Cannabis use and involuntary admission may mediate long-term adherence in first-episode psychosis patients: a prospective longitudinal study

Background: This study aimed to examine factors associated with treatment adherence in first-episode psychosis (FEP) patients followed up over 8 years, especially involuntary first admission and stopping cannabis use. Methods: This prospective, longitudinal study of FEP patients collected data on symptoms, adherence, functioning,and substance use. Adherence to treatment was the main outcome variable and was categorized as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Cannabis use during follow-up was stratified as continued use, stopped use, and never used. Bivariate and logistic regression models identified factors significantly associated with adherence and changes in adherence over the 8-year follow-up period. Results: Of the 98 FEP patients analyzed at baseline, 57.1% had involuntary first admission, 74.4% bad adherence,and 52% cannabis use. Good adherence at baseline was associated with Global Assessment of Functioning score (p = 0.019), Hamilton Depression Rating Scale score (p = 0.017) and voluntary admission (p < 0.001). Adherence patterns over 8 years included: 43.4% patients always bad, 26.1% always good, 25% improved from bad to good. Among the improved adherence group, 95.7% had involuntary first admission and 38.9% stopped cannabis use. In the subgroup of patients with bad adherence at baseline, involuntary first admission and quitting cannabis use during follow up were associated with improved adherence. Conclusions: The long-term association between treatment adherence and type of first admission and cannabis use in FEP patients suggest targets for intervention to improve clinical outcomes.

Query-by-Example Spoken Term Detection ALBAYZIN 2012 evaluation: overview, systems, results, and discussion

Query-by-Example Spoken Term Detection (QbE STD) aims at retrieving data from a speech data repository given an acoustic query containing the term of interest as input. Nowadays, it has been receiving much interest due to the high volume of information stored in audio or audiovisual format. QbE STD differs from automatic speech recognition (ASR) and keyword spotting (KWS)/spoken term detection (STD) since ASR is interested in all the terms/words that appear in the speech signal and KWS/STD relies on a textual transcription of the search term to retrieve the speech data. This paper presents the systems submitted to the ALBAYZIN 2012 QbE STD evaluation held as a part of ALBAYZIN 2012 evaluation campaign within the context of the IberSPEECH 2012 Conference(a). The evaluation consists of retrieving the speech files that contain the input queries, indicating their start and end timestamps within the appropriate speech file. Evaluation is conducted on a Spanish spontaneous speech database containing a set of talks from MAVIR workshops(b), which amount at about 7 h of speech in total. We present the database metric systems submitted along with all results and some discussion. Four different research groups took part in the evaluation. Evaluation results show the difficulty of this task and the limited performance indicates there is still a lot of room for improvement. The best result is achieved by a dynamic time warping-based search over Gaussian posteriorgrams/posterior phoneme probabilities. This paper also compares the systems aiming at establishing the best technique dealing with that difficult task and looking for defining promising directions for this relatively novel task.

Advances in Nonlinear Complexity Analysis for Partial Differential Equations

1 p. -- [Editorial Material]

Subdiffusion of nonlinear waves in quasiperiodic potentials

19 p.

An observer-based vaccination control law for an SEIR epidemic model based on feedback linearization techniques for nonlinear systems

This paper presents a vaccination strategy for fighting against the propagation of epidemic diseases. The disease propagation is described by an SEIR (susceptible plus infected plus infectious plus removed populations) epidemic model. The model takes into account the total population amounts as a refrain for the illness transmission since its increase makes the contacts among susceptible and infected more difficult. The vaccination strategy is based on a continuous-time nonlinear control law synthesised via an exact feedback input-output linearization approach. An observer is incorporated into the control scheme to provide online estimates for the susceptible and infected populations in the case when their values are not available from online measurement but they are necessary to implement the control law. The vaccination control is generated based on the information provided by the observer. The control objective is to asymptotically eradicate the infection from the population so that the removed-by-immunity population asymptotically tracks the whole one without precise knowledge of the partial populations. The model positivity, the eradication of the infection under feedback vaccination laws and the stability properties as well as the asymptotic convergence of the estimation errors to zero as time tends to infinity are investigated.

Nonlinear Fluid Damping In Structure-Wake Oscillators In Modeling Vortex-Induced Vibrations

A Nonlinear Fluid Damping (NFD) in the form of the square-velocity is applied in the response analysis of Vortex-induced Vibrations (VIV). Its nonlinear hydrodynamic effects oil the coupled wake and structure oscillators are investigated. A comparison between the coupled systems with the linear and nonlinear fluid dampings and experiments shows that the NFD model can well describe response characteristics, such as the amplification of body displacement at lock-in and frequency lock-ill, both at high and low mass ratios. Particularly, the predicted peak amplitude of the body in the Griffin plot is ill good agreement with experimental data and empirical equation, indicating the significant effect of the NFD on the structure motion.

Long-Term Evolution Of Delayed Ettringite And Gypsum In Portland Cement Mortars Under Sulfate Erosion

The magnitude evolution of ettringite and gypsum in hydrated Portland cement mortars due to sulfate attack was detected by X-ray powder diffraction. The influences of sulfate concentration and water-to-cement ratio on the evolution of ettringite and gypsum were investigated. Experimental results show that the magnitude of ettringite formation in sodium sulfate solution follows a three-stage process, namely, the 'penetration period', 'enhance period of strength', and 'macro-crack period'. The cracking of concrete materials is mainly attributed to the effect of ettringite. The gypsum formations occurred in two stages, the 'latent period' and the 'accelerated period'. The gypsum formation including ettringite formation was relative to the linear expansion of mortars to some extend. Both water-to-cement ratio and sulfate concentration play important roles in the evolution of ettringite and gypsum. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.