Carriage of apoE epsilon 4 lowers the age of onset of Alzheimer's Disease in Northern Ireland

Alzheimer's disease is the most common neurodegenerative disorder affecting those in mid to late adult life. Carriage of an apolipoprotein E (apoE) epsilon 4 allele has been shown to be associated with an increased risk of developing AD in numerous studies involving populations of various races and ethnic backgrounds. It has also been suggested that carriage of this allele reduces the age of onset of AD. To investigate this, we carried out a genetic association study utilising 108 sporadic late-onset AD patients and age, sex and ethnically-matched controls from Northern Ireland. Findings of this study verified the risk of AD associated with carriage of the apoE epsilon 4 allele in a dose-dependent manner (p

Inference and Declaration of Independence in Task-Parallel Programs

The inherent difficulty of thread-based shared-memory programming has recently motivated research in high-level, task-parallel programming models. Recent advances of Task-Parallel models add implicit synchronization, where the system automatically detects and satisfies data dependencies among spawned tasks. However, dynamic dependence analysis incurs significant runtime overheads, because the runtime must track task resources and use this information to schedule tasks while avoiding conflicts and races.
We present SCOOP, a compiler that effectively integrates static and dynamic analysis in code generation. SCOOP combines context-sensitive points-to, control-flow, escape, and effect analyses to remove redundant dependence checks at runtime. Our static analysis can work in combination with existing dynamic analyses and task-parallel runtimes that use annotations to specify tasks and their memory footprints. We use our static dependence analysis to detect non-conflicting tasks and an existing dynamic analysis to handle the remaining dependencies. We evaluate the resulting hybrid dependence analysis on a set of task-parallel programs.

Slavery, Education, and Inequality

We investigate the effect of slavery on the current level of income inequality across US counties. We find that a larger proportion of slaves over population in 1860 persistently increases inequality, and in particular inequality across races. We also show that a crucial
channel of transmission from slavery to racial inequality is human capital accumulation, i.e., current inequality is primarily influenced by slavery through the unequal educational attainment of blacks and whites. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that the underlying links run through the political exclusion of former slaves and the resulting negative influence on the local provision of education.

An anatomical and analytical study of the Modiolus: Enlightening its relevance to plastic surgery

Background: This study was designed to evaluate the structures, muscles, and fasciae of which the modiolus is composed. It can aid in the understanding and, therefore, the utilization of plastic surgery for the aesthetic or reconstructive treatment of that region, especially the angle of the mouth. Methods: Dissections of the midface were done on five different cadavers. They were of different races (3 males, 2 females). The anatomy of the modiolus was studied in detail. New anatomical observations were classified as type I through type VI. Results: The perifacial artery fascia contributed to the modiolus in four (80%) specimens and was not part of it in 1 (20%) specimen. The facial artery was anterior to it in one (20%) specimen, lateral in four (80%) specimens, and never medial to it. No significant relationship was observed between the perifacial artery fascia contribution to the modiolus and gender or race. Also, the location of the facial artery lateral or anterior to the modiolus was not significantly related to gender or race. In addition, the deep and superficial fasciae of the face converged not anterior to the masseter muscle but actually at the modiolus, which was different from observations made by others. Conclusion: The modiolus is of critical importance in aesthetic and reconstructive plastic surgery of the face. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC and International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery.

Biometric gonioscopy and the effects of age, race, and sex on the anterior chamber angle.

AIM:

To utilise a novel method for making measurements in the anterior chamber in order to compare the anterior chamber angles of people of European, African, and east Asian descent aged 40 years and over.

METHODS:

A cross sectional study on 15 people of each sex from each decade from the 40s to the 70s, from each of three racial groups-black, white, and Chinese Singaporeans. Biometric gonioscopy (BG) utilises a slit lamp mounted reticule to make measurements from the apparent iris insertion to Schwalbe's line through a Goldmann one mirror goniolens. The main outcome measures were BG measurements of the anterior chamber angle as detailed above.

RESULTS:

There was no significant difference in angle measurement between black, white, and Chinese races in this study. However, at younger ages people of Chinese race appeared to have deeper angles than white or black people, whereas the angles of older Chinese were significantly narrower (p = 0.004 for the difference in slope of BG by age between Chinese and both black and white people).

CONCLUSION:

The failure to detect a difference in angle measurements between these groups was surprising, given the much higher prevalence of angle closure among Chinese. It appears that the overall apparent similarity of BG means between Chinese and Western populations may mask very different trends with age. The apparently more rapid decline in angle width measurements with age among Chinese may be due to the higher prevalence of cataract or "creeping angle closure." However, longitudinal inferences from cross sectional data are problematic, and this may represent a cohort phenomenon caused by the increasing prevalence of myopia in the younger Singaporean population.