Objective
We describe the demographics, clinical features, disease course, and survival of polyarteritis nodosa (PAN) through an international collaboration (GLOBAL‐PAN).
Methods
Patients with PAN ...were recruited between 1990 and 2020 from observational cohorts of nine countries across Europe, Japan, and North America. Eligibility was retrospectively defined using the European Medicines Agency classification algorithm. Patients with PAN related to hepatitis B virus (n = 12) and two monogenic diseases mimicking PAN, deficiency of adenosine deaminase 2 enzyme (n = 16) or familial Mediterranean fever (n = 11), were excluded. Data regarding organ involvement, relapse, disease‐related damage, and survival were analyzed.
Results
Three hundred fifty‐eight patients (female:male ratio 174:184), including those with systemic PAN (sPAN, n = 282) and cutaneous PAN (n = 76), were included. Twenty‐five were pediatric onset. Mean ± SD age at diagnosis was 44.3 ± 18.1 years. Constitutional symptoms (71.5%), cutaneous involvement (70.5%), musculoskeletal findings (69.1%), and neurologic features (48.0%) were common manifestations. Among patients with sPAN, gastrointestinal involvement and proteinuria over 400 mg/day were reported in 52.2% and 11.2%, respectively. During a median (interquartile range) 59.6 (99.5) months of follow‐up, relapse occurred in 48.5% of patients. One, 5‐ and 10‐year survival rates for sPAN were 97.1%, 94.0%, and 89.0%, respectively. Predictors of death for sPAN included age ≥65 years at diagnosis, serum creatinine at diagnosis >140 μmol/L, gastrointestinal manifestations, and central nervous system (CNS) involvement.
Conclusion
The spectrum of PAN remains a complex, multifaceted disease. Relapse is common. Age ≥65 years and serum creatinine >140 μmol/L at diagnosis, as well as gastrointestinal and CNS involvement, are independent predictors of death in sPAN.
States, rebels, and mafias all provide governance beyond their core membership; increasingly, so do prison gangs. US gangs leverage control over prison life to govern street-level drug markets. ...Brazil’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) gang goes further, orchestrating paralyzing attacks on urban targets, while imposing a social order throughout slums that sharply reduces homicides. We analyze hundreds of seized PCC documents detailing its drug business and internal disciplinary system. Descriptively, we find vast, consignment-based trafficking operations whose profits fund collective benefits for members’ families; elaborate bureaucratic procedures and recordkeeping; and overwhelmingly nonviolent punishments for debt-nonpayment and misconduct. These features, we argue, reflect a deliberate strategy of creating rational-bureaucratic legitimacy in criminal governance. The PCC’s collectivist norms, fair procedures, and meticulous “criminal criminal records” facilitate community stigmatization of infractors, giving mild sanctions punitive heft and inducing widespread voluntary compliance without excessive coercion. This has aided the PCC’s rapid expansion across Brazil.
Civic Duty and Voter Turnout Blais, André; Achen, Christopher H.
Political behavior,
06/2019, Letnik:
41, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We argue that two different sets of considerations shape the decision to vote or abstain in an election–ethical and non-ethical. First the citizen may vote out of a sense of duty. Failing that, she ...may vote because she has strong preferences about the outcome of the election. Abstention occurs when neither duty nor a sufficiently strong preference is present. The implication is that while duty and preference each have strong positive effects on turnout, they also have a negative interaction effect, since the impact of preference is much weaker among those with a sense of duty. We present a wide array of empirical evidence that systematically supports our claim that the turnout decision is importantly shaped by this causal heterogeneity. Thus a turnout model misses something fundamental if it does not take into account the effect of civic duty.
Despite a relationship between gender and support for populist causes in cross-national research, including in the 2016 US Presidential election, the role of gender has been missing in analysis of ...support for Brexit, most likely because women and men showed no average aggregate-level differences in voting Leave or Remain. This misses an important explanation for Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. We demonstrate how gender-based resentment motivated Leave votes in the EU referendum through perceptions of discrimination against men, among men. Using novel survey measures, we demonstrate (i) the distinct nature of perceptions of discrimination towards men in comparison with discrimination towards women; (ii) the sociological sources of perceptions that men are discriminated against; and (iii) the role of these perceptions in Brexit support. Our findings reveal that the Brexit referendum provided an opportunity to express broader social grievances than have, to date, been identified as relevant. The paper therefore offers a novel contribution to understanding the cultural backlash behind Britain’s vote to leave the EU, and by so doing, insight into the potential for gender-based backlash effects in elections where gender isn’t significantly primed, unlike the 2016 US presidential election where gender was a major political focus.
We make use of a newly-available international data set from a survey of children aged 8 to 12years old across 16 diverse countries to explore variations in rates of schools-based bullying of ...children and the associations between experiences of being bullied and child subjective well-being, both within and between countries. The analysis is consistent with previous international studies in showing very substantial variation in rates of bullying at the country level. There are also between-country variations in the rates of different types of bullying. In terms of individual variations, we find significant variations in the likelihood of being bullied according to age, gender and deprivation, although the influence of these factors varies by country. There was no apparent link at a country-level between rates of bullying and mean life satisfaction scores. On the other hand, in almost all countries, children who had been bullied had significantly lower subjective well-being than children who had not. However there were substantial differences in the strength of association across countries. We find some tentative evidence to suggest that being bullied may make a greater contribution to explaining variations in child subjective well-being in rich countries than in poor countries. The implications of the findings and directions for future research are discussed.
•There is very substantial variation in rates of bullying at the country level.•There are also between-country variations in the rates of different types of bullying.•The likelihood of being bullied varies according to age, gender and deprivation.•There was no apparent link between rates of bullying and mean life satisfaction scores.
Images play an increasingly important role in global politics but pose significant and so far largely unexplored methodological challenges. Images are different from words. They circulate in ever ...more complex and rapid ways. I argue that the political significance of images is best understood through an interdisciplinary framework that relies on multiple methods, even if they are at times incompatible. I defend such a pluralist approach as both controversial and essential: controversial because giving up a unitary standard of evidence violates social scientific conventions; essential because such a strategy offers the best opportunity to assess how images work across their construction, content and impact. I counter fears of relativism, arguing that the hubris of indisputable knowledge is more dangerous than a clash of different perspectives. The very combination of incompatible methods makes us constantly aware of our own contingent standpoints, thus increasing the self-reflectiveness required to understand the complexities of visual global politics.
I conduct an experiment which examines the impact of group norm promotion and social sanctioning on racist online harassment. Racist online harassment de-mobilizes the minorities it targets, and the ...open, unopposed expression of racism in a public forum can legitimize racist viewpoints and prime ethnocentrism. I employ an intervention designed to reduce the use of anti-black racist slurs by white men on Twitter. I collect a sample of Twitter users who have harassed other users and use accounts I control (“bots”) to sanction the harassers. By varying the identity of the bots between in-group (white man) and out-group (black man) and by varying the number of Twitter followers each bot has, I find that subjects who were sanctioned by a high-follower white male significantly reduced their use of a racist slur. This paper extends findings from lab experiments to a naturalistic setting using an objective, behavioral outcome measure and a continuous 2-month data collection period. This represents an advance in the study of prejudiced behavior.
The tumor-stroma ratio (TSR) has been reported as a strong, independent prognostic parameter in colon cancer as well as in other epithelial cancer types, and may be implemented to routine pathology ...diagnostics. The TSR is an easy technique, based on routine hematoxylin and eosin stained histological sections, estimating the amount of stroma present in the primary tumor. It links tumors with high stromal content to poor prognosis. The analysis time is less than 2 min with a low inter-observer variation. Scoring of the TSR has been validated in a number of independent international studies. In this manuscript, we provide a detailed technical description of estimating the TSR in colon cancer, including examples, pitfalls, and recommendations.
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