species. This was also supported by analysis of the 18S rRNA genes from these ciliates, the sequences of which are 97.5% identical, (6 substitutions, 1479 compared bases), and in phylogenetic analyses these sequences grouped with other 18S rRNA genes sequenced from previous isolates of the same respective species. Together these data provide strong evidence that T. finlayi is a novel species of Trimyema, within the class Plagiopylea. Various microscopic techniques demonstrated that Trimyema finlayi n. sp. contains polymorphic endosymbiotic methanogens, and analysis of the endosymbionts 16S rRNA gene showed that they belong to the genus Methanocorpusculum, which was confirmed using fluorescence in situ hybridisation with specific probes. Despite the degree of similarity and close relationship between these ciliates, T. compressum contains endosymbiotic methanogens from a different genus, Methanobrevibacter. In phylogenetic analyses of 16S rRNA genes, the Methanocorpusculum endosymbiont of T. finlayi n. sp. grouped with sequences from Methanomicrobia, including the endosymbiont of an earlier isolate of the same species, ‘Trimyema sp.’, which was sampled approximately 22 years earlier, at a distant (~400 km) geographical location. Identification of the same endosymbiont species in the two separate isolates of T. finlayi n. sp. provides evidence for spatial and temporal stability of the Methanocorpusculum-T. finlayi n. sp. endosymbiosis. T. finlayi n. sp. and T. compressum provide an example of two closely related anaerobic ciliates that have endosymbionts from different methanogen genera, suggesting that the endosymbionts have not co-speciated with their hosts

A nonmitochondrial hydrogen production in Naegleria gruberi

Naegleria gruberi is a free-living heterotrophic aerobic amoeba well known for its ability to transform from an amoeba to a flagellate form. The genome of N. gruberi has been recently published, and in silico predictions demonstrated that Naegleria has the capacity for both aerobic respiration and anaerobic biochemistry to produce molecular hydrogen in its mitochondria. This finding was considered to have fundamental implications on the evolution of mitochondrial metabolism and of the last eukaryotic common ancestor. However, no actual experimental data have been shown to support this hypothesis. For this reason, we have decided to investigate the anaerobic metabolism of the mitochondrion of N. gruberi. Using in vivo biochemical assays, we have demonstrated that N. gruberi has indeed a functional [FeFe]-hydrogenase, an enzyme that is attributed to anaerobic organisms. Surprisingly, in contrast to the published predictions, we have demonstrated that hydrogenase is localized exclusively in the cytosol, while no hydrogenase activity was associated with mitochondria of the organism. In addition, cytosolic localization displayed for HydE, a marker component of hydrogenase maturases. Naegleria gruberi, an obligate aerobic organism and one of the earliest eukaryotes, is producing hydrogen, a function that raises questions on the purpose of this pathway for the lifestyle of the organism and potentially on the evolution of eukaryotes

Phylogenetic Diversity of NTT Nucleotide Transport Proteins in Free-Living and Parasitic Bacteria and Eukaryotes

Plasma membrane-located nucleotide transport proteins (NTTs) underpin the lifestyle of important obligate intracellular bacterial and eukaryotic pathogens by importing energy and nucleotides from infected host cells that the pathogens can no longer make for themselves. As such their presence is often seen as a hallmark of an intracellular lifestyle associated with reductive genome evolution and loss of primary biosynthetic pathways. Here, we investigate the phylogenetic distribution of NTT sequences across the domains of cellular life. Our analysis reveals an unexpectedly broad distribution of NTT genes in both host-associated and free-living prokaryotes and eukaryotes. We also identify cases of within-bacteria and bacteria-to-eukaryote horizontal NTT transfer, including into the base of the oomycetes, a major clade of parasitic eukaryotes. In addition to identifying sequences that retain the canonical NTT structure, we detected NTT gene fusions with HEAT-repeat and cyclic nucleotide binding domains in Cyanobacteria, pathogenic Chlamydiae and Oomycetes. Our results suggest that NTTs are versatile functional modules with a much wider distribution and a broader range of potential roles than has previously been appreciated

Waning magmatic activity along the Southern Explorer Ridge revealed through fault restoration of rift topography

International audienceWe combine high-resolution bathymetry acquired using the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle ABE with digital seafloor imagery collected using the remotely operated vehicle ROPOS across the axial valley of the Southern Explorer Ridge (SER) to infer the recent volcanic and tectonic processes. The SER is an intermediate spreading ridge located in the northeast Pacific. It hosts the Magic Mountain hydrothermal vent. We reconstruct the unfaulted seafloor terrain at SER based on calculations of the vertical displacement field and fault parameters. The vertical changes between the initial and the restored topographies reflect the integrated effects of volcanism and tectonism on relief-forming processes over the last 11,000-14,000 years. The restored topography indicates that the axial morphology evolved from a smooth constructional dome >500 m in diameter, to a fault-bounded graben, ~500 m wide and 30-70 m deep. This evolution has been accompanied by changes in eruptive rate, with deposition of voluminous lobate and sheet flows when the SER had a domed morphology, and limited-extent low-effusion rate pillow eruptions during graben development. Most of the faults shaping the present axial valley postdate the construction of the dome. Our study supports a model of cyclic volcanism at the SER with periods of effusive eruptions flooding the axial rift, centered on the broad plateau at the summit of the ridge, followed by a decrease in eruptive activity and a subsequent dominance of tectonic processes, with minor low-effusion rate eruptions confined to the axial graben. The asymmetric shape of the axial graben supports an increasing role of extensional processes, with a component of simple shear in the spreading processes