Using Cluster Analysis to Identify Subgroups of College Students at Increased Risk for Cardiovascular Disease

Background and Purpose: To examine the co-occurrence of cardiovascular risk factors and cluster subgroups of college students for cardiovascular risks. Methods: A cross sectional descriptive study was conducted using co-occurrence patterns and hierarchical clustering analysis in 158 college students. Results: The top co-occurring cardiovascular risk factors were overweight/obese and hypertension (10.8%, n = 17). Of the total 34 risk factors that co-occurred, 30 of them involved being overweight/obese. A six-cluster-solution was obtained, two clusters displayed elevated levels of lifetime and 30-year cardiovascular disease risks. Conclusions: The hierarchical cluster analysis identified that single White males with a family history of heart disease, overweight/obese, hypertensive or diabetes, and occasionally (weekly) consumed red meat, take antihypertensive medication, and hyperlipidemia were considered the higher risk group compared to other subgroups

Unsupervised Neural Hidden Markov Models

In this work, we present the first results for neuralizing an Unsupervised Hidden Markov Model. We evaluate our approach on tag in- duction. Our approach outperforms existing generative models and is competitive with the state-of-the-art though with a simpler model easily extended to include additional context.Comment: accepted at EMNLP 2016, Workshop on Structured Prediction for NLP. Oral presentatio

Is Graduate School Worth It? Evaluating the Return on Investment in a Master\u27s Degree.

Pursuing a college degree is one of the most expensive financial investments that an individual makes during their lifetime. While several elements contribute to the increasing cost of obtaining a bachelor\u27s degree research indicates that the wage premium of a college degree remains highly beneficial. Over a lifetime a bachelor\u27s degree has an estimated worth of $2.8 million with a wage premium that is 84$1.4 trillion in outstanding student loan debt are all factors that must be considered when evaluating the value of graduate school. While a great deal of research has been conducted to accurately measure the positive net gains to a bachelor\u27s degree less investigation has been performed for master\u27s degrees. This study utilizes data from the 2016-2017 PayScale College Salary Report the Federal Student Aid Data Center and U.S. News Higher Education to analyze the return on investment of pursuing a master\u27s degree. The study assesses median costs and earnings at the school level for master\u27s degrees in three different academic focuses: Business Law and STEM. Results from the study reveal substantial positive net returns for a master\u27s degree at a remarkably high percentage of business and law schools. However the financial gains to a master\u27s degree in STEM concentrations exhibited negative returns compared to a bachelor\u27s degree for the majority of the institutions observed

Design, development, and characterization of breathforce : a respiratory training system for patients with spinal cord injuries.

Pulmonary and cardiovascular dysfunction are consistently reported as the leading causes of morbidity and mortality among the 1,275,000 people who are living with chronic spinal cord injury (SCI) in the United States. Respiratory-cardiovascular complications from neurological disorders (primarily COPD and sleep apnea) are currently the number one cause of death and disability in the US. The main goal of this project is to develop an inspiratory-expiratory training device for use in the rehabilitation of patients with respiratory motor and cardiovascular deficits that incorporates existing technologies and promotes successful training methodologies performed at the clinic and at home. An embedded microprocessor was to convert pressure from a physiological range pressure sensor into appropriate units and guide the user through a therapy session, while saving the data for later use by the clinician. Rechargeable batteries were used to allow for portability. A bi-directional breathing apparatus to accompany the microprocessor was developed using FDA approved, off-the-shelf parts. Two therapy modes were programmed into the microprocessor to 1) find max expiratory pressure (MEP) and max inspiratory pressure (MIP) of the user and 2) function as a spirometer to track and display user data during respiratory muscle training (RMT). A transducer tester was used to apply a calibrated pressure to the device to validate the measurement accuracy. Measured values differed from the tester by 1.91%-3.78%. No drift was noticed in the device when left running for an extended period of time and humidity, moisture, and temperature effects did not affect the accuracy of the sensor measurement. A SCI test subject showed an average pressure deviation from target values (10-18.51%) that were less than that of a healthy subject (~40%). The prototype device that was given the name BreathForce. Validation studies are underway for accuracy and effectiveness

An Analysis Of Patterns And Predictors Associated With Patient Compliance Using Group-Based Trajectory Modeling

The purpose of the study was to identify differential trajectories of patient compliance in a clinical trial and to determine demographic and health risk factors associated with compliance trajectory membership. The data was obtained from an 18 month, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial looking at the long-term impact of increased dietary protein on bone mass in older men and women. Two hundred and eight subjects were randomized to either a protein treatment or carbohydrate placebo group. Statistical analysis utilized a group-based trajectory modeling framework to identify distinct clusters of individuals who follow similar compliance trajectories over time. Post hoc analysis using multinomial and standard logistic regression models were conducted to incorporate risks factors associated with compliance group membership. A four-group trajectory model was selected and determined that reported adverse event was a significant risk factor. This analysis will provide supplementation to the standard intention-to-treat analysis to understand how efficacy is driven by compliance and will pave the way to improve compliance in subsequent protein-supplemented trials

Parsing Speech: A Neural Approach to Integrating Lexical and Acoustic-Prosodic Information

In conversational speech, the acoustic signal provides cues that help listeners disambiguate difficult parses. For automatically parsing spoken utterances, we introduce a model that integrates transcribed text and acoustic-prosodic features using a convolutional neural network over energy and pitch trajectories coupled with an attention-based recurrent neural network that accepts text and prosodic features. We find that different types of acoustic-prosodic features are individually helpful, and together give statistically significant improvements in parse and disfluency detection F1 scores over a strong text-only baseline. For this study with known sentence boundaries, error analyses show that the main benefit of acoustic-prosodic features is in sentences with disfluencies, attachment decisions are most improved, and transcription errors obscure gains from prosody.Comment: Accepted in NAACL HLT 201

N-Arachidonoyl Dopamine Modulates Acute Systemic Inflammation via Nonhematopoietic TRPV1.

N-Arachidonoyl dopamine (NADA) is an endogenous lipid that potently activates the transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1), which mediates pain and thermosensation. NADA is also an agonist of cannabinoid receptors 1 and 2. We have reported that NADA reduces the activation of cultured human endothelial cells by LPS and TNF-α. Thus far, in vivo studies using NADA have focused on its neurologic and behavioral roles. In this article, we show that NADA potently decreases in vivo systemic inflammatory responses and levels of the coagulation intermediary plasminogen activator inhibitor 1 in three mouse models of inflammation: LPS, bacterial lipopeptide, and polymicrobial intra-abdominal sepsis. We also found that the administration of NADA increases survival in endotoxemic mice. Additionally, NADA reduces blood levels of the neuropeptide calcitonin gene-related peptide but increases the neuropeptide substance P in LPS-treated mice. We demonstrate that the anti-inflammatory effects of NADA are mediated by TRPV1 expressed by nonhematopoietic cells and provide data suggesting that neuronal TRPV1 may mediate NADA's anti-inflammatory effects. These results indicate that NADA has novel TRPV1-dependent anti-inflammatory properties and suggest that the endovanilloid system might be targeted therapeutically in acute inflammation