Impact of asthma on educational attainment in a socioeconomically deprived population: a study linking health, education and social care datasets

BACKGROUND: Asthma has the potential to adversely affect children's school examination performance, and hence longer term life chances. Asthma morbidity is especially high amongst UK ethnic minority children and those experiencing social adversity, populations which also have poor educational outcomes. We tested the hypothesis that asthma adversely affects performance in national school examinations in a large cohort from an area of ethnic diversity and social deprivation. METHODS AND FINDINGS: With a novel method (using patient and address-matching algorithms) we linked administrative and clinical data for 2002-2005 for children in east London aged 5-14 years to contemporaneous education and social care datasets. We modelled children's performance in school examinations in relation to socio-demographic and clinical variables. The dataset captured examination performance for 12,136 children who sat at least one national examination at Key Stages 1-3. For illustration, estimates are presented as percentage changes in Key Stage 2 results. Having asthma was associated with a 1.1% increase in examination scores (95%CI 0.4 to 1.7)%,p = 0.02. Worse scores were associated with Bangladeshi ethnicity -1.3%(-2.5 to -0.1)%,p = 0.03; special educational need -14.6%(-15.7 to -13.5)%,p = 0.02; mental health problems -2.5%(-4.1 to -0.9)%,p = 0.003, and social adversity: living in a smoking household -1.2(-1.7 to -0.6)%,p<0.001; living in social housing -0.8%(-1.3 to -0.2)% p = 0.01, and entitlement to free school meals -0.8%(-1.5 to -0.1)%,p<0.001. CONCLUSIONS: Social adversity and ethnicity, but not asthma, are associated with poorer performance in national school examinations. Policies to improve educational attainment in socially deprived areas should focus on these factors

Adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is associated with asthma

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is increasingly recognized as a common disorder not only in children, but also in the adult population. Similarly, asthma also has a substantial prevalence among adults. Previous studies concerning a potential relationship between ADHD and asthma have not presented consistent results.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A cross-sectional study of 594 adult patients diagnosed with ADHD, compared with 719 persons from the general population. Information was collected between 1997 and 2005 using auto-questionnaires rating past and present symptoms of ADHD, co-morbid conditions, including asthma, and work status.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The prevalence of asthma was significantly higher in the ADHD patient group compared to the controls, 24.4% vs. 11.3% respectively (OR = 2.54, 95% CI 1.89-3.44), and controls with asthma scored higher on ratings of both past and present symptoms of ADHD. Female ADHD patients had a significantly higher prevalence of asthma compared to male ADHD patients (30.9% vs. 18.2%, OR = 2.01, CI 1.36-2.95), but in controls a slight female preponderance was not statistically significant. In both ADHD patients and controls, having asthma was associated with an increased prevalence of symptoms of mood- and anxiety disorders.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The present findings point to a co-morbidity of ADHD and asthma, and these patients may represent a clinical and biological subgroup of adult patients with ADHD.</p

Estimating global injuries morbidity and mortality: methods and data used in the Global Burden of Disease 2017 study

BACKGROUND: While there is a long history of measuring death and disability from injuries, modern research methods must account for the wide spectrum of disability that can occur in an injury, and must provide estimates with sufficient demographic, geographical and temporal detail to be useful for policy makers. The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2017 study used methods to provide highly detailed estimates of global injury burden that meet these criteria. METHODS: In this study, we report and discuss the methods used in GBD 2017 for injury morbidity and mortality burden estimation. In summary, these methods included estimating cause-specific mortality for every cause of injury, and then estimating incidence for every cause of injury. Non-fatal disability for each cause is then calculated based on the probabilities of suffering from different types of bodily injury experienced. RESULTS: GBD 2017 produced morbidity and mortality estimates for 38 causes of injury. Estimates were produced in terms of incidence, prevalence, years lived with disability, cause-specific mortality, years of life lost and disability-adjusted life-years for a 28-year period for 22 age groups, 195 countries and both sexes. CONCLUSIONS: GBD 2017 demonstrated a complex and sophisticated series of analytical steps using the largest known database of morbidity and mortality data on injuries. GBD 2017 results should be used to help inform injury prevention policy making and resource allocation. We also identify important avenues for improving injury burden estimation in the future

Evaluation of a Cray performance tool using a large hydrodynamics code

This paper will discuss one of these automatic tools that has been developed recently by Cray Research, Inc. for use on its parallel supercomputer. The tool is called ATEXPERT; when used in conjunction with the Cray Fortran compiling system, CF77, it produces a parallelized version of a code based on loop-level parallelism, plus information to enable the programmer to optimize the parallelized code and improve performance. The information obtained through the use of the tool is presented in an easy-to-read graphical format, making the digestion of such a large quantity of data relatively easy and thus, improving programmer productivity. In this paper we address the issues that we found when the took a large Los Alamos hydrodynamics code, PUEBLO, that was highly vectorizable, but not parallelized, and using ATEXPERT proceeded to parallelize it. We show that through the advice of ATEXPERT, bottlenecks in the code can be found, leading to improved performance. We also show the dependence of performance on problem size, and finally, we contrast the speedup predicted by ATEXPERT with that measured on a dedicated eight-processor Y-MP

Current Serum Lipoprotein Levels and fMRI Response to Working Memory in Midlife

Aims: Given that high cholesterol levels at midlife are a risk factor for future cognitive decline, the goal of the current study was to determine if cholesterol-related alterations in the cerebrovascular response to cognition could be detected at midlife. Methods: Forty adults, aged 40-60 years, performed a 2-Back working memory task during fMRI. The associations between serum total cholesterol, HDL-cholesterol, and total cholesterol/HDL-cholesterol concentrations to task-related activation intensity were modeled using multivariate multiple regression (two-tailed p \u3c 0.02). Results: Higher levels of total cholesterol/HDL-cholesterol related to reduced working memory-related activation intensity in the left inferior parietal lobe, right superior frontal gyrus, and right middle frontal gyrus. Conclusion: These data provide preliminary support for a deleterious effect of elevated total cholesterol/HDL-cholesterol ratio on cerebrovascular support for cognition in midlife. Copyright © 2011 S. Karger AG, Basel