Processus de changement chez des patients avec une concomitance toxicomanie–santé mentale

Cette étude est un suivi rétrospectif sur cinq ans qui examine les variations dans la consommation de substances psychoactives et les déterminants de ces variations. Il s’agit d’une recherche exploratoire auprès d’un sous-échantillon de 22 participants, sélectionnés à partir d’un échantillon initial de 197 patients, présentant à la fois des problèmes de consommation problématique de substances et de santé mentale. Au niveau quantitatif, la comparaison statistique entre les deux temps de mesure montre une amélioration de la consommation problématique d’alcool et de drogues et une absence de changement au niveau de l’état psychologique, de la santé, des relations familiales/interpersonnelles et de l’emploi. Au niveau qualitatif, l’analyse de la perspective subjective des participants indique que les deux principaux éléments de progression de la consommation sont les effets et la disponibilité des substances. Les principaux éléments de diminution de la consommation sont l’utilisation des services, des techniques personnelles mises au point par les participants, le réseau familial, les atteintes à la santé physique, le manque de ressources financières, les activités « occupationnelles » et un processus de maturation.This paper is a retrospective study with a five year follow-up which examines the variations in substance use and the determinants of these variations. This exploratory research studied a sub-sample of 22 participants, selected from an initial sample of 197 patients with concurrent substance use and other mental health disorders. At the quantitative level, the statistical analysis shows an improvement in the problematic use of alcohol and drugs but no change in psychological state, health, family and interpersonnals relations, as well as employment. At the qualitative level, the analysis of the participant’s subjective view indicates that the two main elements of progression in substance use are the effects and the availability of substances. The main elements of reduction in substance use are the use of services, the personal techniques developped by participants, the family network, physical health, lack of financial resources, “occupational” activities, and a process of maturation.Este estudio es un seguimiento retrospectivo de cinco años que examina las variaciones en el consumo de sustancias psicoactivas y las determinantes de estas variaciones. Se trata de una investigación exploratoria en una submuestra de 22 participantes, seleccionados a partir de una muestra inicial de 197 pacientes, que presentan a la vez problemas de salud mental y de consumo problemático de sustancias. A nivel cuantitativo, la comparación estadística entre los dos tiempos de medida muestra una mejora en el consumo problemático de alcohol y drogas, y una ausencia de cambio a nivel del estado psicológico, de la salud, de las relaciones familiares/interpersonales y del empleo. A nivel cualitativo, el análisis de la perspectiva subjetiva de los participantes indica que los dos principales elementos de progresión en el consumo son los efectos y la disponibilidad de las sustancias. Los principales elementos de disminución del consumo son la utilización de los servicios, las técnicas personales puestas a punto por los participantes, la red familiar, el perjuicio a la salud física, la falta de recursos económicos, las actividades “ocupacionales” y un proceso de maduración.Este estudo é um acompanhamento retrospectivo de cinco anos que examina as variações no consumo de substâncias psicoativas e os determinantes destas variações. Trata-se de uma pesquisa exploratória junto a uma subamostragem de 22 participantes, selecionados a partir de uma amostragem inicial de 197 pacientes que apresentam ao mesmo tempo problemas de consumo de substâncias e de saúde mental. Ao nível quantitativo, a comparação estatística entre os dois tempos de medida demonstra uma redução do consumo problemático de álcool e de drogas com uma ausência de mudança no estado psicológico, na saúde, nas relações familiares e interpessoais e no emprego. Ao nível qualitativo, a análise da perspectiva subjetiva dos participantes indica que os dois principais elementos de progressão do consumo são os efeitos da acessibilidade das substâncias. Os principais elementos de diminuição do consumo são a utilização dos serviços, das técnicas pessoais criadas pelos participantes, a rede familiar, os problemas de saúde física, a falta de recursos financeiros, as atividades ocupacionais e um processo de maturidade

Débogage à large échelle sur des systèmes hétérogènes parallèles

Le traitement parallèle est devenu une nécessité afin de bénéficier du plein potentiel des processeurs centraux modernes. En effet, l’ajout de coeurs de calcul est un des facteurs ayant eu le plus d’impact sur le gain de performance des processeurs dans les dernières années. Pour cette raison, l’usage des processeurs multicoeurs est de plus en plus répandu en industrie ainsi que chez les particuliers, et le nombre de coeurs continue à augmenter. Cependant, le développement de programmes adaptés aux processeurs parallèles apporte de nouveaux défis. En effet, le paradigme de développement séquentiel ne suffit plus, et le programmeur doit prendre en compte le parallélisme. Il doit s’assurer que les interactions entre les fils d’exécution ne créent pas de problèmes. Cela est difficile, notamment lorsque le programme utilise un grand nombre de fils d’exécution, et des problèmes dus au parallélisme peuvent survenir. Cela pose un défi important en industrie, car ces problèmes compliquent le développement logiciel, et peuvent augmenter les coûts de développement. Il est donc nécessaire d’avoir des outils adaptés au développement de programmes parallèles pour permettre aux programmeurs d’identifier et de trouver rapidement ces problèmes. Un outil vital pour le processus de développement logiciel est le débogueur. Cet outil permet à l’utilisateur de contrôler le fonctionnement d’un programme, de l’arrêter à certains endroits et d’utiliser plusieurs autres techniques pour trouver l’origine de problèmes. Or, la majorité des débogueurs et des techniques de débogage utilisés existent depuis plusieurs années, et ont été développés alors que les processeurs parallèles étaient peu répandus. Plusieurs problèmes liés au parallélisme découlent d’une mauvaise synchronisation entre les fils d’exécution. La course de donnée en est un exemple. Elle survient lorsque plusieurs fils d’exécution modifient une variable en mémoire sans synchronisation. La valeur finale de la variable dépend alors de l’ordre d’exécution des fils et peut varier entre différentes exécutions du programme. Ce type de problème n’est donc pas déterministe, et n’arrive pas nécessairement même si on ré-exécute un programme avec les mêmes valeurs de départ. Or, la plupart des techniques de débogage sont intrusives. En effet, stopper un programme et examiner ses variables a un effet important sur la synchronisation. Il arrive donc qu’un problème disparaisse ou change lorsqu’un programme est débogué en raison de l’impact du débogueur. Il est évident que des techniques de débogage minimalement intrusives sont nécessaires afin d’aider les développeurs à déceler ce type d’erreur. Un autre défi présent avec le débogage de programmes parallèles est l’interface utilisateur. En effet, les programmes parallèles contiennent un très grand nombre de fils d’exécution, et peuvent générer un grand débit d’évènements qui doivent être traités par le développeur. Par exemple, il peut être nécessaire d’inspecter l’état de plusieurs dizaines de fils d’exécution lors d’un arrêt du programme pour bien comprendre le contexte. Cela est une tâche pénible, et peut mener le développeur à manquer certains problèmes en raison d’une surcharge d’information. Il peut arriver qu’il soit difficile de trouver l’information pertinente à travers toutes les informations affichées. Il faut donc que l’utilisateur ait accès à une interface qui lui permette de facilement visualiser et contrôler l’état d’un programme.----------ABSTRACT : A significant proportion of performance gains in processors in recent years has come from parallel processing. Indeed, adding cores in a processor has been heavily used by most manufacturers to gain performance improvements. For this reason, multi-core and many-core processors are increasingly common in personal computers and industrial systems. However, designing software for parallel processors is not an easy task. Indeed, the sequential programming paradigm traditionally used is not sufficient anymore, as multiple tasks can be processed simultaneously. The software designer must take interactions between threads into account, and write code accordingly. This is a complicated task, especially when a program uses a large number of threads. This can lead to multiple issues, thus increasing development time and cost. Therefore, using development tools suitable for parallel development is essential to allow developers to quickly identify and locate these issues. One of the most important tools is the debugger, a tool to control a program execution and inspect its state. Unfortunately, most debugging tools have been in use for a long time, and were designed to debug single-threaded applications. Many problems can be created by a mistake in thread synchronization. One example is a data race, which occurs when multiple threads try to access a shared variable without concurrency control. In this case, its final value depends on the order in which each thread accesses it, and the result may change between different executions as the thread scheduling varies. Inspecting this type of problem with a debugger can be problematic, as a debugger can be very intrusive and disturb the execution of the program. Therefore, a multi-threading issue may be masked or modified during debugging, greatly diminishing the usefulness of the debugger. Thus, adapted debugging techniques are needed for parallel software. Another challenge is the large amount of data to be handled by the user. Indeed, as parallel software may contain a great number of threads, there is a lot of information to display, and a large number of events can be generated. This can confuse the developer by overloading him with information. Therefore, appropriate techniques to visualize and control multi-threaded software are needed. These two challenges have been addressed during this research project. Two different platforms have been used for tests. The first one is a server with four multi-core processors that has a total of 64 physical cores. The other one is a general-purpose computer with a multi-core processor and a graphic card used for calculations. The GDB debugger has been enhanced to allow dynamic scalable tracing in order to trace parallel programs with minimal overhead. This enhancement has been achieved by modifying GDB to address limitations for parallel tracing, and using LTTng for trace collection. LTTng has also been enhanced to allow dynamic event registration. Finally, the impact of conditional breakpoints has been measured, and a technique to minimize this impact has been proposed

Efficient large-scale heterogeneous debugging using dynamic tracing

Heterogeneous multi-core and many-core processors are increasingly common in personal computers and industrial systems. Efficient software development on these platforms needs suitable debugging tools, beyond traditional interactive debuggers. An alternative, to interactively follow the execution flow of a program, is tracing within the debugging environment, as long as the tracer has a minimal overhead. In this paper, the dynamic tracing infrastructure of GNU debugger (GDB) was investigated to understand its performance limitations. Thereafter, we propose an improved architecture for dynamic tracing on many-core processors within GDB, and demonstrate its scalability on highly parallel platforms. In addition, the scalability of the thread data collection and presentation component was studied and new views were proposed within the Eclipse Debugging Service Framework and the Trace Compass visualization tool. With these scalability enhancements, debuggers such as GDB can more efficiently help debugging multi-threaded programs on heterogeneous many-core processors composed of multi-core CPUs, and GPUs containing thousands of cores

Identification of conserved gene clusters in multiple genomes based on synteny and homology

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Uncovering the relationship between the conserved chromosomal segments and the functional relatedness of elements within these segments is an important question in computational genomics. We build upon the series of works on <it>gene teams</it> and <it>homology teams.</it></p> <p>Results</p> <p>Our primary contribution is a local sliding-window SYNS (SYNtenic teamS) algorithm that refines an existing family structure into orthologous sub-families by analyzing the neighborhoods around the members of a given family with a locally sliding window. The neighborhood analysis is done by computing conserved gene clusters. We evaluate our algorithm on the existing homologous families from the Genolevures database over five genomes of the Hemyascomycete phylum.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The result is an efficient algorithm that works on multiple genomes, considers paralogous copies of genes and is able to uncover orthologous clusters even in distant genomes. Resulting orthologous clusters are comparable to those obtained by manual curation.</p

Rhinitis associated with asthma is distinct from rhinitis alone: TARIA‐MeDALL hypothesis

Asthma, rhinitis, and atopic dermatitis (AD) are interrelated clinical phenotypes that partly overlap in the human interactome. The concept of “one-airway-one-disease,” coined over 20 years ago, is a simplistic approach of the links between upper- and lower-airway allergic diseases. With new data, it is time to reassess the concept. This article reviews (i) the clinical observations that led to Allergic Rhinitis and its Impact on Asthma (ARIA), (ii) new insights into polysensitization and multimorbidity, (iii) advances in mHealth for novel phenotype definitions, (iv) confirmation in canonical epidemiologic studies, (v) genomic findings, (vi) treatment approaches, and (vii) novel concepts on the onset of rhinitis and multimorbidity. One recent concept, bringing together upper- and lower-airway allergic diseases with skin, gut, and neuropsychiatric multimorbidities, is the “Epithelial Barrier Hypothesis.” This review determined that the “one-airway-one-disease” concept does not always hold true and that several phenotypes of disease can be defined. These phenotypes include an extreme “allergic” (asthma) phenotype combining asthma, rhinitis, and conjunctivitis.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Cabbage and fermented vegetables : From death rate heterogeneity in countries to candidates for mitigation strategies of severe COVID-19

Large differences in COVID-19 death rates exist between countries and between regions of the same country. Some very low death rate countries such as Eastern Asia, Central Europe, or the Balkans have a common feature of eating large quantities of fermented foods. Although biases exist when examining ecological studies, fermented vegetables or cabbage have been associated with low death rates in European countries. SARS-CoV-2 binds to its receptor, the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2). As a result of SARS-CoV-2 binding, ACE2 downregulation enhances the angiotensin II receptor type 1 (AT(1)R) axis associated with oxidative stress. This leads to insulin resistance as well as lung and endothelial damage, two severe outcomes of COVID-19. The nuclear factor (erythroid-derived 2)-like 2 (Nrf2) is the most potent antioxidant in humans and can block in particular the AT(1)R axis. Cabbage contains precursors of sulforaphane, the most active natural activator of Nrf2. Fermented vegetables contain many lactobacilli, which are also potent Nrf2 activators. Three examples are: kimchi in Korea, westernized foods, and the slum paradox. It is proposed that fermented cabbage is a proof-of-concept of dietary manipulations that may enhance Nrf2-associated antioxidant effects, helpful in mitigating COVID-19 severity.Peer reviewe

Nrf2-interacting nutrients and COVID-19 : time for research to develop adaptation strategies

There are large between- and within-country variations in COVID-19 death rates. Some very low death rate settings such as Eastern Asia, Central Europe, the Balkans and Africa have a common feature of eating large quantities of fermented foods whose intake is associated with the activation of the Nrf2 (Nuclear factor (erythroid-derived 2)-like 2) anti-oxidant transcription factor. There are many Nrf2-interacting nutrients (berberine, curcumin, epigallocatechin gallate, genistein, quercetin, resveratrol, sulforaphane) that all act similarly to reduce insulin resistance, endothelial damage, lung injury and cytokine storm. They also act on the same mechanisms (mTOR: Mammalian target of rapamycin, PPAR gamma:Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor, NF kappa B: Nuclear factor kappa B, ERK: Extracellular signal-regulated kinases and eIF2 alpha:Elongation initiation factor 2 alpha). They may as a result be important in mitigating the severity of COVID-19, acting through the endoplasmic reticulum stress or ACE-Angiotensin-II-AT(1)R axis (AT(1)R) pathway. Many Nrf2-interacting nutrients are also interacting with TRPA1 and/or TRPV1. Interestingly, geographical areas with very low COVID-19 mortality are those with the lowest prevalence of obesity (Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia). It is tempting to propose that Nrf2-interacting foods and nutrients can re-balance insulin resistance and have a significant effect on COVID-19 severity. It is therefore possible that the intake of these foods may restore an optimal natural balance for the Nrf2 pathway and may be of interest in the mitigation of COVID-19 severity

Sarkozy’s image as a strong leader is helping him narrow the gap with Hollande, but it will not be sufficient to balance out his poor economic record.

Thomas Didier, Richard Nadeau and Michael S Lewis-Beck examine the 2012 French presidential election from two standpoints: first, a retrospective dimension emphasizes the burden of Sarkozy’s poor record as a president. Second, a prospective dimension highlights how Sarkozy’s image is playing in his favour – but not enough to secure a victory

Hydrological mass balance of boreal watersheds in the Canadian Shield

International audienceThis study aims at evaluating the hydrological balance of large watersheds of the Canadian Shield in the James Bay area in Northwestern Quebec, Canada. The focus is set on six rivers of the Canadian Shield altogether draining more than 185,000 km2 of the Boreal Shield, Taiga Shield and Hudson Plains ecozones of Canada. River discharge measurements, geochemical data (δ2H, δ18O and electrical conductivity [EC] of water), remote sensing, and GIS models are used jointly to calculate water balances. The approach allows for partitioning the influence of rainwater, snowmelt, surface runoff, evaporation, transpiration, and groundwater discharge to the hydrological balances of watersheds. On an annual basis, the results suggest that runoff from rainwater (30–61 % of total precipitation) and snowmelt (18–40 % of total precipitation) are the main contributions to river discharge, while the contribution of groundwater discharge to rivers represents 3 of water. The stable isotope mass balances allow for estimating watershed-scale evaporation over inflow ratios ranging between 2 and 10 % and suggest that transpiration has an isotopic composition close to summer rainwater. The hydrological balances further suggest that the total pool of water stored in the active portion of watersheds represents 10–20 % of the total annual precipitation, while the exports of groundwater beyond the limits of surface watersheds are negligible. The seasonal trends in the hydrological balances of monitored watersheds were further documented to provide insights into the sensitivity of watersheds as they face climate change. The observations are used to propose recommendations for monitoring of rivers in the Canadian Shield and to identify future research needs