Genetic and environmental influences on alcohol consumption in middle to late life.

Objective: Alcohol use is common in older adults and linked to poor health and aging outcomes. Studies have demonstrated genetic and environmental contributions to the quantity of alcohol consumption in mid-to-late life, but less is known about whether these influences are moderated by sociodemographic factors such as age, sex, and educational attainment. This study sought to better understand sociodemographic trends in alcohol consumption across the second half of the life course and their underlying genetic and environmental influences.

REAL-TIME RECURSIVE ESTIMATION OF, AND UNCERTAINTY QUANTIFICATION FOR, BREATH ALCOHOL CONCENTRATION VIA LQ TRACKING CONTROL-BASED INVERSE FILTERING OF TRANSDERMAL ALCOHOL BIOSENSOR SIGNALS.

The utility of newly developed wearable biosensors for passively, non-invasively, and continuously measuring transdermal alcohol levels in the body in real time has been limited by the fact that raw transdermal alcohol data does not consistently correlate (quantitatively or temporally) with interpretable metrics of breath and blood across individuals, devices, and the environment. A novel method using a population model in the form of a random abstract hybrid system of ordinary and partial differential equations and linear quadratic tracking control in Hilbert space is developed to estimate blood or breath alcohol concentration from the biosensor-produced transdermal alcohol level signal. Using human subject data in the form of 270 drinking episodes, the method is shown to produce estimates of blood or breath alcohol concentration that are highly correlated and thus good predictors of breath analyzer measurements.

A Method of Precise Auto-Calibration in a Micro-Electro-Mechanical System Accelerometer.

A novel design of a MEMS (Micro-Electromechanical System) capacitive accelerometer fabricated by surface micromachining, with a structure enabling precise auto-calibration during operation, is presented. Precise auto-calibration was introduced to ensure more accurate acceleration measurements compared to standard designs. The standard mechanical structure of the accelerometer (seismic mass integrated with elastic suspension and movable plates coupled with fixed plates forming a system of differential sensing capacitors) was equipped with three movable detection electrodes coupled with three fixed electrodes, thus creating three atypical tunneling displacement transducers detecting three specific positions of seismic mass with high precision, enabling the auto-calibration of the accelerometer while it was being operated.

A population model-based linear-quadratic Gaussian compensator for the control of intravenously infused alcohol studies and withdrawal symptom prophylaxis using transdermal sensing.

An output feedback LQG compensator (combined controller and state estimator) for the regulation of intravenous-infused alcohol studies and treatment using a noninvasive transdermal alcohol biosensor is developed. The design is based on a population model involving an abstract semi-linear parabolic hybrid reaction-diffusion system involving coupled partial and ordinary differential equations with random parameters known only up to their distributions. The scheme developed is based on a weak formulation of the model equations in an appropriately constructed Gelfand triple of Bochner spaces wherein the unknown random parameters are treated as additional spatial variables.

A genetically informed longitudinal study of early-life temperament and childhood aggression.

The present study examined the longitudinal associations between three dimensions of temperament - activity, affect-extraversion, and task orientation - and childhood aggression. Using 131 monozygotic and 173 dizygotic (86 same-sex) twin pairs from the Louisville Twin Study, we elucidated the ages, from 6 to 36 months, at which each temperament dimension began to correlate with aggression at age 7. We employed latent growth modeling to show that developmental increases (i.