The Postural Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS): Pathophysiology, Diagnosis & Management

Postural tachycardia syndrome (POTS), characterized by orthostatic tachycardia in the absence of orthostatic hypotension, has been the focus of increasing clinical interest over the last 15 years 1. Patients with POTS complain of symptoms of tachycardia, exercise intolerance, lightheadedness, extreme fatigue, headache and mental clouding. Patients with POTS demonstrate a heart rate increase of ≥30 bpm with prolonged standing (5-30 minutes), often have high levels of upright plasma norepinephrine (reflecting sympathetic nervous system activation), and many patients have a low blood volume. POTS can be associated with a high degree of functional disability. Therapies aimed at correcting the hypovolemia and the autonomic imbalance may help relieve the severity of the symptoms. This review outlines the present understanding of the pathophysiology, diagnosis, and management of POTS

Dynamic Demand Analysis of India Domestic Coffee Market

Coffee, although an important commodity in India agricultural exports, has faced fluctuating international prices and decreasing unit value realisation, especially in the post-reform period. Hence, domestic market for coffee cannot be neglected altogether. In fact, Coffee Board has proposed a promotional campaign to increase domestic demand for coffee. In this context, it becomes necessary to understand weather the emphasis should be on price incentives or nonprice factors. We estimate coffee demand for the Indian domestic market using the dynamic error-correction methodology (ECM). Results show that while demand for coffee is inelastic in the long-run, it is highly inelastic in the short-run. This suggests that Coffee Board may focus efforts on non-price factors rather than price incentives in their generic coffee promotional campaign.

MULTILATERAL GOVERNANCE OF FISHERIES: MANAGEMENT AND COOPERATION IN THE WESTERN AND CENTRAL PACIFIC TUNA FISHERIES

The tuna resources of the Western and Central Pacific are the world's largest and most valuable fisheries of their type and are of significant economic importance to the Pacific island countries through whose waters they migrate. Two major concerns exist with the current governance of this fishery. First, Pacific island countries receive only a small share of the resource rents from the tuna fisheries. Second, the current management structure of the fisheries will not ensure the long-term sustainability of the resources. This paper derives a model to show that the sustainability of the resource can be improved when a single policymaker acts as Stackelberg leader and sets a tax, or an equivalent quantity instrument, to maximize rents from the resource. A practical institutional mechanism is presented that mimics the model's rent maximization outcome and that offers substantial benefits to both Pacific island countries and distant water fishing nations.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

A model study of the seasonal cycle of the Arabian Sea surface temperature

The Annual variation of the SST along a zonal strip from the coast of Somalia to the southwest coast of India was simulated using available data (monthly-mean heat and momentum fluxes across the air-sea interface, surface advective field, etc.) as input to a Kraus-Turner mixed-layer model. Three cases were examined. In the first, influence of surface fluxes alone was considered. The second included the effects of surface fluxes and vertical advection. Then, effect of horizontal advection was added. The model forced with the surface heat and momentum fluxes alone simulated reasonably well the SST variability throughout the year except during the May-August (southwest monsoon) cooling phase. The model was found to be inadequate to handle the coastal areas during this phase. Over the open-sea regime the performance of the model was better; and, it improved when the influence of advection was included. The important contribution of the horizontal advection during June-August was to remove most of the heat gained at the surface during the course of a year. Though downwelling in the open-sea had little influence on the SST, it had noticeable impact on the vertical heat transport. The numerical experiments suggest that the Kraus-Turner thermodynamics alone dominate the Arabian SST variability throughout the year except during the southwest monsoon, when dynamics too playa significant role

Gene tree reconciliation: new developments in Bayesian concordance analysis with BUCKy

When phylogenetic trees inferred from different genes are incongruent, several methods are available to reconcile gene trees and extract the shared phylogenetic information from the sequence data. Bayesian Concordance Analysis, implemented in BUCKy, aims to extract the vertical signal and to infer clusters of genes that share the same tree topology. The new version of BUCKy includes a quartet-based estimate of the species tree with branch lengths in coalescent units