Experiences of COVID-19 in an Australian community cohort of adults with epilepsy.

A number of studies have been conducted on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on people with epilepsy (PWE), some showing increased seizures, poorer psychosocial states, and reductions in Quality of Life (QoL). During the latter stages of COVID-19, well before the UN declared an end to the state of emergency, our study was conducted in Australia of a sample of women and men ≥ 18 years. The study was based on Wave 6 of the Australian Epilepsy Longitudinal Study (AELS).

Inequality and health: Can medical practice address the consequences of inequalities?

Background: The extent to which governments provide socioeconomic supports has been highlighted by their spending during the COVID-19 pandemic. This has implications for patterns of inequality, in particular on exacerbating unequal health and well-being.

Results: Inequity has expanded due to neoliberalism, a market-based approach that has endured for more than four decades.

Locally linear attributes of ReLU neural networks.

A ReLU neural network functions as a continuous piecewise linear map from an input space to an output space. The weights in the neural network determine a partitioning of the input space into convex polytopes, where each polytope is associated with a distinct affine mapping. The structure of this partitioning, together with the affine map attached to each polytope, can be analyzed to investigate the behavior of the associated neural network.

An algorithm for computing Schubert varieties of best fit with applications.

We propose the geometric framework of the Schubert variety as a tool for representing a collection of subspaces of a fixed vector space. Specifically, given a collection of -dimensional subspaces , …, of ℝ, represented as the column spaces of matrices , …, , we seek to determine a matrix ∈ℝ such that each subspace intersects (or comes close to intersecting) the span of the columns of in at least dimensions. We formulate a non-convex optimization problem to determine such a along with associated sets of vectors {} and {} used to express linear combinations of the columns of the that are close to linear combinations of the columns of .

Hurricane wind regimes for forests of North America.

Despite the ubiquity of tropical cyclones and their impacts on forests, little is known about how tropical cyclone regimes shape the ecology and evolution of tree species. We used a simple meteorological model (HURRECON) to estimate wind fields from hurricanes in the Western North Atlantic and Eastern North Pacific tropical cyclone basins from storms occurring between 1851 and 2022. We characterize how the intensity and frequency of hurricanes differ among geographically distinct hurricane regimes and define four hurricane regimes for North America (Continental, Inland, Coastal, and Fringe).

Universal health care and political economy, neoliberalism and effects of COVID-19: A view of systems and complexity.

Sturmberg and Martin's application of systems and complexity theory to understanding Universal Health Care (UHC) and Primary Health Care (PHC) is evaluated in the light of the influence of political economy on health systems. Furthermore, the role that neoliberal approaches to governance have had in creating increased inequities is seen as a key challenge for UHC. COVID-19 has emphasized long standing discrepancies in health and these disadvantages require government will and cooperation together with adequate social services to redress these discrepancies in UHC.

Large tree mortality leads to major aboveground biomass decline in a tropical forest reserve.

Humans are transforming the ecology of the Earth through rapid changes in land use and climate. These changes can affect tropical forest structure, dynamics and diversity. While numerous studies have focused on diversity metrics, other aspects of forest function, such as long-term biomass dynamics, are often less considered.

Universal health coverage and primary health care: Their place in people's health.

Sturmberg and Martin in 2020 argue that universal health coverage (UHC) is mainly about financing, and primary health care (PHC) is about the right care at the right time to ensure health. They maintain that the World Health Organization has recently sent the wrong message about the "pillars" of PHC in their relationship to UHC. An understanding of political economy is required in order to come to terms with the bases of PHC and the fundamentals of UHC that dealing with inequities is not only an economic issue but fundamentally a political issue.

Examining quality of life in an Australian cohort of people with epilepsy over six years - Understanding the role of stigma and mood.

Aim: Research examining quality of life (QoL) among people living with epilepsy (PWE) consistently highlights the detrimental impact of stigma, anxiety, and depression, as well as the dynamic and changing nature of QoL over time. This paper represents the first panel study of the Australian Epilepsy Longitudinal Survey (AELS), examining factors that influence the QoL of PWE over a six-year interval, particularly focusing on experiences of stigma, depression, and anxiety.

Methods: Ninety-two adults participated in both Wave 2 (T1; 2010) and Wave 4 (T2; 2016/17) of the AELS.

Where Does Value Lie in Peer Support? An Exploratory Discussion of the Theories and Methods Underpinning Effective Research in Peer Support.

A literature review was undertaken in 2019 to review research into the effectiveness of peer support in chronic disease self-management. As with an earlier literature review, we found the results disappointing due to poor reporting and poor research design. Lack of information on training of peer supporters, unrealistically short timeframes to produce changes in health behaviors, and lack of any theoretical underpinning of the research design contributed to rating randomized controlled trials as poor to medium quality evidence.

Needs for aids and equipment for the management of epilepsy in an Australian cohort.

Aim: This paper investigated the bases of needs for a range of epilepsy aids and equipment and expressed concerns about the use of such devices.

Method: There was a 29.6% response rate (n = 393 of 1328) to Wave 4 of the Australian Epilepsy Longitudinal Study (AELS).

Reported service needs at diagnosis of epilepsy and implications for quality of life.

Aim: This paper reports on contributing factors to Quality of Life (QoL) in an Australian community sample of people with epilepsy (PWE).

Method: Three hundred and ninety-three respondents or 29.6% of people on the Australian Epilepsy Research Register participated in Wave 4 of a longitudinal survey.

Health and Disease-Emergent States Resulting From Adaptive Social and Biological Network Interactions.

Health is an adaptive state unique to each person. This subjective state must be distinguished from the objective state of disease. The experience of health and illness (or poor health) can occur both in the absence and presence of objective disease.

'I hate wasting the hospital's time': Experiences of emergency department admissions of Australian people with epilepsy.

Aim: This paper investigates the reasons and extent of hospital emergency department (ED) attendance by people with epilepsy in Wave 4 of The Australian Longitudinal Survey 2016-17.

Method: Wave 4 had 393 respondents who completed the survey, which included questions relating to their use of hospital and healthcare services. Of these, 121 (31%; 82 females) reported one or more admissions to the ED within the previous 12 months.

Motion Segmentation via Generalized Curvatures.

New depth sensors, like the Microsoft Kinect, produce streams of human pose data. These discrete pose streams can be viewed as noisy samples of an underlying continuous ideal curve that describes a trajectory through high-dimensional pose space. This paper introduces a technique for generalized curvature analysis (GCA) that determines features along the trajectory which can be used to characterize change and segment motion.

A sociological approach to resilience in health and illness.

Work on resilience in health and illness has been approached from a number of perspectives. These are the biological and psychosocial with a focus on the individual's responses to cope and adapt to changing circumstances wrought by changing physical health states. This we argue has a place but is far too narrow emphasizing the neoliberal view that the sick or imperfect individual is ultimately responsible for their own health outcomes.

A degradation debt? Large-scale shifts in community composition and loss of biomass in a tropical forest fragment after 40 years of isolation.

Habitat loss and fragmentation are among the biggest threats to tropical biodiversity and associated ecosystem services. We examined forest dynamics in a mid-elevation 365-ha fragment in southern Costa Rica. The fragment was isolated in the mid-1970s and belongs to the Las Cruces Biological Station.

Older people and knowledge of epilepsy: GPs can help.

Background: Epilepsy is a common neurological disease with a high prevalence in people aged 65 years or older. Therefore, an understanding of the disease is important. The objective of this article was to determine older people's knowledge of epilepsy.

Evaluating the ecological impacts of salvage logging: can natural and anthropogenic disturbances promote coexistence?

Salvage logging following windthrow is common throughout forests worldwide even though the practice is often considered inimical to forest recovery. Because salvaging removes trees, crushes seedlings, and compacts soils, many warn this practice may delay succession, suppress diversity, and alter composition. Here, over 8 yr following windthrow, we experimentally evaluate how salvaging affects tree succession across 11 gaps in Eastern deciduous forests of Pennsylvania, wherein each gap was divided into salvaged and control (unsalvaged) halves.

Multimorbidity: a sociological perspective of systems.

There has been a great tradition of looking at health and illness from a systems perspective. For clinicians and people with illnesses a lot can be gained by mapping the interface of different sectors to understand the nature of conditions. This paper aims to use Sturmberg et als.

Yttrium 90-ibritumomab tiuxetan plus rituximab maintenance as initial therapy for patients with high-tumor-burden follicular lymphoma: a Wisconsin Oncology Network study.

Introduction: Yttrium 90-ibritumomab tiuxetan (90Y-IT) radioimmunotherapy has proved to be effective in relapsed follicular lymphoma (FL). We conducted a clinical trial in which 90Y-IT followed by maintenance rituximab (MR) was evaluated as initial therapy for high-tumor-burden FL.

Methods: Eligible patients had histologically confirmed FL and met the GELF (Groupe d'Etude des Lymphomes Folliculaires) criteria for high tumor burden.

Pasture succession in the Neotropics: extending the nucleation hypothesis into a matrix discontinuity hypothesis.

The nucleation hypothesis appears to explain widespread patterns of succession in tropical pastures, specifically the tendency for isolated trees to promote woody species recruitment. Still, the nucleation hypothesis has usually been tested explicitly for only short durations and in some cases isolated trees fail to promote woody recruitment. Moreover, at times, nucleation occurs in other key habitat patches.

Multivariate analysis of functional metagenomes.

Metagenomics is a primary tool for the description of microbial and viral communities. The sheer magnitude of the data generated in each metagenome makes identifying key differences in the function and taxonomy between communities difficult to elucidate. Here we discuss the application of seven different data mining and statistical analyses by comparing and contrasting the metabolic functions of 212 microbial metagenomes within and between 10 environments.

Effects of suture choice on biomechanics and physeal status after bioenhanced anterior cruciate ligament repair in skeletally immature patients: a large-animal study.

Purpose: The objective of this study was to assess the effect of absorbable or nonabsorbable sutures in bioenhanced anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) repair in a skeletally immature pig model on suture tunnel and growth plate healing and biomechanical outcomes.

Methods: Sixteen female skeletally immature Yorkshire pigs were randomly allocated to receive unilateral, bioenhanced ACL repair with an absorbable (Vicryl) or nonabsorbable (Ethibond) suture augmented by an extracellular matrix-based scaffold (MIACH). After 15 weeks of healing, micro-computed tomography was used to measure residual tunnel diameters and growth plate status, and biomechanical outcomes were assessed.

Mobility, longevity and activity of chlorfenapyr in soils treated at a termiticidal rate.

Background: The mobility, longevity and termiticidal activity of chlorfenapyr applied to soils at the termiticidal labeled rate was evaluated for 30 months after treatment (MAT) in a greenhouse study.

Results: There was little dissipation of chlorfenapyr in soil treated at the labeled rate for perimeter treatments for the prevention and control of termite infestations. Chlorfenapyr was detected in soil immediately below the initially treated soil in the packed soil columns.