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This study aimed to investigate the relationship between serum folate levels and the risk of psoriasis by integrating observational study with Mendelian Randomisation (MR) analysis. We firstly conducted an observational study using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Subsequently, genetic instruments were selected for two-sample MR analyses to investigate the causal relationship between serum folate levels and the risk of psoriasis. The observational study showed no significant association between serum folate levels and psoriasis. In the fully adjusted model, neither serum folate level as a continuous variable (OR = 0·99, 95 % CI: 0·98, 1·00, P = 0·071) nor serum folate quartiles Q4 compared to Q1 (OR = 0·83, 95 % CI: 0·58, 1·19, P = 0·309) showed statistical significance. The MR analysis revealed that higher genetically predicted serum folate levels from Icelandic and Danish populations were significantly associated with a reduced risk of psoriasis (OR = 0·63, 95 % CI: 0·45, 0·88, P = 0·005). Similarly, higher genetically predicted serum folate levels from South Asian populations were significantly associated with a lower risk of psoriasis (OR = 0·84, 95 % CI: 0·72, 0·98, P = 0·025). Integrating observational study with MR analysis suggests that serum folate levels are protective factors against psoriasis, indicating that higher serum folate levels may help prevent the onset of the disease.
Growing evidence indicates a link between diet and depression risk. We aimed to examine the association between an inflammatory diet index and depression utilising extensive data from UK biobank cohort. The energy-adjusted dietary inflammation index (E-DII) was calculated to quantify the potential of daily diet, with twenty-seven food parameters utilised. The E-DII scores were classified into two categories (low v. high) based on median value. To mitigate bias and ensure comparability of participant characteristics, propensity score matching was employed. To ascertain the robustness of these associations, sensitivity analyses were conducted. Subgroup analyses were performed to evaluate the consistency of these associations within different subpopulations. Totally, 152 853 participants entered the primary analyses with a mean age of 56·11 (sd 7·98) years. Employing both univariate and multivariate logistic regression models, adjustments were made for varying degrees of confounding factors (socio-demographics, lifestyle factors, common chronic medical conditions including type 2 diabetes and hypertension). Results consistently revealed a noteworthy positive correlation between E-DII and depression. In the context of propensity score matching, participants displaying higher E-DII scores exhibited an increased likelihood of experiencing incident depression (OR = 1·12, 95 % CI: 1·05, 1·19; P = 0·000316). Subgroup analysis results demonstrated variations in these associations across diverse subpopulations. The E-value for the point-estimate OR calculated from the propensity score matching dataset was 1·48. Excluding individuals diagnosed with type 2 diabetes or hypertension, the findings consistently aligned with the positive association in the primary analysis. These findings suggested that consumption of a diet with higher pro-inflammatory potential might associated with an increase of future depression risk.
Double-cone ignition [Zhang et al., Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 378, 20200015 (2020)] was proposed recently as a novel path for direct-drive inertial confinement fusion using high-power lasers. In this scheme, plasma jets with both high density and high velocity are required for collisions. Here we report preliminary experimental results obtained at the Shenguang-II upgrade laser facility, employing a CHCl shell in a gold cone irradiated with a two-ramp laser pulse. The CHCl shell was pre-compressed by the first laser ramp to a density of 3.75 g/cm3 along the isentropic path. Subsequently, the target was further compressed and accelerated by the second laser ramp in the cone. According to the simulations, the plasma jet reached a density of up to 15 g/cm3, while measurements indicated a velocity of 126.8 ± 17.1 km/s. The good agreements between experimental data and simulations are documented.
The burden of mental disorders is increasing worldwide, thus, affecting society and healthcare systems. This study investigated the independent influences of age, period and cohort on the global prevalence of mental disorders from 1990 to 2019; compared them by sex; and predicted the future burden of mental disorders in the next 25 years.
Methods
The age-specific and sex-specific incidence of mental disorders worldwide was analysed according to the general analysis strategy used in the Global Burden of Disease Study in 2019. The incidence and mortality trends of mental disorders from 1990 to 2019 were evaluated through joinpoint regression analysis. The influences of age, period and cohort on the incidence of mental disorders were evaluated with an age–period–cohort model.
Results
From 1990 to 2019, the sex-specific age-standardized incidence and disability-adjusted life years (DALY) rate decreased slightly. Joinpoint regression analysis from 1990 to 2019 indicated four turning points in the male DALY rate and five turning points in the female DALY rate. In analysis of age effects, the relative risk (RR) of incidence and the DALY rate in mental disorders in men and women generally showed an inverted U-shaped pattern with increasing age. In analysis of period effects, the incidence of mental disorders increased gradually over time, and showed a sub-peak in 2004 (RR, 1.006 for males; 95% CI, 1.000–1.012; 1.002 for women, 0.997–1.008). Analysis of cohort effects showed that the incidence and DALY rate decreased in successive birth cohorts. The incidence of mental disorders is expected to decline slightly over the next 25 years, but the number of cases is expected to increase.
Conclusions
Although the age-standardized burden of mental disorders has declined in the past 30 years, the number of new cases and deaths of mental disorders worldwide has increased, and will continue to increase in the near future. Therefore, relevant policies should be used to promote the prevention and management of known risk factors and strengthen the understanding of risk profiles and incidence modes of mental disorders, to help guide future research on control and prevention strategies.
This work characterizes the vanishing of the Fourier coefficients of all CM (Complex Multiplication) eta quotients. As consequences, we recover Serre’s characterization about that of $\eta(12z)^{2}$ and recent results of Chang on the pth coefficients of $\eta(4z)^{6}$ and $\eta(6z)^{4}$. Moreover, we generalize the results on the cases of weight 1 to the setting of binary quadratic forms.
We provide an umbrella review of the reported polysomnographic changes in patients with neuropsychiatric diseases compared with healthy controls.
Methods
An electronic literature search was conducted in EMBASE, MEDLINE, All EBM databases, CINAHL, and PsycINFO. Meta-analyses of case–control studies investigating the polysomnographic changes in patients with neuropsychiatric diseases were included. For each meta-analysis, we estimated the summary effect size using random effects models, the 95% confidence interval, and the 95% prediction interval. We also estimated between-study heterogeneity, evidence of excess significance bias, and evidence of small-study effects. The levels of evidence of polysomnographic changes in neuropsychiatric diseases were ranked as follows: not significant, weak, suggestive, highly suggestive, or convincing.
Results
We identified 27 articles, including 465 case–control studies in 27 neuropsychiatric diseases. The levels of evidence of polysomnographic changes in neuropsychiatric diseases were highly suggestive for increased sleep latency and decreased sleep efficiency (SE) in major depressive disorder (MDD), increased N1 percentage, and decreased N2 percentage, SL and REML in narcolepsy, and decreased rapid eye movement (REM) sleep percentage in Parkinson's disease (PD). The suggestive evidence decreased REM latency in MDD, decreased total sleep time and SE in PD, and decreased SE in posttraumatic stress disorder and in narcolepsy.
Conclusions
The credibility of evidence for sleep characteristics in 27 neuropsychiatric diseases varied across polysomnographic variables and diseases. When considering the patterns of altered PSG variables, no two diseases had the same pattern of alterations, suggesting that specific sleep profiles might be important dimensions for defining distinct neuropsychiatric disorders.
In the beginning of the eighteenth century,Japanese scholar Ogyū Sorai promoted translationstudy (yakugaku).This study advocated a ‘direct translation’ methodto render Chinese texts into everyday Japanese, tocounter the fundamental problem of the kundoku (reading by gloss)method: its paradox of being a translation yetconcealing its translational nature. To promotedirect translation, Sorai encouraged reading andunderstanding Chinese texts in their own acousticand grammatical forms, which he called ‘Chineselanguage’. Sorai's ‘Chinese language’ and itspractice, the tōwa(contemporary spoken Chinese) study, epitomize thepre-1900 Sinitic concept of ‘language’. Thiswriting-imbued ‘Chinese language’ manifested thevitality of Sinitic writing and the intricaterelation of voice and text, as well as of Chinaand the Sinitic.
In 1714-1715, the renowned Japanese Confucian scholarOgyū Sorai 荻生徂 徠 (1666-1728) published Yakubun sentei 譯文筌蹄 (A Tool for Translation,editor's note 1711), an aid for Sinitic studies. Inthe ‘Prefatory Remarks in Ten Principles’ (Daigen jussoku 題言十則) to thiswork, Sorai offered his views on ‘Chinese language’(Chūka gengo中華言語):
This land [i.e., Japan] has its own language, andChina has the Chinese language. The forms andnatures of the two languages are fundamentallydifferent; how can we unite them? When we approachthe problem by using Japanese glossing and theinverted word order to read, it may seemcomprehensible, but it is quite distorted.However, people nowadays are not aware [of thisdistortion].
What did Sorai mean by ‘Chūkagengo’? Both the term gen and the term go suggest a spokencomponent. The character gen 言 (Ch. yan) stresses spoken words and go 語 (Ch. yu) means words to state orto conversate. The supposed written traces of thevanished spoken words are also called gen or go. By using gengo rather than bun 文 (Ch. wen; pattern, writing, composition),Sorai was emphasizing speech rather thanwriting.
Understanding factors associated with post-discharge sleep quality among COVID-19 survivors is important for intervention development.
Aims
This study investigated sleep quality and its correlates among COVID-19 patients 6 months after their most recent hospital discharge.
Method
Healthcare providers at hospitals located in five different Chinese cities contacted adult COVID-19 patients discharged between 1 February and 30 March 2020. A total of 199 eligible patients provided verbal informed consent and completed the interview. Using score on the single-item Sleep Quality Scale as the dependent variable, multiple linear regression models were fitted.
Results
Among all participants, 10.1% reported terrible or poor sleep quality, and 26.6% reported fair sleep quality, 26.1% reported worse sleep quality when comparing their current status with the time before COVID-19, and 33.7% were bothered by a sleeping disorder in the past 2 weeks. After adjusting for significant background characteristics, factors associated with sleep quality included witnessing the suffering (adjusted B = −1.15, 95% CI = −1.70, −0.33) or death (adjusted B = −1.55, 95% CI = −2.62, −0.49) of other COVID-19 patients during hospital stay, depressive symptoms (adjusted B = −0.26, 95% CI = −0.31, −0.20), anxiety symptoms (adjusted B = −0.25, 95% CI = −0.33, −0.17), post-traumatic stress disorders (adjusted B = −0.16, 95% CI = −0.22, −0.10) and social support (adjusted B = 0.07, 95% CI = 0.04, 0.10).
Conclusions
COVID-19 survivors reported poor sleep quality. Interventions and support services to improve sleep quality should be provided to COVID-19 survivors during their hospital stay and after hospital discharge.
The chapter focuses on network flow problems, which form a very important part of practical applications.Routing, distribution, and scheduling problems often belong to this category of formulations, while a large number of other optimization problems encountered in diverse areas of applications may contain elements of network flow problems.
Quadratic multidimensional functions play a very important role in the understanding of general nonlinear functions. Convexity of quadratic functions is linked in a natural way from its geometrical definition all the way to the properties of its matrix eigenspectrum.Indeed, to second order expansion, and close to the expansion point, any nonlinear function can be approximated by a quadratic – thus providing a crucial link and understanding of the local behaviour and convexity properties of general functions.
The chapter introduces basic optimization concepts, and motivates the use of optimization models and methods to engineering and scientific practice applications.It establishes key concepts, such as the types of variables, arguments to an optimization problem as continuous, integer and control functions (for optimal control problems).Further, it introduces types of optimization problems according to their formulation (such as multiobjective, bilevel, stochastic optimization problems)
This chapter introduces concepts of norm-1 and infinity norm fitting, both in terms of their own merit as useful fitting techniques, apart from least squares, but also importantly to teach how optimization problems that seem hard to solve (such as by being non-differentiable) can be reformulated effectively into easier ones that can be handled by standard solution methods – in this case by LP solvers.
Unconstrained multivariate gradient-based minimization is introduced by means of search direction-producing methods, focusing on steepest descent and Newton's method.Issues with both methods are discussed, highlighting what happens in the case of locally nonconvex functions, particularly in Newton's method.Linesearch is introduced, effectively rendering multidimensional optimization into a sequence of one-dimensional searches along the ray of the search directions produced.Linesearch criteria are discussed, such as the Armijo first condition, and efficient ways to cut the step size are discussed.
Duality theory has a central role in constrained optimization, both from a theoretical point of view and to enable understanding of solution methods and problem reformulations for special classes of problems.Such applications are presented in the next chapter on Lagrangian relaxation and Lagrangian decomposition.In this chapter, the fundamental background for duality theory is presented along with a basic introduction of key concepts related to it.
Convexity is of paramount importance in optimization theory.This chapter adopts a simple and intuitive description, highlighting the importance of these properties to guarantee global optimality, and paves the way to understanding nonconvex optimization problems in later chapters.
This chapter is the main chapter of the book that introduces in detail how modern Interior Point Methods work, what they are based on, and the associated numerical-computational implementation schemes involved.The difference between primal barrier methods and primal-dual barrier methods is presented and discussed, showing why nowadays mostly primal-dual methods are used in general optimization solvers.