UTILIZATION OF MIND-BODY PRACTICES FOR ADULTS WITH FIBROMYALGIA: 2017 NATIONAL HEALTH INTERVIEW SURVEY

Fibromyalgia (FM) is a medical condition characterized by chronic pain and tenderness. Individuals with FM may experience burdensome symptoms, which impact their health-related quality of life. Treatment for FM includes pharmacological and non pharmacological practices. Non-pharmacological treatments for FM include dietary management, routine exercise, and physical and mind-body therapies. There is growing evidence that the utilization of mind-body practices is increasing in the United States, but there have been limited investigations done to observe the use of mind-body practices in the FM population. The purpose of this study is to identify predictors of the use of meditation and/or meditative movement in individuals with FM. The secondary aims are to describe the percentage of adults with and without FM that use mind-body practices and compare the demographic traits of people with FM who use meditation versus meditative movement. Using data from the 2017 National Health Interview Survey, descriptive statistics were used to determine the percentage of adults that use mind-body practices between those with FM and those without FM. To compare demographic and medical characteristics of individuals with FM that use meditation, meditative movement, both or neither practices, χ2 tests were performed. Lastly, a multinomial logistic regression model was used to examine predictors of using meditation, meditative movement, neither or both practices. The analyses revealed that people without FM were significantly more likely to use mantra and spiritual meditation, yoga, and tai chi compared to people with FM. Predictors of using mind-body practices include being young, female, and college educated

Adventurous Rainforest Hike

Postcard from Amanda Contreras, during the Linfield College Semester Abroad Program at James Cook University in Cairns, Australi

Biaxial escape in nematics at low temperature

In the present work, we study minimizers of the Landau-de Gennes free energy in a bounded domain $\Omega\subset \mathbb{R}^3$. We prove that at low temperature minimizers do not vanish, even for topologically non-trivial boundary conditions. This is in contrast with a simplified Ginzburg-Landau model for superconductivity studied by Bethuel, Brezis and H\'elein. Merging this with an observation of Canevari we obtain, as a corollary, the occurence of biaxial escape: the tensorial order parameter must become strongly biaxial at some point in $\Omega$. In particular, while it is known that minimizers cannot be purely uniaxial, we prove the much stronger and physically relevant fact that they lie in a different homotopy class

Methods of Hierarchical Clustering

We survey agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithms and discuss efficient implementations that are available in R and other software environments. We look at hierarchical self-organizing maps, and mixture models. We review grid-based clustering, focusing on hierarchical density-based approaches. Finally we describe a recently developed very efficient (linear time) hierarchical clustering algorithm, which can also be viewed as a hierarchical grid-based algorithm.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, 69 reference