Radiographic Aspects of Whiplash Injury of the Cervical Spine

While the mechanism of sudden forceful flexion or extension of the neck producing injuries to the ligaments bones, and nerves of the neck has long been known, the term whiplash injury appears not to have been used in the medical literature until 1945 when it was first used by Davis. In his paper he analyzed 134 injuries of the cervical spine resulting from automobile accidents. Since then the term has been used to designate injuries to the neck or cervical spine which result from sudden forward or backward motion of the head, excluding the obviously catastrophic injuries resulting in complete paralysis or death from severe dislocation or fracture. The accident frequently appears trivial and the victim may not be aware of serious injury to the neck immediately following the incident but later may be afflicted with disabling or annoying pain

Radiographic Aspects of Whiplash Injury of the Cervical Spine

While the mechanism of sudden forceful flexion or extension of the neck producing injuries to the ligaments bones, and nerves of the neck has long been known, the term whiplash injury appears not to have been used in the medical literature until 1945 when it was first used by Davis. In his paper he analyzed 134 injuries of the cervical spine resulting from automobile accidents. Since then the term has been used to designate injuries to the neck or cervical spine which result from sudden forward or backward motion of the head, excluding the obviously catastrophic injuries resulting in complete paralysis or death from severe dislocation or fracture. The accident frequently appears trivial and the victim may not be aware of serious injury to the neck immediately following the incident but later may be afflicted with disabling or annoying pain

Fully-Coupled Simulation of Cosmic Reionization. I: Numerical Methods and Tests

We describe an extension of the Enzo code to enable fully-coupled radiation hydrodynamical simulation of inhomogeneous reionization in large $\sim (100 Mpc)^3$ cosmological volumes with thousands to millions of point sources. We solve all dynamical, radiative transfer, thermal, and ionization processes self-consistently on the same mesh, as opposed to a postprocessing approach which coarse-grains the radiative transfer. We do, however, employ a simple subgrid model for star formation which we calibrate to observations. Radiation transport is done in the grey flux-limited diffusion (FLD) approximation, which is solved by implicit time integration split off from the gas energy and ionization equations, which are solved separately. This results in a faster and more robust scheme for cosmological applications compared to the earlier method. The FLD equation is solved using the hypre optimally scalable geometric multigrid solver from LLNL. By treating the ionizing radiation as a grid field as opposed to rays, our method is scalable with respect to the number of ionizing sources, limited only by the parallel scaling properties of the radiation solver. We test the speed and accuracy of our approach on a number of standard verification and validation tests. We show by direct comparison with Enzo's adaptive ray tracing method Moray that the well-known inability of FLD to cast a shadow behind opaque clouds has a minor effect on the evolution of ionized volume and mass fractions in a reionization simulation validation test. We illustrate an application of our method to the problem of inhomogeneous reionization in a 80 Mpc comoving box resolved with $3200^3$ Eulerian grid cells and dark matter particles.Comment: 32 pages, 23 figures. ApJ Supp accepted. New title and substantial revisions re. v

Validation of the Saint George's Respiratory Questionnaire in Uganda.

INTRODUCTION: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) will soon be the third leading global cause of death and is increasing rapidly in low/middle-income countries. There is a need for local validation of the Saint George's Respiratory Questionnaire (SGRQ), which can be used to identify those experiencing lifestyle impairment due to their breathing. METHODS: The SGRQ was professionally translated into Luganda and reviewed by our field staff and a local pulmonologist. Participants included a COPD-confirmed clinic sample and COPD-positive and negative members of the community who were enrolled in the Lung Function in Nakaseke and Kampala (LiNK) Study. SGRQs were assembled from all participants, while demographic and spirometry data were additionally collected from LiNK participants. RESULTS: In total, 103 questionnaires were included in analysis: 49 with COPD from clinic, 34 community COPD-negative and 20 community COPD-positive. SGRQ score varied by group: 53.5 for clinic, 34.4 for community COPD-positive and 4.1 for community COPD-negative (p<0.001). The cross-validated c statistic for SGRQ total score predicting COPD was 0.87 (95% CI 0.75 to 1.00). SGRQ total score was associated with COPD severity (forced expiratory volume in 1 s per cent of predicted), with an r coefficient of -0.60 (-0.75, -0.39). SGRQ score was associated with dyspnoea (OR 1.05/point; 1.01, 1.09) and cough (1.07; 1.03, 1.11). CONCLUSION: Our Luganda language SGRQ accurately distinguishes between COPD-positive and negative community members in rural Uganda. Scores were correlated with COPD severity and were associated with odds of dyspnoea and cough. We find that it can be successfully used as a respiratory questionnaire for obstructed adults in Uganda

Discordance in investigator-reported and adjudicated sudden death in TIOSPIR

Accurate and consistent determination of cause of death is challenging in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients. TIOSPIR (N=17 135) compared the safety and efficacy of tiotropium Respimat 5/2.5 µg with HandiHaler 18 µg in COPD patients. All-cause mortality was a primary end-point. A mortality adjudication committee (MAC) assessed all deaths. We aimed to investigate causes of discordance in investigator-reported and MAC-adjudicated causes of death and their impact on results, especially cardiac and sudden death. The MAC provided independent, blinded assessment of investigator-reported deaths (n=1302) and assigned underlying cause of death. Discordance between causes of death was assessed descriptively (shift tables). There was agreement between investigator-reported and MAC-adjudicated deaths in 69.4% of cases at the system organ class level. Differences were mainly observed for cardiac deaths (16.4% investigator, 5.1% MAC) and deaths assigned to general disorders including sudden death (17.4% investigator, 24.6% MAC). Reasons for discrepancies included investigator attribution to the immediate (e.g. myocardial infarction (MI)) over the underlying cause of death (e.g. COPD) and insufficient information for a definitive cause. Cause-specific mortality varies in COPD, depending on the method of assignment. Sudden death, witnessed and unwitnessed, is common in COPD and often attributed to MI without supporting evidence

Police Sexual Violence: A Few Bad Apples or a Cultural Norm?

Approximately 1,600 police officers across the United States were arrested for sex-related crimes during the ten year period 2005-2014. The arrested officers were employed by more than 1,100 state and local law enforcement agencies located in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. These data suggest that police sexual violence is a problem involving more than a few “bad apples” and that the phenomenon of police sexual violence may be a cultural norm within many state and local law enforcement agencies. This presentation was accepted for presentation at the annual meeting of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences in San Antonio, TX, on March 27, 2020. The conference, however, was cancelled due to the global COVID-19 pandemic

Did Ebola emerge in West Africa by a policy-driven phase change in agroecology? Ebola's social context

SCOPUS: no.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Secondary Sex Ratio among Women Exposed to Diethylstilbestrol in Utero

BACKGROUND. Diethylstilbestrol (DES), a synthetic estrogen widely prescribed to pregnant women during the mid-1900s, is a potent endocrine disruptor. Previous studies have suggested an association between endocrine-disrupting compounds and secondary sex ratio. METHODS. Data were provided by women participating in the National Cancer Institute (NCI) DES Combined Cohort Study. We used generalized estimating equations to estimate odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the relation of in utero DES exposure to sex ratio (proportion of male births). Models were adjusted for maternal age, child's birth year, parity, and cohort, and accounted for clustering among women with multiple pregnancies. RESULTS. The OR for having a male birth comparing DES-exposed to unexposed women was 1.05 (95% CI, 0.95-1.17). For exposed women with complete data on cumulative DES dose and timing (33%), those first exposed to DES earlier in gestation and to higher doses had the highest odds of having a male birth. The ORs were 0.91 (95% C, 0.65-1.27) for first exposure at ≥ 13 weeks gestation to < 5 g DES; 0.95 (95% CI, 0.71-1.27) for first exposure at ≥ 13 weeks to ≥ 5 g; 1.16 (95% CI, 0.96-1.41) for first exposure at < 13 weeks to < 5 g; and 1.24 (95% CI, 1.04-1.48) for first exposure at < 13 weeks to ≥ 5 g compared with no exposure. Results did not vary appreciably by maternal age, parity, cohort, or infertility history. CONCLUSIONS. Overall, no association was observed between in utero DES exposure and secondary sex ratio, but a significant increase in the proportion of male births was found among women first exposed to DES earlier in gestation and to a higher cumulative dose.National Cancer Institute (N01-CP-21168, N01-CP-51017, N01-CP-01289

Fiber Four-Wave Mixing Source for Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Scattering Microscopy

We present a fiber-format picosecond light source for coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering microscopy. Pulses from an Yb-doped fiber amplifier are frequency-converted by four-wave mixing in normal dispersion photonic crystal fiber to produce a synchronized two-color picosecond pulse train. We show that seeding the four-wave mixing process overcomes the deleterious effects of group-velocity mismatch and allows efficient conversion into narrow frequency bands. The source generates more than 160 mW of nearly-transform-limited pulses tunable from 775 to 815 nm. High-quality coherent Raman images of animal tissues and cells acquired with this source are presented.Chemistry and Chemical Biolog

WISE/NEOWISE Observations of Comet 103P/Hartley 2

We report results based on mid-infrared photometry of comet 103P/Hartley 2 taken during 2010 May 4-13 (when the comet was at a heliocentric distance of 2.3 AU, and an observer distance of 2.0 AU) by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. Photometry of the coma at 22 μm and data from the University of Hawaii 2.2 m telescope obtained on 2010 May 22 provide constraints on the dust particle size distribution, d log n/d log m, yielding power-law slope values of alpha = –0.97 ± 0.10, steeper than that found for the inbound particle fluence during the Stardust encounter of comet 81P/Wild 2. The extracted nucleus signal at 12 μm is consistent with a body of average spherical radius of 0.6 ± 0.2 km (one standard deviation), assuming a beaming parameter of 1.2. The 4.6 μm band signal in excess of dust and nucleus reflected and thermal contributions may be attributed to carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide emission lines and provides limits and estimates of species production. Derived carbon dioxide coma production rates are 3.5(± 0.9) × 10^(24) molecules per second. Analyses of the trail signal present in the stacked image with an effective exposure time of 158.4 s yields optical-depth values near 9 × 10^(–10) at a delta mean anomaly of 0.2 deg trailing the comet nucleus, in both 12 and 22 μm bands. A minimum chi-squared analysis of the dust trail position yields a beta-parameter value of 1.0 × 10^(–4), consistent with a derived mean trail-grain diameter of 1.1/ρ cm for grains of ρ g cm^(–3) density. This leads to a total detected trail mass of at least 4 × 10^(10) ρ kg