The association between cigarette use and depression has been documented in many studies. Fewer studies have examined other tobacco products such as electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) and hookah ...that are used by young adults. This study examined whether increased frequency of use of these products was associated with depressive symptoms in a cohort of n = 5236 Texas college students followed from 2014 to 2017. To analyze the longitudinal data, a hierarchical model was used. Model results showed that increased frequency of single product use of cigarettes, refillable e-cigarettes and hookah was associated with depressive symptoms. Refillable and disposable e-cigarettes were examined separately and results did not provide evidence of a different association for each type of e-cigarette when cigarettes were not also used. Dual use of cigarettes with another product was also examined. Dual use was associated with higher depressive symptoms for most product combinations. However, infrequent dual use of disposable e-cigarettes and cigarettes may not be associated with depressive symptoms. Suggestions for further research are included.
•This study examined the association between frequency of product use and depressive symptoms for 6 tobacco products.•Frequency of single product use was associated with depressive symptoms for cigarettes, refillable e-cigarettes & hookah.•Dual use was associated with higher depressive symptoms than single product use for most product combinations.•Infrequent dual use of disposable e-cigarettes & cigarettes was not associated with higher depressive symptoms.
Elevated phosphorylation of estrogen receptor α (ERα) at serines 118 (S118) and 167 (S167) is associated with favorable outcome for tamoxifen adjuvant therapy and may serve as surrogate markers for a ...functional ERα signaling pathway in breast cancer. It is possible that loss of phosphorylation at S118 and/or S167 could disrupt ERα signaling, resulting in aggressive ERα-independent breast cancer cells. To this end, MCF-7 breast cancer cells were stably transfected with an ERα-specific short hairpin RNA that reduced endogenous ERα. The resulting cell line was stably transfected with wild-type ERα (ER-AB cells), or ERα containing serine to alanine mutation at S118 or S167 (S118A cells and S167A cells, respectively). These stable cell lines expressed approximately equivalent ERα compared with parental MCF-7 cells and were evaluated for growth, morphology, migration/invasion, and ERα-regulated gene expression. S118A cells and S167A cells exhibited increased growth and migration/invasion in vitro. Forward- and side-scatter flow cytometry revealed that S167A cells were smaller in size, and both S118A and S167A cells exhibited less cellular complexity. S118A and S167A cells expressed pancytokeratin and membrane localization of β-catenin and did not express vimentin, indicating retention of epithelial lineage markers. Expression of ERα-target genes and other genes regulated by ERα signaling or involved in breast cancer were markedly altered in both S118A and S167A cells. In summary, attenuated phosphorylation of ERα at S118 and S167 significantly affected cellular physiology and behavior in MCF-7 breast cancer cells, resulting in increased growth, migration/invasion, compromised expression of ERα target genes, and markedly altered gene expression patterns.
Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) is often misperceived to be a cost-cutting exercise. The intention of CEA is not to identify and implement cheap technologies, but rather those which offer maximum ...health gain, subject to available funds. Such analysis is crucial for decision making in health care, as tight budget constraints mean spending in one area of healthcare displaces spending elsewhere. Therefore in order to achieve the greatest health gain for the overall population, treatments must be selected which provide the greatest health gain within the available funds.
The relevance of CEA in health care systems is explained, using varicose vein treatment in the UK NHS as an example. Treatment for varicose veins is often not commissioned to at a local level, most likely because it is misperceived to be a cosmetic problem. However, this view does not take into account the impact of quality of life. CEA balances costs against a quantitative measure of health related quality of life, and could therefore be used to determine whether it is cost-effective to provide varicose vein treatment. The current literature on the cost-effectiveness of varicose vein treatment is reviewed, and an overview of cost-effectiveness principles is provided. Concepts such as economic modelling, incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs), net monetary benefit (NMB) and sensitivity analysis are explained, using examples relevant to varicose veins where appropriate.
This article explains how, far from cutting costs and sacrificing patient health, CEA provides a useful tool to maximise the health of the population in the face of ever tightening budget constraints. CEA could be used to compare the cost-effectiveness of the various treatment options for varicose veins, and efficiencies realised.
HerMES: SPIRE Science Demonstration Phase maps Levenson, L.; Marsden, G.; Zemcov, M. ...
Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society,
11/2010, Letnik:
409, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We describe the production and verification of sky maps of the five Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver (SPIRE) fields observed as part of the Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey ...(HerMES) during the Science Demonstration Phase (SDP) of the Herschel mission. We have implemented an iterative map-making algorithm The SPIRE-HerMES Iterative Mapper (SHIM) to produce high fidelity maps that preserve extended diffuse emission on the sky while exploiting the repeated observations of the same region of the sky with many detectors in multiple scan directions to minimize residual instrument noise. We specify here the SHIM algorithm and outline the various tests that were performed to determine and characterize the quality of the maps and verify that the astrometry, point source flux and power on all relevant angular scales meet the needs of the HerMES science goals. These include multiple jackknife tests, determination of the map transfer function and detailed examination of the power spectra of both sky and jackknife maps. The map transfer function is approximately unity on scales from 1 arcmin to 1°. Final maps (v1.0), including multiple jackknives, as well as the SHIM pipeline, have been used by the HerMES team for the production of SDP papers.
The orbital distribution of Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) provides important tests of solar system evolution models. However, our understanding of this orbital distribution can be affected by many ...observational biases. An important but difficult to quantify bias results from tracking selection effects; KBOs are recovered or lost depending on assumptions made about their orbital elements when fitting the initial (short) observational arc. Quantitatively studying the effects and significance of this bias is generally difficult, because only the objects where the assumptions were correct are recovered and thus available to study 'the problem,' and because different observers use different assumptions and methods. We have used a sample of 38 KBOs that were discovered and tracked, bias-free, as part of the Canada-France Ecliptic Plane Survey to evaluate the potential for losing objects based on the two most common orbit and ephemeris prediction sources: the Minor Planet Center (MPC) and the Bernstein and Khushalani (BK) orbit fitting code. In both cases, we use early discovery and recovery astrometric measurements of the objects to generate ephemeris predictions that we then compare to later positional measurements; objects that have large differences between the predicted and actual positions would be unlikely to be recovered and are thus considered 'lost.' We find systematic differences in the orbit distributions which would result from using the two orbit-fitting procedures. In our sample, the MPC-derived orbit solutions lost slightly fewer objects (five out of 38) due to large ephemeris errors at one year recovery, but the objects which were lost belonged to more 'unusual' orbits such as scattering disk objects or objects with semimajor axes interior to the 3:2 resonance. Using the BK code, more objects (seven out of 38) would have been lost due to ephemeris errors, but the lost objects came from a range of orbital regions, primarily the classical belt region. We also compare the accuracy of orbits calculated from one year arcs against orbits calculated from multiple years of observations and find that two-opposition orbits without additional observations acquired at least two months from opposition are unreliable for dynamical modeling.
The Sun and Heliosphere at Solar Maximum Smith, E. J.; Marsden, R. G.; Balogh, A. ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
11/2003, Letnik:
302, Številka:
5648
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Recent Ulysses observations from the Sun's equator to the poles reveal fundamental properties of the three-dimensional heliosphere at the maximum in solar activity. The heliospheric magnetic field ...originates from a magnetic dipole oriented nearly perpendicular to, instead of nearly parallel to, the Sun's rotation axis. Magnetic fields, solar wind, and energetic charged particles from low-latitude sources reach all latitudes, including the polar caps. The very fast high-latitude wind and polar coronal holes disappear and reappear together. Solar wind speed continues to be inversely correlated with coronal temperature. The cosmic ray flux is reduced symmetrically at all latitudes.
We describe a mapmaking method that we have developed for the Balloon- borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) experiment, but which should have general application to data from other ...submillimeter arrays. Our method uses a maximum likelihood-based approach, with several approximations, which allows images to be constructed using large amounts of data with fairly modest computer memory and processing requirements. This new approach, Signal and Noise Estimation Procedure Including Correlations (SANEPIC), builds on several previous methods but focuses specifically on the regime where there are a large number of detectors sampling the same map of the sky, and explicitly allowing for the possibility of strong correlations between the detector time streams. We provide real and simulated examples of how well this method performs compared with more simplistic mapmakers based on filtering. We discuss two separate implementations of SANEPIC: a brute-force approach, in which the inverse pixel-pixel covariance matrix is computed, and an iterative approach, which is much more efficient for large maps. SANEPIC has been successfully used to produce maps using data from the 2005 BLAST flight.
The infrared (IR) emission of "M* galaxies" (10 super(10.4) < or =, slant M sub(star) < or =, slant 10 super(11.0) M sub(odot)) in galaxy pairs, derived using data obtained in Herschel (PEP/HerMES) ...and Spitzer (S-COSMOS) surveys, is compared to that of single-disk galaxies in well-matched control samples to study the cosmic evolution of the star formation enhancement induced by galaxy-galaxy interaction. Both the mean IR spectral energy distribution and mean IR luminosity of star-forming galaxies (SFGs) in SFG+SFG (S+S) pairs in the redshift bin of 0.6 < z < 1 are consistent with no star formation enhancement. SFGs in S+S pairs in a lower redshift bin of 0.2 < z < 0.6 show marginal evidence for a weak star formation enhancement. Together with the significant and strong sSFR enhancement shown by SFGs in a local sample of S+S pairs (obtained using previously published Spitzer observations), our results reveal a trend for the star formation enhancement in S+S pairs to decrease with increasing redshift. Between z = 0 and z = 1, this decline of interaction-induced star formation enhancement occurs in parallel with the dramatic increase (by a factor of ~10) of the sSFR of single SFGs, both of which can be explained by the higher gas fraction in higher-z disks. SFGs in mixed pairs (S+E pairs) do not show any significant star formation enhancement at any redshift. The difference between SFGs in S+S pairs and in S+E pairs suggests a modulation of the sSFR by the intergalactic medium (IGM) in the dark matter halos hosting these pairs.
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