Association between lung function decline and obstructive sleep apnoea: the ALEC study

Sleep and Breathing - To study changes in lung function among individuals with a risk of obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), and if asthma affected this relationship. We used data from the European...     

Prevalence of Gastroduodenitis and Helicobacter pylori Infection in a General Population Sample

Some benign and malignant diseases develop on the background of chronic gastritis or duodenitis. The present study was performed in order to determine the magnitude of these background changes with relations to symptomatology and life style in the general population. Examinations were performed in 501 volunteers (age 35–85 years). Fifty percent had gastritis; this was associated with H. pylori in 87%. H. pylori-negative gastritis was associated with regular use of NSAIDs [odds ratio 3.8 (1.6–9.9)]. Duodenitis, observed in 32%, was associated with H. pylori infection [odds ratio 2.3 (1.3–4.6)], previous cholecystectomy [odds ratio 3.6 (1.1–16.1)], and regular use of NSAIDs [odds ratio 3.0 (1.4–7.1)]. Neither gastritis nor duodenitis was associated with smoking or alcohol consumption. The rate of digestive symptoms did not differ between subjects with and without uncomplicated gastritis or duodenitis. In conclusion, half of this adult population had gastritis strongly associated with H. pylori infection. Gastritis without H. pylori infection was frequently associated with regular NSAID intake. One third had duodenitis, which was associated with H. pylori infection as well as with regular use of NSAIDs and previous cholecystectomy. Digestive symptoms were not overrepresented in uncomplicated gastritis or duodenitis.     

WAITING TIMES AND SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS. EVIDENCE FROM NORWAY

We investigate whether socioeconomic status, measured by income and education, affects waiting time when controls for severity and hospital‐specific conditions are included. We also examine which aspects of the hospital supply (attachment to local hospital, traveling time, or choice of hospital) matter most for unequal treatment of different socioeconomic groups. The study uses administrative data from all elective inpatient and outpatient stays in somatic hospitals in Norway. The main results are that we find very little indication of discrimination with regard to income and education when both severity and aspects of hospital supply are controlled for. This result holds for both men and women. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Analogical Mapping with Sparse Distributed Memory: A Simple Model that Learns to Generalize from Examples

We present a computational model for the analogical mapping of compositional structures that combines two existing ideas known as holistic mapping vectors and sparse distributed memory. The model enables integration of structural and semantic constraints when learning mappings of the type $x_i \rightarrow y_i$ and computing analogies $x_j \rightarrow y_j$ for novel inputs x _j . The model has a one-shot learning process, is randomly initialized, and has three exogenous parameters: the dimensionality $\mathcal{D}$ of representations, the memory size S, and the probability χ for activation of the memory. After learning three examples, the model generalizes correctly to novel examples. We find minima in the probability of generalization error for certain values of χ, S, and the number of different mapping examples learned. These results indicate that the optimal size of the memory scales with the number of different mapping examples learned and that the sparseness of the memory is important. The optimal dimensionality of binary representations is of the order 10⁴, which is consistent with a known analytical estimate and the synapse count for most cortical neurons. We demonstrate that the model can learn analogical mappings of generic two-place relationships, and we calculate the error probabilities for recall and generalization.