The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic affects people's health and health-related quality of life (HRQoL), especially in those who have suspected COVID-19 symptoms (S-COVID-19-S). We ...examined the effect of modifications of health literacy (HL) on depression and HRQoL. A cross-sectional study was conducted from 14 February to 2 March 2020. 3947 participants were recruited from outpatient departments of nine hospitals and health centers across Vietnam. The interviews were conducted using printed questionnaires including participants' characteristics, clinical parameters, health behaviors, HL, depression, and HRQoL. People with S-COVID-19-S had a higher depression likelihood (OR, 2.88;
< 0.001), lower HRQoL-score (B, -7.92;
< 0.001). In comparison to people without S-COVID-19-S and low HL, those with S-COVID-19-S and low HL had 9.70 times higher depression likelihood (
< 0.001), 20.62 lower HRQoL-score (
< 0.001), for the people without S-COVID-19-S, 1 score increment of HL resulted in 5% lower depression likelihood (
< 0.001) and 0.45 higher HRQoL-score (
< 0.001), while for those people with S-COVID-19-S, 1 score increment of HL resulted in a 4% lower depression likelihood (
= 0.004) and 0.43 higher HRQoL-score (
< 0.001). People with S-COVID-19-S had a higher depression likelihood and lower HRQoL than those without. HL shows a protective effect on depression and HRQoL during the epidemic.
We aimed to evaluate the microbiological characteristics and risk factors for mortality of infective endocarditis in two tertiary hospitals in Ho Chi Minh City, south Vietnam.
A retrospective study ...of 189 patients (120 men, 69 women; mean age 38 ± 18 years) with the diagnosis of probable or definite infective endocarditis (IE) according to the modified Duke Criteria admitted to The Heart Institute or Tam Duc Hospital between January 2005 and December 2014.
IE was related to a native valve in 165 patients (87.3%), and prosthetic valve in 24 (12.7%). Of the 189 patients in our series, the culture positive rate was 70.4%. The most common isolated pathogens were Streptococci (75.2%), Staphylococci (9.8%) followed by gram negative organism (4.5%). The sensitivity rate of Streptococci to ampicillin, ceftriaxone or vancomycin was 100%. The rate of methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus was 40%. There was a decrease in penicillin sensitivity for Streptococci over three eras: 2005-2007 (100%), 2008-2010 (94%) and 2010-2014 (84%). The in-hospital mortality rate was 6.9%. Logistic regression analysis found prosthetic valve and NYHA grade 3 or 4 heart failure and vegetation size of more than 15 mm as strong predictors of in-hospital mortality.
Streptococcal species were the major pathogen of IE in the recent years with low rates of antimicrobial resistance. Prosthetic valve involvement, moderate or severe heart failure and vegetation size of more than 15 mm were independent predictors for in-hospital mortality in IE.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Background: Healthy eating and physical activity are effective non-pharmacological approaches to boost immune function and contain the pandemic. We aimed to explore the associations and interactions ...between physical activity and healthy eating behavior with COVID-19-like symptoms (Slike-CV19S). Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted on 3947 outpatients, from 14 February to 2 March 2020, at nine health facilities in Vietnam. Data collection included sociodemographic characteristics, healthy eating behavior (using the healthy eating score (HES) questionnaire), physical activity (using the short form international physical activity questionnaire), and Slike-CV19S. The associations and interactions were tested using logistic regression models. Results: Frequent intake of fruits (OR = 0.84; p = 0.016), vegetables (OR = 0.72; p = 0.036), and fish (OR = 0.43; p < 0.001) were associated with a lower Slike-CV19S likelihood, as compared with infrequent intake. Patients with higher HES levels (OR = 0.84; p = 0.033 for medium HES; OR = 0.77; p = 0.006 for high HES) or being physically active (OR = 0.69; p < 0.001) had a lower Slike-CV19S likelihood, as compared to those with low HES or physical inactivity, respectively. Patients with medium HES who were physically active (OR = 0.69; p = 0.005), or with high HES and physically active (OR = 0.58; p < 0.001), had a lower Slike-CV19S likelihood, as compared to those with low HES and physical inactivity. Conclusions: Healthy eating behavior and physical activity showed single and combinative impacts on protecting people from Slike-CV19S. Strategic approaches are encouraged to improve healthy behaviors, which may further contribute to containing the pandemic.
Channelrhodopsin2 (ChR2) optogenetic excitation is widely used to study neurons, astrocytes, and circuits. Using complementary approaches in situ and in vivo, we found that ChR2 stimulation leads to ...significant transient elevation of extracellular potassium ions by ∼5 mM. Such elevations were detected in ChR2-expressing mice, following local in vivo expression of ChR2(H134R) with adeno-associated viruses (AAVs), in different brain areas and when ChR2 was expressed in neurons or astrocytes. In particular, ChR2-mediated excitation of striatal astrocytes was sufficient to increase medium spiny neuron (MSN) excitability and immediate early gene expression. The effects on MSN excitability were recapitulated in silico with a computational MSN model and detected in vivo as increased action potential firing in awake, behaving mice. We show that transient, physiologically consequential increases in extracellular potassium ions accompany ChR2 optogenetic excitation. This coincidental effect may be important to consider during astrocyte studies employing ChR2 to interrogate neural circuits and animal behavior.
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•Multiple approaches reveal transient K+ elevations during ChR2 excitation•ChR2-mediated K+ elevations increase neuronal excitability and cFos expression•Neuronal effects of K+ are recapitulated with a model and in vivo•Increased K+ may contribute to astrocyte experiments employing ChR2 in vivo
Using multiple approaches, Octeau et al. discover that optogenetic excitation of ChR2-expressing cells leads to significant transient extracellular potassium ion elevations that increase neuronal excitability and immediate early gene expression in neurons following in vivo stimulation.
Cooperative navigation for fleets of robots conventionally adopts algorithms based on Reynolds's flocking rules, which usually use a weighted sum of vectors for calculating the velocity from ...behavioral velocity vectors with corresponding fixed weights. Although optimal values of the weighting coefficients giving good performance can be found through many experiments for each particular scenario, the overall performance could not be guaranteed due to unexpected conditions not covered in experiments. This paper proposes a novel control scheme for a swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that also employs the original Reynolds rules but adopts an adaptive weight allocation mechanism based on the current context than being fixed at the beginning. The simulation results show that our proposed scheme has better performance than the conventional Reynolds-based ones in terms of the flock compactness and the reduction in the number of crashed swarm members due to collisions. The analytical results of behavioral rules' impact also validate the proposed weighting mechanism's effectiveness leading to improved performance.
Chronic inflammation is a key player in metabolic dysfunction-associated fatty liver disease (MAFLD) progression. Necroptosis, an inflammatory cell death pathway, is elevated in MAFLD patients and ...mouse models, yet its role is unclear due to the diverse mouse models and inhibition strategies. In our study, we inhibited necroptosis by targeting mixed lineage kinase domain-like pseudokinase (MLKL), the terminal effector of necroptosis, in a high-fat, high-fructose, high-cholesterol (HFHFrHC) mouse model of diet-induced MAFLD. Despite the HFHFrHC diet upregulating MLKL (2.5-fold), WT mice livers showed no increase in necroptosis markers or associated proinflammatory cytokines. Surprisingly,
mice experienced exacerbated liver inflammation without protection from diet-induced liver damage, steatosis, or fibrosis. In contrast,
mice showed a significant reduction in these parameters that was associated with elevated Pparα and Pparγ levels. Both
and
mice on the HFHFrHC diet resisted diet-induced obesity, attributed to the increased beiging, enhanced oxygen consumption, and energy expenditure due to adipose tissue, and exhibited improved insulin sensitivity. These findings highlight the tissue-specific effects of MLKL on the liver and adipose tissue, and they suggest a dose-dependent effect of MLKL on liver pathology.
The fouling of a spiral wound reverse osmosis (RO) membrane after nearly 1 year of service in a brackish water treatment plant was investigated using optical and electron microscopic methods, Fourier ...transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-AES). Both the top surface and the cross-section of the fouled membrane were analysed to monitor the development of the fouling layer. It has been found that the extent of fouling was uneven across the membrane surface with regions underneath or in the vicinity of the strands of the feed spacer being more severely affected. Fouling appeared to have developed through different stages. In particular, it consisted of an initial thin fouling layer of an amorphous matrix with embedded particulate matter. The amorphous matrix comprised organic–Al–P complexes and the particulate matter was mostly aluminium silicates. Subsequently, as the fouling layer reached a thickness of about 5–7
μm, further amorphous material, which is suggested to include extracellular polymeric substances such as polysaccharides, started to deposit on top of the existing fouling layer. This secondary amorphous material did not seem to contain any particulate matter nor any inorganic elements within it, but acted as a substrate upon which aluminium silicate crystals grew exclusively in the absence of other foulants, including natural organic matter (NOM).
Graph analytics methods have evoked significant interest in recent years. Their applicability to real-world complex systems is currently limited by the challenges of inferring effective graph ...representations of the high-dimensional, noisy, nonlinear and transient dynamics from limited time series outputs, as well as of extracting statistical quantifiers that capture the salient structure of the inferred graphs for detecting change. In this article, we present an approach to detecting changes in complex dynamic systems that is based on spectral-graph-theory and uses a single realization of time series data collected under specific, common types of transient conditions, such as intermittency. We introduce a statistic, γ
k
, based on the spectral content of the inferred graph. We show that the γ
k
statistic under high-dimensional dynamics converges to a normal distribution, and we employ the parameters of this distribution to construct a procedure to detect qualitative changes in the coupling structure of a dynamical system. Experimental investigations suggest that the γ
k
statistic by itself is able to detect changes with modified area under curve (mAUC) of about 0.96 (for numerical simulation tests), and can, by itself, achieve a true positive rate of about 40% for detecting seizures from EEG signals. In addition, by incorporating this statistic with random forest, one of the best seizure detection methods, the seizure detection rate of the random forest method improves by 5% in 35% of the subjects. These studies of the network inferred from EEG signals suggest that γ
k
can capture salient structural changes in the physiology of the process and can therefore serve as an effective feature for detecting seizures from EEG signals.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Machines in custom manufacturing environments with IoT (Internet-of-Things) capability are predicted to be pervading enterprises. However, there is a need to develop new algorithms that reap the ...benefits of such technologies. We consider a system where jobs with stochastic workloads arrive to a machine in an arbitrary fashion and upon arrival, their workload is revealed (enabled by IoT). The tool on the machine gets used up based on the speed at which the jobs are processed. Knowing that tool-replacement consumes a significant amount of time, we want to develop online algorithms that maximize the capacity of the machine by determining: (i) the speed at which each job is processed; and (ii) the epoch when the tool is replaced. We provide online approaches that leverage the ability to reveal workload in real-time and effectively balance future uncertainties. We derive asymptotic bounds for the online algorithm performance and show using numerical experimentation that a little revealed information could result in a tremendous improvement in performance. Our online algorithms also work under realistic conditions of non-stationary batch arrivals and correlated workloads. Our work opens up research directions for a variety of operational settings that may benefit from revealing stochastic quantities by mining information.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Purpose
To quantify the effects of barrier precautions and antibiotic mixing on prevalence and acquisition of five drug-resistant microorganisms within a single tetanus intensive care unit at a ...tertiary referral hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Methods
All patients admitted within the study period were included. After a 1-year baseline period, barrier precautions were implemented and the single empirical treatment ceftazidime was changed to mixing (per consecutive patient) of three different regimens (ceftazidime, ciprofloxacin, piperacillin–tazobactam). Markov chain modeling and genotyping were used to determine the effects of interventions on prevalence levels and the relative importance of cross-transmission and antibiotic-associated selection.
Results
A total of 190 patients were included in year 1 (2,708 patient days, 17,260 cultures) and 167 patients in year 2 (3,384 patient days, 20,580 cultures). In year 1, average daily prevalence rates for methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus
(MRSA), extended spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL)-producing
Enterobacteriaceae
(excluding
Klebsiella pneumoniae
),
Pseudomonas aeruginosa
, gentamicin-resistant
K. pneumoniae
, and amikacin-resistant
Acinetobacter
species were 34.0, 61.3, 53.4, 65.7 and 57.1 %. After intervention, ceftazidime usage decreased by 53 %; the use of piperacillin–tazobactam and ciprofloxacin increased 7.2-fold and 4.5-fold, respectively. Adherence to hand hygiene after patient contact was 54 %. These measures were associated with a reduction of MRSA prevalence by 69.8 % (to 10.3 %), mainly because of less cross-transmission (88 % reduction), and of ESBL-producing
Enterobacteriaceae
prevalence by 10.3 % (non-significantly). In contrast, prevalence levels of the other three pathogens remained unaffected.
Conclusion
The combination of simple infection control measures and antibiotic mixing was highly effective in reducing the prevalence of MRSA, but not of Gram-negative microorganisms.
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