Dietary patterns, nutrition knowledge, lifestyle, and health-related quality of life: Associations with anti-hypertension medication adherence in a sample of Australian adults

© 2017, Springer International Publishing AG. Introduction: Poor anti-hypertension medication (AHT) adherence can increase disease costs and adverse outcomes. Hypertensive individuals who have a better nutrition knowledge may lead a healthier lifestyle, have a better health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and greater confidence to change behaviour. On this basis, they may have better treatment adherence. Aim: To explore the association between the above-mentioned variables and AHT adherence in a group of Australian adults with high blood pressure (BP) in a cross-sectional clinical and community-based study. Methods: Adults with high BP (n = 270) completed a questionnaire including: food frequency questionnaire (FFQ), nutrition knowledge, HRQoL, self-efficacy of diet and exercise, lifestyle and AHT adherence sections. Bivariate analysis and hierarchical logistic regression were used to explore the data. Results: Three dietary patterns were identified from the FFQ, using factor and cluster analyses (Western, Snack and Alcohol, and Balanced). We observed that following a Western dietary pattern, having lower exercise self-efficacy and shorter sleep duration were more dominant in the poor AHT adherence individuals compared to their counterparts. A positive association was observed between self-efficacy and sleep duration with AHT adherence. A Western dietary pattern was prevalent in high BP participants which slightly reduced the likelihood of good adherence. Conclusion: A healthier dietary pattern, better exercise self-efficacy and adequate sleep (more than six hours a night) may increase the likelihood of AHT adherence in individuals with high BP. Interventions focusing on improving these variables are required to confirm the findings of this study

Lifestyle and self-management determinants of hypertension control in a sample of Australian adults

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Background: Poor hypertension control can increase the risk of cardiovascular, renal and kidney diseases, and increase the social and economic burden of the disease. Methods: This study aimed to explore the lifestyle and self-management skills (medication adherence, self-monitoring, self-efficacy) determinants of hypertension control in a sample of hypertensive Australians. In a cross-sectional design, a total of 233 hypertensive adults completed a survey. Hypertension control was categorised as good control if hypertensive individuals managed to reduce their blood pressure (BP) < 140/90 mmHg, otherwise it was categorised as poor control. Data were analysed using bivariate analysis and hierarchical logistic regression. Results: 55% of the participants had poor BP control. A significantly higher frequency of poor BP self-monitoring was observed in individuals with poor control compared to their counterparts. Poor self-monitoring and a sedentary lifestyle were associated with higher odds of poor control (OR: 5.33, 95% CI: 1.78–15.93; p < 0.01, and OR: 4.69, 95% CI: 1.00–22.25; p < 0.05, respectively). No significant association was observed between other variables and hypertension control. Conclusion: Successful BP control for hypertensive individuals may require interventions and strategies that assist with improving BP self-monitoring skills and increasing physical activity. Expert Review of Cardiovascular Therap

Impulsive control of time-delay systems using delayed impulse and its application to impulsive master–slave synchronization

This Letter is concerned with impulsive control of a class of nonlinear time-delay systems. Some uniform stability criteria for the closed-loop time-delay system under delayed impulsive control are derived by using piecewise Lyapunov functions. Then the criteria are applied to impulsive master–slave synchronization of some secure communication systems with transmission delays and sample delays under delayed impulsive control. Two numerical examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the derived results

Less conservative stability criteria for linear systems with interval time-varying delays

Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.The problem of the stability of a linear system with an interval time-varying delay is investigated. A new Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional that fully uses information about the lower bound of the time-varying delay is constructed to derive new stability criteria. It is proved that the proposed Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional can lead to less conservative results than some existing ones. Based on the proposed Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional, two stability conditions are developed using two different methods to estimate Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional's derivative. Two numerical examples are given to illustrate that the two stability conditions are complementary and yield a larger maximum upper bound of the time-varying delay than some existing results

Dietary patterns, nutrition knowledge and lifestyle: Associations with blood pressure in a sample of Australian adults (the Food BP study)

This study examined the association between dietary patterns, nutrition knowledge and lifestyle with blood pressure (BP) in a sample of Australian adults. Adults with normal and high BP were included in a cross-sectional study. Dietary intake data was collected using a Food Frequency Questionnaire. Nutrition knowledge and lifestyle surveys were included in the questionnaire. Dietary patterns were extracted using factor analysis followed by cluster analysis. Associations were analysed using logistic regression. Four hundred and seven participants were included. Three dietary patterns were identified: Western; Snack and alcohol; and Balanced. Participants with high BP had a higher intake of Western and a lower intake of Balanced dietary pattern. A significant and higher frequency of discretionary foods and oils consumption, as well as lower nutrition knowledge score and activity frequency, were observed in the high BP group. Regression analysis indicated that the intake of Western and Snack and alcohol dietary patterns increases the likelihood of having high BP by 2.40 (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.28–4.49) and 2.76 (95% CI: 1.52–5.00), respectively, when nutrition knowledge and lifestyle were controlled for as moderator variables. The likelihood of high BP was not associated with nutrition knowledge, but increased with physical inactivity. This study indicates that poor dietary patterns and inactivity are associated with increases in the likelihood of high BP, and the association is not influenced by nutrition knowledge. These findings indicate the importance of developing public health strategies with an emphasis on improving the dietary patterns of individuals to prevent and control high BP in Australian adults

Group Target Tracking Based on MS-MeMBer Filters

This paper presents a new group target tracking method based on the standard multi-sensor multi-target multi-Bernoulli (MS-MeMBer) filter. In the prediction step, the group structure is used to constrain the movement of the constituent members within the respective groups. Specifically, the group of members is considered as an undirected random graph. Combined with the virtual leader-follower model, the motion equation of the members within groups is formulated. In the update step, the partitioning problem of multiple sensors is transformed into a multi-dimensional assignment (MDA) problem. Compared with the original two-step greedy partitioning mechanism, the MDA algorithm achieves better measurement partitions in group target tracking scenarios. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, a simulation scenario including group splitting and merging is established. Results show that, compared with the standard MS-MeMBer filter, our method can effectively estimate the cardinality of members and groups at the cost of increasing computational load. The filtering accuracy of the proposed method outperforms that of the MS-MeMBer filter. </p

Validation of a short food frequency questionnaire in Australian adults

The aim of this article is to report on the validity and internal consistency of a short food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) to measure dietary intake in Australian adults. A total of 407 individuals completed the short FFQ. The Cronbach?s alpha of 0.66 indicated acceptable internal consistency for the FFQ. Content validity was measured using factor analysis showed that 35% of total variance was explained by factor analysis. The FFQ was also validated against 31 3-day food records (FR). No significant difference between average intake of energy, most macronutrients, and some micronutrients between two instruments was identified. An acceptable levels of correlation (0.39?0.69) was observed between the two instruments. Bland and Altman?s plots showed relative agreement in both instruments with potential bias in measuring iron and iodine. The current FFQ can be an acceptable tool to quickly measuring dietary intake in Australian adults

Effect of probiotics on blood pressure: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized, controlled trials

Previous human clinical trials have shown that probiotic consumption may improve blood pressure (BP) control. The aim of the present systematic review was to clarify the effects of probiotics on BP using a meta-analysis of randomized, controlled trials. PubMed, Scopus, Cochrane Library (Central), Physiotherapy Evidence Database, and Clinicaltrial.gov databases were searched until January 2014 to identify eligible articles. Meta-analysis using a random-effects model was chosen to analyze the impact of combined trials. Nine trials were included. Probiotic consumption significantly changed systolic BP by −3.56 mm Hg (95% confidence interval, −6.46 to −0.66) and diastolic BP by −2.38 mm Hg (95% confidence interval, −2.38 to −0.93) compared with control groups. A greater reduction was found with multiple as compared with single species of probiotics, for both systolic and diastolic BP. Subgroup analysis of trials with baseline BP ≥130/85 mm Hg compared with <130/85 mm Hg found a more significant improvement in diastolic BP. Duration of intervention <8 weeks did not result in a significant reduction in systolic or diastolic BP. Furthermore, subgroup analysis of trials with daily dose of probiotics <1011 colony-forming units did not result in a significant meta-analysis effect. The present meta-analysis suggests that consuming probiotics may improve BP by a modest degree, with a potentially greater effect when baseline BP is elevated, multiple species of probiotics are consumed, the duration of intervention is ≥8 weeks, or daily consumption dose is ≥1011 colony-forming units

MFBCNNC: Momentum factor biogeography convolutional neural network for COVID-19 detection via chest X-ray images

Aim:By October 6, 2020, Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was diagnosed worldwide, reaching 3,355,7427 people and 1,037,862 deaths. Detection of COVID-19 and pneumonia by the chest X-ray images is of great significance to control the development of the epidemic situation. The current COVID-19 and pneumonia detection system may suffer from two shortcomings: the selection of hyperparameters in the models is not appropriate, and the generalization ability of the model is poor.Method:To solve the above problems, our team proposed an improved intelligent global optimization algorithm, which is based on the biogeography-based optimization to automatically optimize the hyperparameters value of the models according to different detection objectives. In the optimization progress, after selecting the immigration of suitable index vector and the emigration of suitable index vector, we proposed adding a comparison operation to compare the value of them. According to the different numerical relationships between them, the corresponding operations are performed to improve the migration operation of biogeography-based optimization. The improved algorithm (momentum factor biogeography-based optimization) can better perform the automatic optimization operation. In addition, our team also proposed two frameworks: biogeography convolutional neural network and momentum factor biogeography convolutional neural network. And two methods for detection COVID-19 based on the proposed frameworks.Results:Our method used three convolutional neural networks (LeNet-5, VGG-16, and ResNet-18) as the basic classification models for chest X-ray images detection of COVID-19, Normal, and Pneumonia. The accuracy of LeNet-5, VGG-16, and ResNet-18 is improved by 1.56%, 1.48%, and 0.73% after using biogeography-based optimization to optimize the hyperparameters of the models. The accuracy of LeNet-5, VGG-16, and ResNet-18 is improved by 2.87%, 6.31%, and 1.46% after using the momentum factor biogeography-based optimization to optimize the hyperparameters of the models.Conclusion:Under the same experimental conditions, the performance of the momentum factor biogeography-based optimization is superior to the biogeography-based optimization in optimizing the hyperparameters of the convolutional neural networks. Experimental results show that the momentum factor biogeography-based optimization can improve the detection performance of the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of overall accuracy. In future research, we will continue to use and improve other global optimization algorithms to enhance the application ability of deep learning in medical pathological image detection.</div

Measuring the developing trends of international construction industries in global value chains based on value added

The construction sector is an indispensable element of social economies. The international trade activities for the local construction sectors have been stimulated by the demands of globalization, which accelerates the transfer of value added in the global value chains. This study constructs a measurement framework for the developing trends in the global value chains based on value added and picks up the international construction industries at the sectoral level. Based on the participation index, the position index, and the connection index, the developing trend is measured in order to comprehensively identify the ability of the national construction sectors due to value added in the global value chain. The study results show that the influence on the global value chain derived from technical advantage decreased with the improvement of the construction sectors in emerging economies. The international construction sectors were reallocated based on geographical distribution and competitive advantage after 2008. This paper will prove useful for policymakers by providing a clear method for identifying the precise location in the global value chain of a specific country. Governments can consider sectoral planning at regional and global levels based on a map of advantages and disadvantages