Plos One
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Mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) or concussion is common in many sports. Today, neuropsychological evaluation is recommended in the monitoring of a concussion and in return-to-play considerations. To investigate the sensitivity of neuropsychological assessment, we tested amateur boxers post bout and compared with controls. Further the relationship between neuropsychological test results and brain injury biomarkers in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) were investigated. ⋯ This is the first study showing traumatic axonal brain injury can be present without measureable cognitive impairment. The repetitive, subconcussive head trauma in amateur boxing causes axonal injury that can be detected with analysis of CSF NFL, but is not sufficient to produce impairment in memory tests, tests of processing speed, or executive functions. The association of prolonged CSF NFL increase in boxers with impairment of processing speed is an interesting observation, which needs to be verified in larger studies.
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Zimbabwe underwent a socioeconomic crisis and resultant increase in food insecurity in 2008-9. The impact of the crisis on Tuberculosis (TB) incidence is unknown. ⋯ This study suggests that an epidemic of TB mirrored socioeconomic collapse and recovery in Zimbabwe. The seasonal data suggests that food security may have been associated with TB incidence both annually and during the crisis in this high HIV prevalence country.
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Decline in oxygen uptake efficiency (OUE), especially during exercise, is found in patients with chronic heart failure. In this study we aimed to test the validity and usefulness of OUE in evaluating gas exchange abnormality of patients with idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension (IPAH). ⋯ In patients with IPAH, OUES and OUEP are both significantly lower than the healthy subjects. OUEP is a better physiological parameter than OUES in evaluating the gas exchange abnormality of patients with IPAH.
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To study the relationships of long-term trajectories of glycemic control with cognitive performance in cognitively normal elderly with type 2 diabetes (T2D). ⋯ Glycemic control trajectories, which better reflect chronicity of T2D than a single HbA1c measurement, predict cognitive performance. A trajectory of stable HbA1c levels over time is associated with better cognitive function.
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Recently, contagion-based (disease, information, etc.) spreading on social networks has been extensively studied. In this paper, other than traditional full interaction, we propose a partial interaction based spreading model, considering that the informed individuals would transmit information to only a certain fraction of their neighbors due to the transmission ability in real-world social networks. Simulation results on three representative networks (BA, ER, WS) indicate that the spreading efficiency is highly correlated with the network heterogeneity. ⋯ Detailed analyses show that the critical value is decreasing along with the network heterogeneity for the spreading process, which is complete the contrary to that of random selection. Moreover, the critical value in the latter process is also larger than that of the former for the same network. Those findings might shed some lights in in-depth understanding the effect of network properties on information spreading.