Depression and Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA)

For over two decades clinical studies have been conducted which suggest the existence of a relationship between depression and Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA). Recently, Ohayon underscored the evidence for a link between these two disorders in the general population, showing that 800 out of 100,000 individuals had both, a breathing-related sleep disorder and a major depressive disorder, with up to 20% of the subjects presenting with one of these disorders also having the other. In some populations, depending on age, gender and other demographic and health characteristics, the prevalence of both disorders may be even higher: OSA may affect more than 50% of individuals over the age of 65, and significant depressive symptoms may be present in as many as 26% of a community-dwelling population of older adults. In clinical practice, the presence of depressive symptomatology is often considered in patients with OSA, and may be accounted for and followed-up when considering treatment approaches and response to treatment. On the other hand, sleep problems and specifically OSA are rarely assessed on a regular basis in patients with a depressive disorder. However, OSA might not only be associated with a depressive syndrome, but its presence may also be responsible for failure to respond to appropriate pharmacological treatment. Furthermore, an undiagnosed OSA might be exacerbated by adjunct treatments to antidepressant medications, such as benzodiazepines. Increased awareness of the relationship between depression and OSA might significantly improve diagnostic accuracy as well as treatment outcome for both disorders. In this review, we will summarize important findings in the current literature regarding the association between depression and OSA, and the possible mechanisms by which both disorders interact. Implications for clinical practice will be discussed

All-Optical Production of a Degenerate Fermi Gas

We achieve degeneracy in a mixture of the two lowest hyperfine states of $^6$Li by direct evaporation in a CO$_2$ laser trap, yielding the first all-optically produced degenerate Fermi gas. More than $10^5$ atoms are confined at temperatures below $4 \mu$K at full trap depth, where the Fermi temperature for each state is $8 \mu$K. This degenerate two-component mixture is ideal for exploring mechanisms of superconductivity ranging from Cooper pairing to Bose condensation of strongly bound pairs.Comment: 4 pgs RevTeX with 2 eps figs, to be published in Phys. Rev. Let

Location data and privacy: a framework for analysis

Innovative services have exploited data about users’ physical location, sometimes but not always explicitly with their consent. As new applications that reveal users’ location data appear on the Web it essential to focus on the privacy implications, in particular with respect to inferences about context. This paper focuses on the understanding of location and contextual privacy by developing a framework for analysis, which is applied to existing systems that exploit location data. The analysis highlights the primal role of location in linking and inferring contextual data, but also how these inferences can extend to non-contextual data

Realization of a Resonant Fermi Gas with a Large Effective Range

We have measured the interaction energy and three-body recombination rate for a two-component Fermi gas near a narrow Feshbach resonance and found both to be strongly energy dependent. Even for deBroglie wavelengths greatly exceeding the van der Waals length scale, the behavior of the interaction energy as a function of temperature cannot be described by atoms interacting via a contact potential. Rather, energy-dependent corrections beyond the scattering length approximation are required, indicating a resonance with an anomalously large effective range. For fields where the molecular state is above threshold, the rate of three-body recombination is enhanced by a sharp, two-body resonance arising from the closed-channel molecular state which can be magnetically tuned through the continuum. This narrow resonance can be used to study strongly correlated Fermi gases that simultaneously have a sizeable effective range and a large scattering length.Comment: to appear in Phys. Rev. Let