Frailty is one of the greatest challenges facing our aging population, as it can lead to adverse outcomes such as institutionalization, hospitalization, and mortality. However, the factors that are ...associated with frailty are poorly understood. We performed a systematic review of longitudinal studies in order to identify the sociodemographic, physical, biological, lifestyle-related, and psychological risk or protective factors that are associated with frailty among community-dwelling older adults.
A systematic literature search was conducted in the following databases in order to identify studies that assessed the factors associated with of frailty among community-dwelling older adults: Embase, Medline Ovid, Web of Science, Cochrane, PsychINFO Ovid, CINAHL EBSCOhost, and Google Scholar. Studies were selected if they included a longitudinal design, focused on community-dwelling older adults aged 60 years and older, and used a tool to assess frailty. The methodological quality of each study was assessed using the Quality of Reporting of Observational Longitudinal Research checklist.
Twenty-three studies were included. Significant associations were reported between the following types of factors and frailty: sociodemographic factors (7/7 studies), physical factors (5/6 studies), biological factors (5/7 studies), lifestyle factors (11/13 studies), and psychological factors (7/8 studies). Significant sociodemographic factors included older age, ethnic background, neighborhood, and access to private insurance or Medicare; significant physical factors included obesity and activities of daily living (ADL) functional status; significant biological factors included serum uric acid; significant lifestyle factors included a higher Diet Quality Index International (DQI) score, higher fruit/vegetable consumption and higher tertile of all measures of habitual dietary resveratrol exposure; significant psychological factors included depressive symptoms.
A broad range of sociodemographic, physical, biological, lifestyle, and psychological factors show a longitudinal association with frailty. These factors should be considered when developing interventions aimed at preventing and/or reducing the burden associated with frailty among community-dwelling older adults.
The need for formal care among the elderly population has been increasing due to their greater longevity and the evolution of family structure. We examined the determinants of the use and expenses of ...formal care among in-home elderly adults in Shanghai. A two-part model based on the data from the Shanghai Long-Term Care Needs Assessment Questionnaire was applied. A total of 8428 participants responded in 2014 and 7100 were followed up in 2015. The determinants of the probability of using formal care were analyzed in the first part of the model and the determinants of formal care expenses were analyzed in the second part. Demographic indicators, living arrangements, physical health status, and care type in 2014 were selected as independent variables. We found that individuals of older age; women; those with higher Activities of Daily Living (ADL) scores; those without spouse; those with higher income; those suffering from stroke, dementia, lower limb fracture, or advanced tumor; and those with previous experience of formal and informal care were more likely to receive formal care in 2015. Furthermore, age, income and formal care fee in 2014 were significant predictors of formal care expenses in 2015. Taken together, the results showed that formal care provision in Shanghai was not determined by ADL scores, but was instead more related to income. This implied an inappropriate distribution of formal care among elderly population in Shanghai. Additionally, it appeared difficult for the elderly to quit the formal care once they begun to use it. These results highlighted the importance of assessing the need for formal care, and suggested that the government offer guidance on formal care use for the elderly.
ObjectivesTo evaluate the feasibility, discriminant validity and concurrent validity of the Health Status Classification System-Preschool (HSCS-PS) in children aged 3 years in a large community ...sample in the Netherlands.Design/settingA prospective population-based cohort in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.ParticipantsA questionnaire was administrated to a sample of parents of 4546 children (36.7±1.5 months).Outcome measuresHealth-related quality of life (HRQOL) of children was measured by HSCS-PS. The HSCS-PS consists of 10 original domains. Two single-item measures of ‘General health’ and ‘Behavior’ were added. A disability score was calculated by summing up all 10 original domains to describe the overall health status. Feasibility was assessed by the response rate, percentages of missing answers, score distributions and the presence of floor/ceiling effects. Discriminant validity was analysed between subgroups with predefined conditions: low birth weight, preterm birth, wheezing, Ear-Nose-Throat surgical procedures and behaviour problems. In the absence of another HRQOL measure, this study uses the single-items ‘General health’ and ‘Behavior’ as a first step to evaluate concurrent validity of the HSCS-PS.ResultsFeasibility: response rate was 69%. Ceiling effects were observed in all domains. Discriminant validity: the disability score discriminated clearly between subgroups of children born with a ‘very low birth weight’, ‘very preterm birth’, with ‘four or more than four times wheezing’, ‘at least one ear-nose-throat surgical procedures’, ‘behaviour problems present’ and the ‘reference’ group. Concurrent validity: HSCS-PS domains correlated better with hypothesised parallel additional domains than with other non-hypothesised original domains.ConclusionsThis study supports the feasibility and validity of the HSCS-PS among preschoolers in community settings. We recommend developing a utility-based scoring algorithm for the HSCS-PS. Further empirical studies and repeated evaluations in varied populations are recommended.
The shuttle effect of lithium polysulfides (LPSs) is the main issue which prohibits the practical use of Li–S batteries (LSBs). Therefore, a MnO decorated Nitrogen doped carbon/CNT (MnO/N–C/CNT) ...composite is synthesized and used as the barrier and accelerator for LPSs. The bi-metal Zn/Mn-MOF is firstly grown on carbon nanotubes (CNT) by a facile chemical reaction of Zn(NO3)2/Mn(NO3) and dimethylimidazole, then the precursor is calcined in nitrogen ambient at 910 °C to fabricate MnO/N–C/CNT composite. After coating on the polypropylene separator, the MnO/N–C/CNT layer can greatly alliviate the shuttle effect by its dual function. The N–C/CNT network can provide good conductivity and physical barrier, while the polar MnO can enhance the chemical adsorption and conversion rate for LPSs. As a result, when the sulfur areal loading is 3.5mg/cm2, an impressive specific capacity of 950 mAh/g at 0.5C is obtained by use of MnO/N–C/CNT modified separator, and it can cycle steadily for over 500 cycles at an average decay rate of 0.022%/cycle. Furthermore, the battery also displays a cycle stability for over 200 cycles even under the sulfur areal loading of 5.5mg/cm2, which demonstrate its application potential.
• The bi-metal Zn/Mn-MOF is firstly grown on carbon nanotubes(CNT) by a facile chemical reaction of Zn(NO3)2/Mn(NO3) and dimethylimidazole, then the precursor is calcined in nitrogen ambient at 910 °C to fabricate MnO/N–C/CNT composite.• MnO/N–C/CNT composite is coated on PE separator and used as the separator of Li–S battery, The N–C/CNT network can provide good conductivity and physical barrier, while the polar MnO can enhance the chemical adsorption and conversion rate for polysulfides.•When the sulfur areal loading is 3.5mg/cm2, an impressive specific capacity of 950 mAh/g at 0.5C is obtained by use of MnO/N–C/CNT modified separator, and it can cycle steadily for over 500 cycles at an average decay rate of 0.022%/cycle. Display omitted
•Zn/Mn-MOF is firstly grown on carbon nanotubes(CNT) and calcined to get MnO/N–C/CNT composite.•MnO/N–C/CNT composite is coated on the PE separator to serve as the Li–S battery separator.•MnO/N–C/CNT modified separator can be used as the physical shield of polysulfides as well as the up current collector.
This paper considers the problem of having a team of mobile robots to visit a set of target locations. This problem is known as multi-robot patrolling problems. In this paper, the problem is ...formulated as a multiple traveling salesman problem (MTSP) with single depot or multiple depot, which is an non-deterministic polynomial-hard problem. Unlike most previous research works, in real-world applications, the requirement of optimizing the maximum traveled distance and the total traveled distance simultaneously widely exists. In this paper, a bi-objective ant colony optimization (ACO) based memetic algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. In the algorithm, a simple multi-ACO is integrated with a sequential variable neighborhood descent. A powerful local optimization method for bi-objective MTSP is proposed to improve the candidate solutions. In addition, we adopt the technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution method to select a reasonable solution from the optimal Pareto. Through computational experiments, we demonstrated the benefits of our algorithm as compared with four other existing algorithms. Computational results show that proposed algorithm is promising and effective for the bi-objective MTSP s.
This paper considers the task allocation problems in a distributed multi-robot system under critical time constraints. Considering the requirement of distributed computing, many existing distributed ...heuristic task allocation approaches tend to trap in local optimal and cannot obtain high-quality solutions. For a dynamic task allocation problem in a multi-robot system, not only the task information and the robot state may be subject to changes, but also the network status. That is, robots that each robot can communicate with may change over time, and sometimes there may even be no robots that it can communicate with. To solve these problems, a dynamic grouping allocation method is proposed. It builds upon the state-of-the-art consensus-based auction algorithms, extending them in both task inclusion phase and consensus phase. First, a cluster-first strategy and a task inclusion procedure that can be easily applied to the task inclusion phase of the algorithms are proposed, so that the solution quality of each iteration of the algorithms are significantly improved with a reasonable amount of computation. In addition, to increase the exploration capabilities, a proportional selection method is used in the task inclusion procedure when it is likely to trap in a local optimal. Second, the block-information-sharing strategy is used to avoid the possible conflicts that dynamic changes may bring. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed method can provide conflict-free solutions in dynamic environments and can achieve outstanding performance in comparison with the state-of-the-art algorithms.
This paper proposes an improved epsilon constraint-handling mechanism and combines it with a decomposition-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA/D) to solve constrained multi-objective ...optimization problems (CMOPs). The proposed constrained multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (CMOEA) is named MOEA/D-IEpsilon. It adjusts the epsilon level dynamically according to the ratio of feasible to total solutions in the current population. In order to evaluate the performance of MOEA/D-IEpsilon, a new set of CMOPs with two and three objectives is designed, having large infeasible regions (relative to the feasible regions), and they are called LIR-CMOPs. Then, the 14 benchmarks, including LIR-CMOP1-14, are used to test MOEA/D-IEpsilon and four other decomposition-based CMOEAs, including MOEA/D-Epsilon, MOEA/D-SR, MOEA/D-CDP and CMOEA/D. The experimental results indicate that MOEA/D-IEpsilon is significantly better than the other four CMOEAs on all of the test instances, which shows that MOEA/D-IEpsilon is more suitable for solving CMOPs with large infeasible regions. Furthermore, a real-world problem, namely the robot gripper optimization problem, is used to test the five CMOEAs. The experimental results demonstrate that MOEA/D-IEpsilon also outperforms the other four CMOEAs on this problem.
Anti-tumor drug resistance is a challenge for human triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) treatment. Our previous work demonstrated that TNFAIP2 activates RAC1 to promote TNBC cell proliferation and ...migration. However, the mechanism by which TNFAIP2 activates RAC1 is unknown. In this study, we found that TNFAIP2 interacts with IQGAP1 and Integrin β4. Integrin β4 activates RAC1 through TNFAIP2 and IQGAP1 and confers DNA damage-related drug resistance in TNBC. These results indicate that the Integrin β4/TNFAIP2/IQGAP1/RAC1 axis provides potential therapeutic targets to overcome DNA damage-related drug resistance in TNBC.
This paper proposes a novel constraint-handling mechanism, namely the angle-based constrained dominance principle (ACDP), to solve constrained multi-objective optimization problems (CMOPs). In this ...work, the mechanism of ACDP is embedded in a decomposition-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA/D). ACDP uses the angle information among solutions of a population and the proportion of feasible solutions to adjust the dominance relationship, so that it can maintain good convergence, diversity and feasibility of a population, simultaneously. To evaluate the performance of the proposed MOEA/D-ACDP, fourteen benchmark instances and an engineering optimization problem are studied. Six state-of-the-art CMOEAs, including C-MOEA/D, MOEA/D-CDP, MOEA/D-Epsilon, MOEA/D-SR, NSGA-II-CDP and SP, are compared. The experimental results illustrate that MOEA/D-ACDP is significantly better than the other six CMOEAs on these benchmark problems and the real-world case, which demonstrates the effectiveness of ACDP.
•The proposed MOEA/D-ACDP utilizes the angle information to maintain the diversity.•MOEA/D-ACDP enhances convergence to the PF by exploring infeasible regions.•MOEA/D-ACDP is significantly better than the other six CMOEAs on the benchmark problems.
•Co-N/KB composite is derived from ZIF67/KB precursor which is prepared by a facile water solution reaction.•Co-N/KB composite is coated on the PE separator of Li-S coin battery which served as the ...polysulfides barrier layer.•Co-N/KB barrier show both physical and chemical interactions with polysulfides based on its rich pore structure and Co-N active site doping.•Coin cells with sulfur areal density of 5 mg cm−2 can cycle with a high capacity retention 81.1% after 200 cycles.
The commercialization of lithium sulfur battery is greatly impeded by the severe capacity decay induced by polysulfides shuttle during charge/discharge process. Herein, we propose a composite carbon material with Co-N doping and high conductivity for polysulfides barrier layer. ZIF67 and high conductivity Ketjen Black(KB) are combined by a facile water solution reaction at room temperature at first, afterwords the as-prepared ZIF67/KB precursor is calcined in nitrogen atmosphere to obtain a novel Co-N/KB nano structure. The Co-N/KB hybrid is then coated on the commercial PE separator to improve electrochemical properties of Li-S battery. The Co-N/KB coating layer apparently promote the redox kinetics and show chemisorption ability toward polysulfides. Furthermore, the coating layer with high conductivity can also be used as a second current collector to promote the electronic transmission, which will increase the use ratio of active substances and improve the cycle retention. By the use of Co-N/KB modified separator, the initial discharge capacity of sulfur cathode with a sulfur areal loading of 3 mg cm−2 reaches 888 mAh g−1 at 0.5 C and shows a slow capacity decay rate of 0.025%/cycle after 200 cycles. Even when the areal loading of active sulfur is added up to 5 mg cm−2, the battery can also show a stable cycle performance for more than 300 cycles.
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