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Topped by light and water
(2012)
The Effects of Lifestyle Modification on Glycemic Levels and Medication Intake:The Rockford CHIP
(2012)
Introduction: The high prevalence of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in the past 50 years has led to intense research, resulting in many improvements in treatment. At the same time, type 2 diabetes, with its concomitant increase in vascular complications, has become a serious, exploding and costly public health concern . Diabetes now affects 285 million adults worldwide and 344 million with pre-diabetes. Of these, 25.8 million diabetics and 79 million pre-diabetics are found in the United States alone.The current cost of diabetes in the US is likely to exceed the $174 billion estimate, which includes 2/3 for direct medical costs and 1/3 for indirect costs, such as disability, work loss, and premature death, but omits the social cost of intangibles (e.g. pain, suffering, lower quality of life). The diabetes epidemic has been accompanied by a similarly drastic increase in obesity. Although the relationship between the two developments is a matter of debate, both are presumably caused by changes in dietary habits and an increasingly sedentary modern lifestyle . Compelling evidence has shown that lifestyle changes can effectively prevent or delay the occurrence of type 2 diabetes. Because individuals at risk for this disease can usually be identified during the pre-diabetic phase of impaired glucose tolerance, early intervention and lifestyle change offer a logical approach to preventing this disease and its devastating vascular complications. Additionally, community-based lifestyle interventions for high risk groups and for the general population are a cost-effective way of curbing the growing burden of the disease. Solidifying the scientific basis for the prevention, treatment and control of this disease and its implementation on a national level, however, remains a difficult challenge. Moreresearch is needed to provide comprehensive and more effective strategies for weight-loss,especially over time. Therefore, the objectives of this study were to identify diabetics and those at risk (prediabetics) out of the total cohort of 1,517 who selected themselves into an intensive community-based lifestyle intervention program, and to assess its clinical efficacy ineffecting medication status as determined and managed by their personal physicians.
Reservoir sedimentation is an increasing problem affecting the majority of reservoirs both in Switzerland and worldwide. As many dams are more than 50 years of age, this problem is becoming more and more serious nowadays. Res-ervoir sedimentation leads to various severe problems such as a decisive de-crease of the active reservoir volume leading to both loss of energy production and water available for water supply and irrigation. These problems will intensify in the near future, because sediment supply tends to increase due to climate change. Therefore, countermeasures have to be developed. They can be divided into the three main categories sediment yield reduction, sediment routing and sediment removal. This paper focuses on the sediment routing using sediment bypass tunnels. Sediment bypass tunnels are an effective means to decrease the reservoir sedimentation process. By routing the sediments around the reservoir into the tailwater, sediment accumulation is reduced significantly. However, the number of sediment bypass tunnels in the world is limited primarily due to high investment and maintenance costs. The main problem of all bypass tunnels is the invert abrasion due to high velocities in combination with high sediment transport. Three Swiss bypass tunnel examples suffering invert abrasion are presented in this paper. Furthermore, VAW started a research project to investigate the invert abrasion process by conducting hydraulic scale tests in the laboratory. The goal of this research project is to establish general design criteria for optimal flow con-ditions where both sediment depositions in the tunnel are avoided and the result-ing abrasion damages are kept at a minimum.
This report presents the findings related to the supporting mechanisms of university-business cooperation (UBC) that have been found to exist in Europe. These results derive from a fifteen and a half month study on the cooperation between HEIs1 and public and private organisations in Europe. The study was conducted by the Science-to-Business Marketing Research Centre, Germany (S2BMRC) for the DG Education and Culture at the European Commission (EC) during 2010 and 2011. The main components of the project are in-depth qualitative interviews with 11 recognised UBC experts as well as a major quantitative survey. The survey was translated into 22 languages and sent to all registered European HEIs (numbering over 3,000) in 33 countries during March 2011. Through this, a final sample population of 6,280 academics and HEI representatives was achieved making the study the largest study into cooperation between HEIs and business yet completed in Europe. Further, 30 good practice UBC case studies have been created to provide positive examples of European UBC.
The Tigray and Afar Water Initiative (TAWI) is a collaboration between the Mekelle University (Ethiopia), the Muenster University of Applied Sciences (Germany) and the Westfalian Wilhelms-University Muenster (Germany). This special initiative is concerned with the rural water supply for the particularly water-scarce regional states of Tigray and Afar in the semi-arid north of Ethiopia. This paper describes a pilot project near the village of Koraro, Hawzen county in the Tigray region and deals with river reaches or creeks which carry water for short periods and only after the longer of two rainy seasons. When these waters run dry, water is still often to be found under the dry beds and is used casually by local people for agricultural purposes. An impermeable wall constructed as a subsurface dam to retain water in the ensuing subsurface micro-reservoir under the bed of such rivers could enable this usage to be intensified and hence enhance the water supply of small local user-groups, while at the same time positively influencing the landscape water balance. Here, the word micro refers to the fact that only the pores of the granular soil of an alluvial river bed are used to store water. Furthermore, storing water underground also avoids the danger of increasing the incidence of diseases such as malaria, a consequence of open water ponds.
UNLABELLED BACKGROUND Parental palliative disease is a family affair, however adolescent's well-being and coping are still rarely considered. The objectives of this paper were a) to identify differences in psychosocial adjustment and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) among adolescents and young adults with parents suffering from palliative cancer or cancers in other disease stages, b) to relate psychosocial adjustment and health-related quality of life to adolescent coping, and c) to explore significant mediator and predictor variables. METHODS Cross-sectional data were derived from a multi-site research study of families before child-centered counselling. N=86 adolescents and young adults were included, their mean age 13.78 years (sd 2.45), 56% being female. Performed analyses included ANCOVA, multiple linear regression, and mediation analysis. RESULTS Adolescents with parents suffering from palliative cancers reported significantly less total psychosocial problems, and better overall HRQoL. There were no significant group differences regarding coping frequency and efficacy. Our set of coping items significantly mediated the effect of parental disease stage on psychosocial problems and HRQoL. Further, parental disease status and general family functioning predicted psychosocial problems (R2adj =.390) and HRQoL (R2adj =.239) best. CONCLUSION The study indicates distress among adolescents throughout the entire parental disease process. Our analysis suggests that counselling services could offer supportive interventions which focus particularly on adolescent coping as well as family functioning.
Parental cancer: factors associated with children's psychosocial adjustment - a systematic review
(2012)
OBJECTIVE Children of cancer patients have an increased risk of developing psychosocial problems. But not all children are alike vulnerable to this stressful event. Thus, knowledge of risk and protective factors is required to design specific diagnostic tools and interventions for this vulnerable population. This study aims to provide a review and methodological evaluation of current studies examining factors associated with children's psychosocial adjustment when a parent has cancer. METHODS Four databases were systematically searched for quantitative research articles examining associative factors of children's adjustment. Study characteristics were analyzed and methodological quality was assessed by two independent reviewers. RESULTS 28 studies examining associative factors in 2896 families were identified. The included studies used a broad range of instruments assessing children's adjustment. Most patients were female breast cancer patients with middle to high socio-economic status. The majority of included studies used correlational approaches and cross-sectional designs. None of the studies examined toddlers or assessed children's quality of life. Across studies with low to high quality, we found no evidence of illness-related factors, except worse disease status that was related to lower adjustment. Evidence from moderate to high quality studies suggest that better family functioning indicates better adjustment, whereas parent's depressive mood indicates worse adjustment of the children. Child-related factors were inconsistent. CONCLUSION Health professionals should pay attention to cancer patients' dependent children. In order to identify this at-risk population, parent's depressive mood and poor family functioning should be considered. Future studies should also assess children's quality of life and child-related factors.
This paper describes the data mining method of association analysis within the framework of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) with the aim to identify standard patterns of nursing care. The approach is application-oriented and used on nursing routine data of the method LEP nursing 2. The increasing use of information technology in hospitals, especially of nursing information systems, requires the storage of large data sets, which hitherto have not always been analyzed adequately. Three association analyses for the days of admission, surgery and discharge, have been performed. The results of almost 1.5 million generated association rules indicate that it is valid to apply association analysis to nursing routine data. All rules are semantically trivial, since they reflect existing knowledge from the domain of nursing. This may be due either to the method LEP Nursing 2, or to the nursing activities themselves. Nonetheless, association analysis may in future become a useful analytical tool on the basis of structured nursing routine data.
We have developed a new type of unimorph deformable mirror, designed to correct for low-order Zernike modes. The mirror has a clear optical aperture of 50 mm combined with large peak-to-valley Zernike amplitudes of up to 35 μm. Newly developed fabrication processes allow the use of prefabricated super-polished and coated glass substrates. The mirror's unique features suggest the use in several stronomical applications like the precompensation of atmospheric aberrations seen by laser beacons and the use in woofer-tweeter systems. Additionally, the design enables an efficient correction of the inevitable wavefront error imposed by the floppy structure of primary mirrors in future large space-based telescopes. We have modeled the mirror by using analytical as well as finite element models. We will present design, key features and manufacturing steps of the deformable mirror.
We have developed a new type of unimorph deformable mirror for the correction of low-order Zernike modes. The mirror features a clear aperture of 50 mm combined with large peak-to-valley amplitudes of up to 35 μm. Newly developed fabrication processes allow the use of prefabricated, coated, super-polished glass substrates. The mirror's unique features suggest the use in several astronomical applications like the compensation of atmospheric aberrations seen by laser beacons, low light astronomy, and the use in woofer-tweeter systems. Additionally, the design enables an efficient correction of the inevitable wave-front error imposed by the floppy structure of primary mirrors in future large space telescopes. We have modeled the mirror by using analytical as well as finite element models. We will present design, key features and manufacturing steps of the deformable mirror.