The Finometer (FMS, Finapres Measurement Systems, Arnhem, Netherlands), which is the improved successor of the Finapres (TNO Biomedical Instrumentation, Amsterdam, Netherlands), measures finger ...arterial blood pressure non-invasively and computes other cardiovascular parameters from the computed aortic-flow waveform. The usability of the Finometer would depend on whether it is sensitive enough to detect small cardiovascular changes. The aim was therefore to determine the sensitivity of the Finometer regarding acute and longer-term cardiovascular changes.
The sensitivity of the Finometer regarding the acute effect of 200 mg caffeine was determined with a double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover study which included 38 young male subjects. Finometer recordings were performed during four occasions at fasting level and after 30 min of ingestion. To evaluate the sensitivity of the Finometer in recording longer-term effects of a daily dosage of 1000 mg vitamin C, 800 mg vitamin E and 10 mg folic acid, 14 young males took placebo and 17 took the vitamins for 12 weeks in a double-blind study. Two recordings were performed at baseline and two after 12 weeks.
After caffeine ingestion significantly (P<0.05) higher systolic, diastolic and mean blood pressure values than resting values were obtained. The arterial compliance was significantly lower after caffeine ingestion, whereas heart rate, peripheral resistance, stroke volume and cardiac output did not change significantly. No differences were shown after intake of placebo. Concerning the effects of vitamin intake, the vitamin group indicated a significant decrease in systolic blood pressure (P=0.03) whereas the placebo group indicated no significant differences after 12 weeks.
The results suggest that the improved Finometer might be a sensitive instrument in the recording of relative small acute and longer-term changes in cardiovascular function, but more studies are necessary before final conclusions can be drawn.
Summary
This double-blind, cross-over study with olive oil as placebo, examined the effect of a daily dosage of 6 g fish oil on cardiovascular risk markers of 20 healthy young volunteers (10 men, 10 ...women). Serum lipids and lipoproteins, and plasma coagulation and fibrinolytic enzymes, including fibrinogen concentrations and plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) activity were measured at baseline and after 6-week supplementation of either fish or olive oil. The results showed that fish oil had an independent lowering effect on triglycerides and coagulation factors Vc and VIIc. Both fish and olive oil significantly raised PAI-1 levels and lowered plasma factor Xc and fibrinogen levels in the women, who had higher initial levels than the men. Mean fibrinogen levels of the women were lowered from 3.23 ± 0.98 to 2.64 ± 0.55 g/1 and from 3.19 ± 0.72 to 2.66 ± 0.49 g/1 by fish and olive oil respectively. This study raises the question whether a particular fatty acid or group of fatty acids, or another constituent of the oil such as vitamin E may be responsible for the fibrinogen lowering effect.
The increased use of alternative treatment for menopausal symptoms is mainly due to women’s changing opinions of conventional hormone replacement therapy (HRT). The objective of this study was to ...assess the opinion of pre and post-menopausal South African women regarding the potential menopause-related health benefits of soy. The sample used for the study was a sub-dataset of 825 respondents, which included only pre- and post-menopausal women that had heard of soy before, selected from a representative sample of the adult South African metropolitan and rural populations. A structured questionnaire was used. Neither age nor racial groups differed practically significantly in opinion regarding any of the various statements. The study also shows that a practically significant lower proportion of women in the sub-population across both age and race groups had a positive opinion on the health benefits of soy as an alternative to HRT and reliever of menopausal symptoms than those who acknowledged its benefit for preventing cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis. Practically significantly more women who used soy than women who never used soy agreed that soy keeps bones strong. In addition, more women who were of opinion that soy has few or no health benefits disagreed that soy could be used as an alternative to HRT compared to women who held a positive opinion. Opsomming Die toenemende gebruik van alternatiewe behandelings vir menopousale simptome kan aan vroue se veranderende opinies oor konvensionele hormoonvervangingsterapie (HVT) toegeskryf word. Die doel van hierdie studie was om pre- en post- menopousale Suid-Afrikaanse vroue se opinie aangaande die potensiële menopouseverwante gesondheids-voordele van soja te bepaal. Die steekproef vir die studie het uit ‘n subdatastel bestaan van 825 vroue in hul pre- en post-menopousale stadium wat al voorheen van soja gehoor het, en is vanuit ‘n verteenwoordigende steekproef van die volwasse Suid-Afrikaanse metropolitaanse en plattelandse bevolking gekies. ‘n Gestruktureerde vraelys is gebruik. Geen prakties betekenisvolle verskille is tussen die verskillende ouderdoms- of rasgroepe se opinie oor enige van die stellings gevind nie. Die studie dui ook daarop dat ‘n prakties betekenisvolle laer verhouding Suid-Afrikaanse vroue, van beide ouderdoms- en rasgroepe, ‘n positiewe opinie oor die gesondheidsvoordele van soja as HVT en verligter van menopousale simptome gehad het as oor soja se voordele om kardiovaskulêre siektes en osteoporose te voorkom. Prakties betekenisvol meer van die vroue wat soja gebruik het as dié wat dit nooit gebruik het nie, het saamgestem dat soja bene sterk hou. Meer vroue wat van die opinie was dat soja geen of min gesondheidsvoordele het nie was ook negatief teenoor die gebruik van soja as ‘n alternatief vir HVT as dié wat ‘n positiewe opinie daaroor gehad het.
The increased use of alternative treatment for menopausal symptoms is mainly due to women's changing opinions of conventional hormone replacement therapy (HRT). The objective of this study was to ...assess the opinion of pre- and post-menopausal South African women regarding the potential menopause-related health benefits of soy. The sample used for the study was a sub-dataset of 825 respondents, which included only pre- and post-menopausal women that had heard of soy before, selected from a representative sample of the adult South African metropolitan and rural populations. A structured questionnaire was used. Neither age nor racial groups differed practically significantly in opinion regarding any of the various statements. The study also shows that a practically significant lower proportion of women in the sub-population across both age and race groups had a positive opinion on the health benefits of soy as an alternative to HRT and reliever of menopausal symptoms than those who acknowledged its benefit for preventing cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis. Practically significantly more women who used soy than women who never used soy agreed that soy keeps bones strong. In addition, more women who were of opinion that soy has few or no health benefits disagreed that soy could be used as an alternative to HRT compared to women who held a positive opinion. Die toenemende gebruik van alternatiewe behandelings vir menopousale simptome kan aan vroue se veranderende opinies oor konvensionele hormoonvervangingsterapie (HVT) toegeskryf word. Die doel van hierdie studie was om pre- en post-menopousale Suid-Afrikaanse vroue se opinie aangaande die potensiële menopouseverwante gesondheidsvoordele van soja te bepaal. Die steekproef vir die studie het uit 'n subdatastel bestaan van 825 vroue in hul pre- en post-menopousale stadium wat al voorheen van soja gehoor het, en is vanuit 'n verteenwoordigende steekproef van die volwasse Suid-Afrikaanse metropolitaanse en plattelandse bevolking gekies. 'n Gestruktureerde vraelys is gebruik. Geen prakties betekenisvolle verskille is tussen die verskillende ouderdoms- of rasgroepe se opinie oor enige van die stellings gevind nie. Die studie dui ook daarop dat 'n prakties betekenisvolle laer verhoudingSuid-Afrikaanse vroue, van beide ouderdoms- en rasgroepe, 'n positiewe opinie oor die gesondheidsvoordele van soja as HVT en verligter van menopousale simptome gehad het as oor soja se voordele om kardiovaskulêre siektes en osteoporose te voorkom. Prakties betekenisvol meer van die vroue wat soja gebruik het as dié wat dit nooit gebruik het nie, het saamgestem dat soja bene sterk hou. Meer vroue wat van die opinie was dat soja geen of min gesondheidsvoordele het nie was ook negatief teenoor die gebruik van soja as 'n alternatief vir HVT as dié wat 'n positiewe opinie daaroor gehad het.
To introduce abductive network classifier committees as an ensemble method for improving classification accuracy in medical diagnosis. While neural networks allow many ways to introduce enough ...diversity among member models to improve performance when forming a committee, the self-organizing, automatic-stopping nature, and learning approach used by abductive networks are not very conducive for this purpose. We explore ways of over-coming this limitation and demonstrate improved classification on three standard medical datasets.
Two standard 2-class medical datasets (Pima Indians Diabetes and Heart Disease) and a 6-class dataset (Dermatology) were used to investigate ways of training abductive networks with adequate independence, as well as methods of combining their outputs to form a network that improves performance beyond that of single models.
Two- or three-member committees of models trained on completely or partially different subsets of training data and using simple output combination methods achieve improvements between 2 and 5 percentage points in the classification accuracy over the best single model developed using the full training set.
Varying model complexity alone gives abductive network models that are too correlated to ensure enough diversity for forming a useful committee. Diversity achieved through training member networks on independent subsets of the training data outweighs limitations of the smaller training set for each, resulting in net gain in committee performance. As such models train faster and can be trained in parallel, this can also speed up classifier development.
The grazing areas of cattle in a Baltic sea-shore meadow changed during the summer. The effects of this on the demography of Plantago maritima was studied. This species is distributed over most parts ...of the area and suffers differently from grazing in different areas. It was found that the losses of flowers due to grazing, was severe and that the density peak of Plantago maritima coincides with the least grazing intensity. Flower-spikes established in different time-periods are disproportionally represented as seed-dispersers and this may be of importance in regeneration since early and late flowers bear seeds of different size.
PDF
