Acne Vulgaris: The Influence of Marriage, Pregnancy and Childbirth

SUMMARY. 1). It is difficult, time consuming, and in many cases impossible to get the co-operation of a large group of patients in a large industrial town, where movement of population is bound to be great, particularly in the 15-25 age group. Many of the questionnaires, though very simply worded were inadequately filled in. 827 addresses were collected, over 1100 letters were sent out and almost 100 homes visited personally, yet only 415 forms were finally collected. 2). The treatment given by a skin department, where only relatively stubborn and rather severely affected cases are treated would seem to shorten the duration of acne vulgaris, an important consideration in reassuring young women of marriageable age. See Table I. 3). Disfiguring scarring would appear to lessen a girl's chance of marriage. See Table II. 4). Marriage has an undeniable influence on the course of acne vulgaris. 43.4% in the series improved, 53%, however, noted no change in their skin condition, only 3.6% deteriorated following matrimony. The widely held belief of a universally beneficial influence of marriage on this complaint, while certainly true in a considerable percentage of women, has not been confirmed by this survey. See Table III. 5), Pregnancy, on the other hand, has a markedly beneficial influence on acne vulgaris according to this survey. See Table IV, This isthought to be due to an increase in secretion of oestrogens, progesterone and gonadotrophins during gestation, all of which have a beneficial effect on acne by suppressing the activity of the pilosebacecus apparatus. Androgen, the hormone which stimulates sebaceous gland activity is at a lower level than normal during gestation. The psychological, possibly hypothalamic influence of pregnancy leading to a happier, better balanced out-look would all appear to bring about an amelioration and often a permanent remission of acne vulgaris. 6). The largest percentage of patients improved after the birth of their baby. See table VI. Lactation appeared not to have further influenced the course of events. See Table VII. An analogy can be drawn between dysmenorrhoea and acne vulgaris, both conditions of varied aetiology, commonest in adolescents and both in many instances finally cured by child-birth. It is postulated that this final cure of acne vulgaris is due to a finally established ideal hormonal balance, only achieved by the hormonal stimuli of pregnancy and parturition. Other aetiological factors would appear to be only of secondary importance. A suggestion is made to qualify Plenck's dictum "Matrimonium varos curat" to "Non matrimonium sed infantes varos in feminas curant". 7). From experience in this and other skin departments the results of hormonal therapy are often disappointing and unpredictable and may give rise to unpleasant, though rarely dangerous side-effects. More, and if at all possible, controlled trials are necessary in this field, to find a more satisfactory and safer approach to the internal and external treatment of acne vulgaris with hormonal substances. 8). It is stressed that acne vulgaris must not be taken lightly, the presence of a disfiguring and usually all too obvious skin condition in a susceptible adolescent not only leads to psychological upset and trauma, but also may interfere with a young person's work and career, as well as jeopardizing a girl's chances in marriage

Spectrum of Sizes for Perfect Deletion-Correcting Codes

One peculiarity with deletion-correcting codes is that perfect $t$-deletion-correcting codes of the same length over the same alphabet can have different numbers of codewords, because the balls of radius $t$ with respect to the Levenshte\u{\i}n distance may be of different sizes. There is interest, therefore, in determining all possible sizes of a perfect $t$-deletion-correcting code, given the length $n$ and the alphabet size~$q$. In this paper, we determine completely the spectrum of possible sizes for perfect $q$-ary 1-deletion-correcting codes of length three for all $q$, and perfect $q$-ary 2-deletion-correcting codes of length four for almost all $q$, leaving only a small finite number of cases in doubt.Comment: 23 page

A critical review on modelling formalisms and simulation tools in computational biosystems

Integration of different kinds of biological processes is an ultimate goal for whole-cell modelling. We briefly review modelling formalisms that have been used in Systems Biology and identify the criteria that must be addressed by an integrating framework capable of modelling, analysing and simulating different biological networks. Aware that no formalism can fit all purposes we realize Petri nets as a suitable model for Metabolic Engineering and take a deeper perspective on the role of this formalism as an integrating framework for regulatory and metabolic networks.Research supported by PhD grant SFRH/BD/35215/2007 from the Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT) and the MIT-Portugal program

Verification of Logs - Revealing Faulty Processes of a Medical Laboratory

Abstract. If there is a suspicion of Lyme disease, a blood sample of a patient is sent to a medical laboratory. The laboratory performs a number of dierent blood examinations testing for antibodies against the Lyme disease bacteria. The total number of dierent examinations depends on the intermediate results of the blood count. The costs of each examination is paid by the health insurance company of the patient. To control and restrict the number of performed examinations the health insurance companies provide a charges regulation document. If a health insurance company disagrees with the charges of a laboratory it is the job of the public prosecution service to validate the charges according to the regulation document. In this paper we present a case study showing a systematic approach to reveal faulty processes of a medical laboratory. First, files produced by the information system of the respective laboratory are analysed and consolidated in a database. An excerpt from this database is translated into an event log describing a sequential language of events performed by the information system. With the help of the regulation document this language can be split in two sets- the set of valid and the set of faulty words. In a next step, we build a coloured Petri net model corre-sponding to the set of valid words in a sense that only the valid words are executable in the Petri net model. In a last step we translated the coloured Petri net into a PL/SQL-program. This program can automat-ically reveal all faulty processes stored in the database.

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I hereby declare that my dissertation entitled “Error-correction on non-standard communication channels ” is not substantially the same as any that I have submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at any other University. I further state that no part of my dissertation has already been or is being concurrently submitted for any such degree or diploma or other qualification. Except where explicit reference is made to the work of others, this dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration. This dissertation does not exceed sixty thousand words in length

Sparse Data Blocks and Multi-User Channels

An e#cient algorithm for creating sparse data blocks of fixed size is presented. The use of sparse data blocks with a systematic error-correcting code is shown to increase the communication rate on multi-user channels