Back reaction, covariant anomaly and effective action

In the presence of back reaction, we first produce the one-loop corrections for the event horizon and Hawking temperature of the Reissner-Nordstr\"om black hole. Then, based on the covariant anomaly cancelation method and the effective action technique, the modified expressions for the fluxes of gauge current and energy momentum tensor, due to the effect of back reaction, are obtained. The results are consistent with the Hawking fluxes of a (1+1)-dimensional blackbody at the temperature with quantum corrections, thus confirming the robustness of the covariant anomaly cancelation method and the effective action technique for black holes with back reaction.Comment: 17 page

Evaluation of a pilot cooperative medical scheme in rural China: impact on gender patterns of health care utilization and prescription practices

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In 2003 the Chinese government introduced voluntary cooperative medical schemes (CMS), soon to be in place throughout rural China. Families who chose to enroll do so as a single unit and nothing is known about any differential effect of these new schemes on family members. This study evaluates the impact of one pilot CMS in Anhui Province on health care use by girls aged less than 5 years and women 65 years or older, and on the pattern and cost of prescriptions.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Health care records were extracted covering a 10 year period, before, during and after the pilot CMS in 4 townships, one with the intervention and 3 comparison townships without. The impact of the intervention on the age and gender distribution of patients presenting for health care and on the prescription of certain drugs was assessed by logistic regression. The cost of prescriptions before, during and after the intervention period was also assessed.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>203,058 registration and 643,588 prescription records were identified. During the intervention there was a reduced likelihood overall that a patient was female (OR = 0.92: 95%CI 0.87 - 0.97) at the intervention site. Girls aged < 5 years had an increased likelihood of health care (OR = 1.41: 95%CI 1.23 - 1.59) during the CMS, but women ≥ 65 years were relatively disadvantaged (OR = 0.84: 95%CI 0.75 - 0.95). The use of antibiotics and systemic steroids increased disproportionately at the intervention site for patients ≥ 5 years. Prescription costs at the township hospital also increased at the intervention site, particularly for older men.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This evaluation suggests that all family members did not benefit equally from the pilot CMS and that women ≥ 65 years may be disadvantaged by the newly available reimbursements of health care costs through the CMS. It points to the need, in future evaluations, to use individuals rather than families as the unit of analysis, in order to determine whether such health care inequalities are wide-spread and persistent or are reduced in the longer term. The results also support earlier concerns about the influence of new funding resources on prescription practices and the need for regulation of for-profit prescribing.</p

Prognostic and therapeutic significance of carbohydrate antigen 19-9 as tumor marker in patients with pancreatic cancer

In pancreatic cancer ( PC) accurate determination of treatment response by imaging often remains difficult. Various efforts have been undertaken to investigate new factors which may serve as more appropriate surrogate parameters of treatment efficacy. This review focuses on the role of carbohydrate antigen 19- 9 ( CA 19- 9) as a prognostic tumor marker in PC and summarizes its contribution to monitoring treatment efficacy. We undertook a Medline/ PubMed literature search to identify relevant trials that had analyzed the prognostic impact of CA 19- 9 in patients treated with surgery, chemoradiotherapy and chemotherapy for PC. Additionally, relevant abstract publications from scientific meetings were included. In advanced PC, pretreatment CA 19- 9 levels have a prognostic impact regarding overall survival. Also a CA 19- 9 decline under chemotherapy can provide prognostic information for median survival. A 20% reduction of CA 19- 9 baseline levels within the first 8 weeks of chemotherapy appears to be sufficient to define a prognostic relevant subgroup of patients ('CA 19- 9 responder'). It still remains to be defined whether the CA 19- 9 response is a more reliable method for evaluating treatment efficacy compared to conventional imaging. Copyright (c) 2006 S. Karger AG, Basel

Synchronous Symmetry Breaking in Neurons with Different Neurite Counts

As neurons develop, several immature processes (i.e., neurites) grow out of the cell body. Over time, each neuron breaks symmetry when only one of its neurites grows much longer than the rest, becoming an axon. This symmetry breaking is an important step in neurodevelopment, and aberrant symmetry breaking is associated with several neuropsychiatric diseases, including schizophrenia and autism. However, the effects of neurite count in neuronal symmetry breaking have never been studied. Existing models for neuronal polarization disagree: some predict that neurons with more neurites polarize up to several days later than neurons with fewer neurites, while others predict that neurons with different neurite counts polarize synchronously. We experimentally find that neurons with different neurite counts polarize synchronously. We also show that despite the significant differences among the previously proposed models, they all agree with our experimental findings when the expression levels of the proteins responsible for symmetry breaking increase with neurite count. Consistent with these results, we observe that the expression levels of two of these proteins, HRas and shootin1, significantly correlate with neurite count. This coordinated symmetry breaking we observed among neurons with different neurite counts may be important for synchronized polarization of neurons in developing organisms

Convergence acceleration for multiobjective sparse reconstruction via knowledge transfer

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019. Multiobjective sparse reconstruction (MOSR) methods can potentially obtain superior reconstruction performance. However, they suffer from high computational cost, especially in high-dimensional reconstruction. Furthermore, they are generally implemented independently without reusing prior knowledge from past experiences, leading to unnecessary computational consumption due to the re-exploration of similar search spaces. To address these problems, we propose a sparse-constraint knowledge transfer operator to accelerate the convergence of MOSR solvers by reusing the knowledge from past problem-solving experiences. Firstly, we introduce the deep nonlinear feature coding method to extract the feature mapping between the search of the current problem and a previously solved MOSR problem. Through this mapping, we learn a set of knowledge-induced solutions which contain the search experience of the past problem. Thereafter, we develop and apply a sparse-constraint strategy to refine these learned solutions to guarantee their sparse characteristics. Finally, we inject the refined solutions into the iteration of the current problem to facilitate the convergence. To validate the efficiency of the proposed operator, comprehensive studies on extensive simulated signal reconstruction are conducted

Social and dental status along the life course and oral health impacts in adolescents: a population-based birth cohort

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Harmful social conditions in early life might predispose individuals to dental status which in turn may impact on adolescents' quality of life.</p> <p>Aims</p> <p>To estimate the prevalence of oral health impacts among 12 yr-old Brazilian adolescents (<it>n </it>= 359) and its association with life course socioeconomic variables, dental status and dental services utilization in a population-based birth cohort in Southern Brazil.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Exploratory variables were collected at birth, at 6 and 12 yr of age. The Oral Impacts on Daily Performances index (OIDP) was collected in adolescence and it was analyzed as a ranked outcome (OIDP from 0 to 9). Unadjusted and adjusted multivariable Poisson regression with robust variance was performed guided by a theoretical determination model.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The response rate was of 94.4% (<it>n </it>= 339). The prevalence of OIDP = 1 was 30.1% (CI95%25.2;35.0) and OIDP ≥ 2 was 28.0% (CI95%23.2;32.8). The most common daily activity affected was eating (44.8%), follow by cleaning the mouth and smiling (15.6%, and 15.0%, respectively). In the final model mother schooling and mother employment status in early cohort participant's life were associated with OIDP in adolescence. As higher untreated dental caries at age 6 and 12 years, and the presence of dental pain, gingival bleeding and incisal crowing in adolescence as higher the OIDP score. On the other hand, dental fluorosis was associated with low OIDP score.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our findings highlight the importance of adolescent's early life social environmental as mother schooling and mother employment status and the early and later dental status on the adolescent's quality of life regardless family income and use of dental services.</p

A novel malaria vaccine candidate antigen expressed in Tetrahymena thermophila

Development of effective malaria vaccines is hampered by the problem of producing correctly folded Plasmodium proteins for use as vaccine components. We have investigated the use of a novel ciliate expression system, Tetrahymena thermophila, as a P. falciparum vaccine antigen platform. A synthetic vaccine antigen composed of N-terminal and C-terminal regions of merozoite surface protein-1 (MSP-1) was expressed in Tetrahymena thermophila. The recombinant antigen was secreted into the culture medium and purified by monoclonal antibody (mAb) affinity chromatography. The vaccine was immunogenic in MF1 mice, eliciting high antibody titers against both N- and C-terminal components. Sera from immunized animals reacted strongly with P. falciparum parasites from three antigenically different strains by immunofluorescence assays, confirming that the antibodies produced are able to recognize parasite antigens in their native form. Epitope mapping of serum reactivity with a peptide library derived from all three MSP-1 Block 2 serotypes confirmed that the MSP-1 Block 2 hybrid component of the vaccine had effectively targeted all three serotypes of this polymorphic region of MSP-1. This study has successfully demonstrated the use of Tetrahymena thermophila as a recombinant protein expression platform for the production of malaria vaccine antigens

Real-time train driver rescheduling by actor-agent techniques

Passenger railway operations are based on an extensive planning process for generating the timetable, the rolling stock circulation, and the crew duties for train drivers and conductors. In particular, crew scheduling is a complex process. After the planning process has been completed, the plans are carried out in the real-time operations. Preferably, the plans are carried out as scheduled. However, in case of delays of trains or large disruptions of the railway system, the timetable, the rolling stock circulation and the crew duties may not be feasible anymore and must be rescheduled. This paper presents a method based on multi-agent techniques to solve the train driver rescheduling problem in case of a large disruption. It assumes that the timetable and the rolling stock have been rescheduled already based on an incident scenario. In the crew rescheduling model, each train driver is represented by a driver-agent. A driver-agent whose duty has become infeasible by the disruption starts a recursive task exchange process with the other driver-agents in order to solve this infeasibility. The task exchange process is supported by a route-analyzer-agent, which determines whether a proposed task exchange is feasible, conditionally feasible, or not feasible. The task exchange process is guided by several cost parameters, and the aim is to find a feasible set of duties at minimal total cost. The train driver rescheduling method was tested on several realistic disruption instances of Netherlands Railways (NS), the main operator of passenger trains in the Netherlands. In general the rescheduling method finds an appropriate set of rescheduled duties in a short amount of time. This research was carried out in close cooperation by NS and the D-CIS Lab

Disparities and risks of sexually transmissible infections among men who have sex with men in China: a meta-analysis and data synthesis.

BACKGROUND: Sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including Hepatitis B and C virus, are emerging public health risks in China, especially among men who have sex with men (MSM). This study aims to assess the magnitude and risks of STIs among Chinese MSM. METHODS: Chinese and English peer-reviewed articles were searched in five electronic databases from January 2000 to February 2013. Pooled prevalence estimates for each STI infection were calculated using meta-analysis. Infection risks of STIs in MSM, HIV-positive MSM and male sex workers (MSW) were obtained. This review followed the PRISMA guidelines and was registered in PROSPERO. RESULTS: Eighty-eight articles (11 in English and 77 in Chinese) investigating 35,203 MSM in 28 provinces were included in this review. The prevalence levels of STIs among MSM were 6.3% (95% CI: 3.5-11.0%) for chlamydia, 1.5% (0.7-2.9%) for genital wart, 1.9% (1.3-2.7%) for gonorrhoea, 8.9% (7.8-10.2%) for hepatitis B (HBV), 1.2% (1.0-1.6%) for hepatitis C (HCV), 66.3% (57.4-74.1%) for human papillomavirus (HPV), 10.6% (6.2-17.6%) for herpes simplex virus (HSV-2) and 4.3% (3.2-5.8%) for Ureaplasma urealyticum. HIV-positive MSM have consistently higher odds of all these infections than the broader MSM population. As a subgroup of MSM, MSW were 2.5 (1.4-4.7), 5.7 (2.7-12.3), and 2.2 (1.4-3.7) times more likely to be infected with chlamydia, gonorrhoea and HCV than the broader MSM population, respectively. CONCLUSION: Prevalence levels of STIs among MSW were significantly higher than the broader MSM population. Co-infection of HIV and STIs were prevalent among Chinese MSM. Integration of HIV and STIs healthcare and surveillance systems is essential in providing effective HIV/STIs preventive measures and treatments. TRIAL REGISTRATION: PROSPERO NO: CRD42013003721