Search results for " function"

666 Pulmonary Abnormalities in Children and Adolescents with Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus

2012

Background and Aims Few studies are available on pulmonary function abnormalities in children with diabetes with controversial results. Spirometric abnormalities and reduction of lung diffusing capacity for carbon monoxide (DLCO) have been reported. A cross sectional study was designed to assess whether children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes have pulmonary dysfunction. Methods Spirometry measurements were performed and DLCO was measured. The final data analysis was conducted on 57 diabetics (mean age 14.4 + 3.09 years, 31 males) and 40 healthy controls (mean age 13.6 + 2.2 years, 19 males). Results Although FVC, FEV1, FEV1/FVC of diabetics were lower than in control, significant stat…

Physiotherapy Intervention for Preventing the Respiratory Muscle Deterioration in Institutionalized Older Women With Functional Impairment

2013

Abstract Introduction In elderly seniors (>80 years), respiratory function may be compromised when, in addition to the presence of comorbidity and loss of mobility, there is also reduced respiratory muscle (RM) strength. The literature has shown that RM training could be an effective method to improve RM function and prevent clinical deterioration, particularly in population with RM weakness. The main purpose of this paper was to assess the effectiveness of RM training on the respiratory muscle strength and endurance of institutionalized elderly women with functional impairment. Method Fifty-four residents (mean=85 years, SD=6.7) were randomly assigned to either a control (n=27) or training…

Asthma control, severity and lung function impairment through network analysis in children

2015

Background: Achieving and maintaining asthma control in children is the primary goal recommended by current guidelines. Aim: To identify risk factors associated with Asthma control and severity, as well as their relative weight. Methods: Within a consecutive series of outpatients visited in a three years period at the IBIM pediatric clinic, we selected 128 persistent asthmatics. A standardized medical interview was carried out to collect information on environmental risk factors, symptoms and comorbidities. Spirometry was performed using Pony FX, Cosmed, Italy; spirometric values were expressed as %pred using GLI-2012equation. Statistical analyses were performed by using R. Results: The ide…

Measuring lung function in asthmatic children: A spirometry and forced oscillation technique (FOT) comparison

2016

Background: Spirometry is the most common pulmonary function test used in asthma diagnosing. However, it requires good patient co-operation. FOT has gained increasing attention for the measurement of pulmonary function in children because it is performed at steady state breathing. Aim: To compare spirometry and FOT in order to discriminate severity of asthma according to GINA. Methods: Spirometry and FOT were performed in 176 out-patient asthmatic children (5-16 year), 100 (57%) with naive Persistent Asthma (PA) and 76 (43%) with Intermittent Asthma (IA), consecutively enrolled at the IBIM pediatric clinic. Two principal component analyses (PCA) were performed, the first (PCA1) based on FEV…

Performance of Radiomics Features in the Quantification of Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis from HRCT.

2020

Background: Our study assesses the diagnostic value of different features extracted from high resolution computed tomography (HRCT) images of patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. These features are investigated over a range of HRCT lung volume measurements (in Hounsfield Units) for which no prior study has yet been published. In particular, we provide a comparison of their diagnostic value at different Hounsfield Unit (HU) thresholds, including corresponding pulmonary functional tests. Methods: We consider thirty-two patients retrospectively for whom both HRCT examinations and spirometry tests were available. First, we analyse the HRCT histogram to extract quantitative lung fibrosis…

Spline-Based Wavelet Transforms

2018

The Lifting Scheme introduced in (Sweldens, Appl. Comput. Harmon. Anal. 3(2), 186–200 (1996) and Sweldens, SIAM J. Math. Anal. 29(2), 511–546 (1997).) [3, 4] is a method that constructs bi-orthogonal wavelet transforms of signals and provides their efficient implementation. The main feature of the lifting scheme is that all the constructions are derived directly in the spatial domain and therefore can be custom designed to more general and irregular settings such as non-uniformly spaced data samples and bounded intervals. In this chapter, we outline the lifting scheme and describe how to use the local quasi-interpolating splines, introduced in Chap. 6, for the construction of wavelet transf…

Strengthened splitting methods for computing resolvents

2021

In this work, we develop a systematic framework for computing the resolvent of the sum of two or more monotone operators which only activates each operator in the sum individually. The key tool in the development of this framework is the notion of the “strengthening” of a set-valued operator, which can be viewed as a type of regularisation that preserves computational tractability. After deriving a number of iterative schemes through this framework, we demonstrate their application to best approximation problems, image denoising and elliptic PDEs. FJAA and RC were partially supported by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities of Spain and the European Regional Development Fund …

2021

Abstract Developmental dyslexia is a specific learning disorder with impairments in reading and spelling acquisition. Apart from literacy problems, dyslexics show inefficient speech encoding and deficient novel word learning, with underlying problems in phonological processing and learning. These problems have been suggested to be related to deficient specialization of the left hemisphere for language processing. To examine this possibility, we tracked with magnetoencephalography (MEG) the activation of the bilateral temporal cortices during formation of neural memory traces for new spoken word forms in 7–8-year-old children with high familial dyslexia risk and in controls. The at-risk chil…

Stackelberg equilibrium with many leaders and followers. The case of zero fixed costs

2017

Abstract I study a version of the Stackelberg game with many identical firms in which leaders and followers use a continuous cost function with no fixed cost. Using lattice theoretical methods I provide a set of conditions that guarantee that the game has an equilibrium in pure strategies. With convex costs the model shows the same properties as a quasi-competitive Cournot model. The same happens with concave costs, but only when the number of followers is small. When this number is large the leaders preempt entry. I study the comparative statics and the limit behavior of the equilibrium and I show how the main determinants of market structure interact. More competition between the leaders …

Dependence of single-particle energies on coupling constants of the nuclear energy density functional

2008

We show that single-particle energies in doubly magic nuclei depend almost linearly on the coupling constants of the nuclear energy density functional. Therefore, they can be very well characterized by the linear regression coefficients, which we calculate for the coupling constants of the standard Skyrme functional. We then use these regression coefficients to refit the coupling constants to experimental values of single-particle energies. We show that the obtained rms deviations from experimental data are still quite large, of the order of 1.1 MeV. This suggests that the current standard form of the Skyrme functional cannot ensure spectroscopic-quality description of single-particle energ…