The rise of Canadian raising of /au/ in New Orleans English.

New Orleans English (NOE) has always stood out amongst Southern Englishes, since NOE speakers do not participate in the Southern vowel shift, and instead display features more commonly associated with New York City English. While these traditional features of NOE are on the decline, this study establishes the adoption of a new feature in the dialect that is similarly distinctive within the Gulf South: the pre-voiceless raising of the nucleus of /au/. Based on statistical analyses and consideration of the social context in post-Katrina New Orleans, this paper argues that this feature is a change in progress which appears to pre-date the demographic shifts following Hurricane Katrina, and which arose independently rather than due to contact with /au/-raising speakers.

Improving the Health Forecasting Alert System for Cold Weather and Heat-Waves In England: A Proof-of-Concept Using Temperature-Mortality Relationships.

Objectives: In this study a prototype of a new health forecasting alert system is developed, which is aligned to the approach used in the Met Office's (MO) National Severe Weather Warning Service (NSWWS). This is in order to improve information available to responders in the health and social care system by linking temperatures more directly to risks of mortality, and developing a system more coherent with other weather alerts. The prototype is compared to the current system in the Cold Weather and Heatwave plans via a case-study approach to verify its potential advantages and shortcomings.

Assessment of the quality of harms reporting in non-randomised studies and randomised controlled studies of topiramate for the treatment of epilepsy using CONSORT criteria.

Purpose: Treatment decisions should be informed by high quality evidence of both the potential benefit and harms of treatment alternatives. Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) provide the best evidence regarding benefits; however information relating to serious, rare and long-term harms is usually available only from non-randomised studies (NRSs). The aim of this study was to use a checklist based on the CONSORT (Consolidating Standards for Reporting Trials) extension for harms recommendations to assess the quality of reporting of harms data in both NRSs and RCTs of antiepileptic drugs, using studies of topiramate as an example.

Zonisamide add-on for drug-resistant partial epilepsy.

Background: The majority of people with epilepsy have a good prognosis and their seizures can be well controlled with the use of a single antiepileptic agent, but up to 30% develop refractory epilepsy, especially those with partial seizures. In this review we summarise the current evidence regarding zonisamide, when used as an add-on treatment for drug-resistant partial epilepsy.

Objectives: To evaluate the efficacy and tolerability of zonisamide when used as an add-on treatment for people with drug-resistant partial epilepsy.

Accounting for bias due to a non-ignorable tracing mechanism in a retrospective breast cancer cohort study.

We consider the analysis of competing risks in a retrospective breast cancer cohort study where tracing of patients is dependent on survival to a pre-specified truncation time. We demonstrate that if ignored, the observed cause-specific hazards will become distorted before the truncation time. Two approaches to account for the tracing bias are considered.