Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Improving Public Health Readiness For Sea Level Rise: A New Initiative In Coastal Virginia, Steven M. Becker

Community & Environmental Health Faculty Publications

Sea level has been rising around the world, and in recent decades, the rate has been accelerating. Because rising seas have the potential to directly or indirectly affect the health of vast numbers of coastal communities and inhabitants, public health agencies and professionals—in conjunction with other fields—have a pivotal role to play in helping to protect populations, reduce and prevent health impacts, and foster resilience. This article discusses a novel effort that has been undertaken in Coastal Virginia to help prepare the next generation of public health professionals to grapple with sea level rise issues. The effort grew out of …

Range Expansion Of Tick Disease Vectors In North America: Implications For Spread Of Tick-Borne Disease, Daniel E. Sonenshine

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

Ticks are the major vectors of most disease-causing agents to humans, companion animals and wildlife. Moreover, ticks transmit a greater variety of pathogenic agents than any other blood-feeding arthropod. Ticks have been expanding their geographic ranges in recent decades largely due to climate change. Furthermore, tick populations in many areas of their past and even newly established localities have increased in abundance. These dynamic changes present new and increasing severe public health threats to humans, livestock and companion animals in areas where they were previously unknown or were considered to be of minor importance. Here in this review, the geographic …

Building Connected Communities: Halton, Milton – 2016 Census Older Immigrants, Sheridan Centre For Elder Research

Data Sheets

This data sheet provides a picture of the available relevant characteristics of the community at the time of the census (2016). We have included data both from those individuals over the age of 65 at the time of the census, as well as those who are in the age cohort just below (50 – 64), so those engaged in planning for future community needs can anticipate where growth or reduction in needs may be.

These numbers may be used to provide an overall picture of the municipality or region as a whole, and may be used to help guide municipality/region-wide …

Building Connected Communities: Halton, Oakville – 2016 Census Older Immigrants, Sheridan Centre For Elder Research

Data Sheets

This data sheet provides a picture of the available relevant characteristics of the community at the time of the census (2016). We have included data both from those individuals over the age of 65 at the time of the census, as well as those who are in the age cohort just below (50 – 64), so those engaged in planning for future community needs can anticipate where growth or reduction in needs may be.

These numbers may be used to provide an overall picture of the municipality or region as a whole, and may be used to help guide municipality/region-wide …

Building Connected Communities: Peel, Brampton – 2016 Census Older Immigrants, Sheridan Centre For Elder Research

Data Sheets

This data sheet provides a picture of the available relevant characteristics of the community at the time of the census (2016). We have included data both from those individuals over the age of 65 at the time of the census, as well as those who are in the age cohort just below (50 – 64), so those engaged in planning for future community needs can anticipate where growth or reduction in needs may be.

These numbers may be used to provide an overall picture of the municipality or region as a whole, and may be used to help guide municipality/region-wide …

Minimally Actuated Walking: Identifying Core Challenges To Economical Legged Locomotion Reveals Novel Solutions, Ryan T. Schroeder, John Ea Bertram

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Terrestrial organisms adept at locomotion employ strut-like legs for economical and robust movement across the substrate. Although it is relatively easy to observe and analyze details of the solutions these organic systems have arrived at, it is not as easy to identify the problems these movement strategies have solved. As such, it is useful to investigate fundamental challenges that effective legged locomotion overcomes in order to understand why the mechanisms employed by biological systems provide viable solutions to these challenges. Such insight can inform the design and development of legged robots that may eventually match or exceed animal performance. In …

A Framework For Development Of Android Mobile Electronic Prescription Transfer Applications In Compliance With Security Requirements Mandated By The Australian Healthcare Industry, Kyaw Kyaw Htat

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis investigates mobile electronic transfer of prescription (ETP) in compliance with the security requirements mandated by the Australian healthcare industry and proposes a framework for the development of an Android mobile electronic prescription transfer application. Furthermore, and based upon the findings and knowledge from constructing this framework, another framework is also derived for assessing Android mobile ETP applications for their security compliance.

The centralised exchange model-based ETP solution currently used in the Australian healthcare industry is an expensive solution for on-going use. With challenges such as an aging population and the rising burden of chronic disease, the cost of …

Well-Being And Mental Health Impact Of Household Flooding In Guyana, The Caribbean, Muge Akpinar-Elci, Shanomae Rose, Michele Kekeh

Center for Global Health Publications

Guyana has annually experienced excessive rainfall and flooding since 2005. This study investigated the general well-being and mental health problems among occupants of households affected by the December 2008 flooding in Guyana. A cross-sectional study design was used to administer validated questionnaires, which included sections on demographics, environmental exposure, general health, and personal behavior. The response rate to the survey was 70% (130/185). The findings indicate an increased self-reported poor health for study participants who smelled moldy odors inside of their home (OR: 4.1, 95% CI: 2.0‐12.0) and for individuals who had mold or mildew inside of their homes (OR: …

Penalized Mixed-Effects Ordinal Response Models For High-Dimensional Genomic Data In Twins And Families, Amanda E. Gentry

Theses and Dissertations

The Brisbane Longitudinal Twin Study (BLTS) was being conducted in Australia and was funded by the US National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Adolescent twins were sampled as a part of this study and surveyed about their substance use as part of the Pathways to Cannabis Use, Abuse and Dependence project. The methods developed in this dissertation were designed for the purpose of analyzing a subset of the Pathways data that includes demographics, cannabis use metrics, personality measures, and imputed genotypes (SNPs) for 493 complete twin pairs (986 subjects.) The primary goal was to determine what combination of SNPs and …

Development Of A Hierarchical Model For Predicting Microbiological Contamination Of Private Groundwater Supplies In A Geologically Heterogeneous Region, Jean O'Dwyer, Paul Hynds, Kenneth Byrne, Michael Ryan, Catherine Adley

Articles

Private groundwater sources in the Republic of Ireland provide drinking water to an estimated 750,000 people or 16% of the national population. Consumers of untreated groundwater are at increased risk of infection from pathogenic microorganisms. However, given the volume of private wells in operation, remediation or even quantification of public risk is both costly and time consuming. In this study, a hierarchical logistic regression model was developed to ‘predict’ contamination with E. coli based on the results of groundwater quality analyses of private wells (n = 132) during the period of September 2011 to November 2012. Assessment of potential microbial …

A Lightweight Policy Preserving Ehr Sharing Scheme In The Cloud, Zuobin Ying, Lu Wei, Qi Li, Ximeng Liu, Jie Cui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Electronic Health Record (EHR) is a digital health documentary. It contains not only the health-related records but also the personal sensitive information. Therefore, how to reliably share EHR through the cloud is a challenging issue. Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is a promising cryptography prototype, which can achieve fine-grained access control as well as one-to-many encryption. In CP-ABE, access policy is attached to the ciphertext, and however, the access policy is not protected, which will also cause some privacy leakage. In this paper, we propose a policy preserving EHR system on the basis of CP-ABE. Specifically, we designed an algorithm, which …

Plasma Medicine: A Brief Introduction, Mounir Laroussi

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

This mini review is to introduce the readers of Plasma to the field of plasma medicine. This is a multidisciplinary field of research at the intersection of physics, engineering, biology and medicine. Plasma medicine is only about two decades old, but the research community active in this emerging field has grown tremendously in the last few years. Today, research is being conducted on a number of applications including wound healing and cancer treatment. Although a lot of knowledge has been created and our understanding of the fundamental mechanisms that play important roles in the interaction between low temperature plasma and …

The Efficacy Of An Emr-Enabled Text Messaging System To The Expanded Health Beliefs, Diabetes Care Profile And Hba1c Of Diabetes Mellitus Patients, Ma. Regina Justina E. Estuar, John Noel Victorino, Razel Custodio

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

As diabetes mellitus (DM) becomes a global emergency, there is a need to explore novel interventions to address problems in self – management. Literature agree in the potential of mobile phones to carry-out self-care for a wide-array of disease conditions. Diabetes Self – Management Support and Education Through Text – Messaging (DSMSET) is a low-cost, two-way text messaging system designed to deliver self - help, educational messages based on the nine (9) dimensions of health management. DSMSET serves as a plugin to SHINE OS+, an open – source electronic medical record (EMR) system. The research is also based on the …

Cognitive Load Reduces The Effects Of Optic Flow On Gait And 2 Electrocortical Dynamics During Treadmill Walking 3, Brenda Malcolm, John J. Foxe, John Butler, Sophie Molholm, Pierfilippo De Sanctis

Articles

While navigating complex environments the brain must continuously adapt to both external demands such as fluctuating sensory inputs, as well as internal demands, such as engagement in a cognitively demanding task. Previous studies have demonstrated changes in behavior and gait with increased sensory and cognitive load, but the underlying cortical mechanisms remain largely unknown. Here, in a Mobile Brain/Body Imaging (MoBI) approach sixteen young adults walked on a treadmill with high-density EEG while 3D motion capture tracked kinematics of the head and feet. Visual load was manipulated with the presentation of optic flow with and without continuous mediolateral perturbations. The …

Estimating The Respiratory Lung Motion Model Using Tensor Decomposition On Displacement Vector Field, Kingston Kang

Theses and Dissertations

Modern big data often emerge as tensors. Standard statistical methods are inadequate to deal with datasets of large volume, high dimensionality, and complex structure. Therefore, it is important to develop algorithms such as low-rank tensor decomposition for data compression, dimensionality reduction, and approximation.

With the advancement in technology, high-dimensional images are becoming ubiquitous in the medical field. In lung radiation therapy, the respiratory motion of the lung introduces variabilities during treatment as the tumor inside the lung is moving, which brings challenges to the precise delivery of radiation to the tumor. Several approaches to quantifying this uncertainty propose using a …

Resilience Concepts In Psychiatry Demonstrated With Bipolar Disorder, David G. Angeler, Craig R. Allen, Maj-Liz Persson

Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit: Staff Publications

Background: The term resilience describes stress–response patterns of subjects across scientific disciplines. In ecology, advances have been made to clearly distinguish resilience definitions based on underlying mechanistic assumptions. Engineering resilience (rebound) is used for describing the ability of subjects to recover from adverse conditions (disturbances), and is the rate of recovery. In contrast, the ecological resilience definition considers a systemic change: when complex systems (including humans) respond to disturbances by reorganizing into a new regime (stable state) where structural and functional aspects have fundamentally changed relative to the prior regime. In this context, resilience is an emergent property of complex …

Systematic Review And Meta-Analysis: Tuberculosis, Tnfα Inhibitors, And Crohn's Disease, Brent L. Cao

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Inflammation is often a protective reaction against harmful foreign agents. However, in many disease conditions, the mechanisms behind the inflammatory response are poorly understood. Often times, the inflammation causes adverse effects, such as joint pain, abdominal pain, fever, fatigue, and loss of appetite. Thus, many treatments aim to inhibit the inflammatory response in order to control adverse symptoms. Such treatments include TNFα inhibitors. However, a major risk associated with drugs inhibiting tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNFα) is serious infection, including tuberculosis (TB).

Anti-TNFα therapy is used to treat patients with Crohn’s disease, for which the risk of tuberculosis may be …

Synthesis Of 1,4-Triazolyl Combretacoumarins As Potential Anticancer Agents, Tashrique A. Khandaker

Dissertations and Theses

Coumarins are natural compounds that have various physiological and therapeutic properties, making them pharmacologically important. Combretastatin A-4 (CA-4) is a microtubule-binding agent that has potent cytotoxic effects against human cell lines. In CA-4 the trimethoxyarene moiety plays a crucial role in its carcinopreventive effect. Thus, we decided to synthesize novel, potential anti-cancer agents called 1,4-triazolyl combretacoumarins, by coupling different coumarins and the functionally relevant group of CA-4 i.e, the trimethoxyarene moiety, via a 1,2,3-triazolyl ring using a copper-catalyzed [3 + 2] azide-alkyne cycloaddition (CuAAC) reaction, which is a very atom-economical reaction. The coupling partners, 4-azidocoumarins, required for making these …

Bimetallic Complexes: The Fundamental Aspects Of Metal-Metal Interactions, Ligand Sterics And Application, Michael Bernard Pastor

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

Metal containing complexes have been used to catalyze various organic transformations for the past few decades. The success of several mononuclear catalysts led to transition metal catalysts used in pharmaceuticals, environmental, and industrial processes. While mononuclear complexes have been used extensively, bimetallic systems have received far less attention. Bimetallic or polynuclear sites are commonly found in metalloenzymes that perform elegant transformation in biological systems, underlying their significance. Inorganic chemists take inspiration from nature and design model bimetallic complexes to further study this cooperativity effect. A bimetallic platform offers many structural and functional differences such as the identity of the metal …

Ms Environmental Biology Capstone Project, Annamaria Marcel

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Due to the worldwide decline of biodiversity, protected nature reserves are necessary for species facing extinction. Many frog species have been experiencing rapid population decline and extinction due to the threat of the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), which inflicts the highly transmittable and deadly disease chytridiomycosis. Chytridiomycosis causes increased skin tissue growth which disrupts respiration and the maintenance of water balance, which can ultimately lead to death. Certain ecological and geographical characteristics have been studied in order to assess their influence on Bd’s prevalence. Specifically, it is hypothesized that high elevations, lotic habitats, and low species richness have a positive …

Investigating The Role Of Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs In Reducing Rates Of Opioid-Related Poisonings, Nathan James Pauly

Theses and Dissertations--Pharmacy

The United States is in the midst of an opioid epidemic. In addition to other system level interventions, almost all states have responded to the crisis by implementing prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs). PDMPs are state-level interventions that track the dispensing of Controlled Substances. Data generated at the time of medication dispensing is uploaded to a central data server that may be used to assist in identifying drug diversion, medication misuse, or potentially aberrant prescribing practices.

Prior studies assessing the impact of PDMPs on trends in opioid-related morbidity have often failed to take into account the wide heterogeneity of program …

Using The Qbest Equation To Evaluate Ellagic Acid Safety Data: Generating A Qnoael With Confidence Levels From Disparate Literature, Cynthia Rose Dickerson

Theses and Dissertations--Pharmacy

QBEST, a novel statistical method, can be applied to the problem of estimating the No Observed Adverse Effect Level (NOAEL or QNOAEL) of a New Molecular Entity (NME) in order to anticipate a safe starting dose for beginning clinical trials. The NOAEL from QBEST (called the QNOAEL) can be calculated using multiple disparate studies in the literature and/or from the lab. The QNOAEL is similar in some ways to the Benchmark Dose Method (BMD) used widely in toxicological research, but is superior to the BMD in some ways. The QNOAEL simulation generates an intuitive curve that is comparable to the …

Hyperthermia As A Cancer Treatment- From Theory To Practice, Graham Fullerton

CMC Senior Theses

Using iron super-paramagnetic and ferromagnetic nanoparticles composed of Fe₃O₄ molecules, scientists analyze the effectiveness and practicality of this new treatment theory, hyperthermia. The problems of magnetic particle density, isothermal barriers/cellular cooling thresholds, and nanoparticle specific targeting are addressed in this review.

Iron magnetic nanoparticles were chosen due to their relatively low biological reactivates and lack of subsequent cellular toxicity. However, there are significant heating problems associated with these magnetic nanoparticles due to their relative size and short thermal time constants or thermal half-lives. Effectively, these aforementioned issues create a phenomenon where cancerous cells, surrounded by unheated healthy …

Metabolic And Transcriptional Modules Independently Diversify Plasma Cell Lifespan And Function, Wing Y. Lam, Arijita Jash, Cong-Hui Yao, Lucas D'Souza, Rachel Wong, Ryan M. Nunley, Gordon P. Meares, Gary J. Patti, Deepta Bhattacharya

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Plasma cell survival and the consequent duration of immunity vary widely with infection or vaccination. Using fluorescent glucose analog uptake, we defined multiple developmentally independent mouse plasma cell populations with varying life- spans. Long-lived plasma cells imported more fluo- rescent glucose analog, expressed higher surface levels of the amino acid transporter CD98, and had more autophagosome mass than did short-lived cells. Low amino acid concentrations triggered re- ductions in both antibody secretion and mitochon- drial respiration, especially by short-lived plasma cells. To explain these observations, we found that glutamine was used for both mitochondrial respira- tion and anaplerotic reactions, yielding …

Characterization Of Tetraethyl Orthosilicate-Based Dynamic Hydrogels For Use As Reversible 3-D Cell Culture Matrices, Krisitan Stipe

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

On The Efficacy Of High-Dose Ascorbic Acid As Anticancer Treatment: A Literature Survey, Florentin Smarandache, Victor Christianto

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

Vitamin C (ascorbic acid, ascorbate) has a controversial history in cancer treatment. Emerging evidence indicates that ascorbate in cancer treatment deserves re-examination. As research results concerning ascorbate pharmacokinetics and its mechanisms of action against tumor cells have been published, and as evidence from case studies has continued to mount that ascorbate therapy could be effective if the right protocols were used, interest among physicians and scientists has increased.

Targeting The Folate Receptor: Improving Efficacy In Inorganic Medicinal Chemistry, Pauraic Mccarron, Aisling Crowley, Denis O'Shea, Malachy Mccann, Orla L. Howe, Mary Hunt, Michael Devereux

Articles

The discovery of the high-affinity, high-specificity folate receptor in mamalian kidney cells, coupled with the ability of folate to enter cells by folate receptor-mediated endocytosis and the subsequent elucidation of the folate receptor’s overexpression in specific cancer cell types; heralded the arrival of the area of chemotherapeutic folate targeting. The application of purely organic folate-based small-molecule drug conjugates that selectively target the folate receptor, which is over expressed in several diseases such as cancer, is well established. The application of inorganic folate-targeted drugs offers significant potential to expand and enhance this therapeutic approach. From the data made available to date, …

Scalable Feature Selection And Extraction With Applications In Kinase Polypharmacology, Derek Jones

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

In order to reduce the time associated with and the costs of drug discovery, machine learning is being used to automate much of the work in this process. However the size and complex nature of molecular data makes the application of machine learning especially challenging. Much work must go into the process of engineering features that are then used to train machine learning models, costing considerable amounts of time and requiring the knowledge of domain experts to be most effective. The purpose of this work is to demonstrate data driven approaches to perform the feature selection and extraction steps in …

Sphingomyelin And Gm1 Influence Huntingtin Binding To, Disruption Of, And Aggregation On Lipid Membranes, Maxmore Chaibva, Xiang Gao, Pranav Jain, Warren A. Campbell, Shelli L. Frey, Justin Legleiter

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Huntington disease (HD) is an inherited neurodegenerative disease caused by the expansion beyond a critical threshold of a polyglutamine (polyQ) tract near the N- terminus of the huntingtin (htt) protein. Expanded polyQ promotes the formation of a variety of oligomeric and fibrillar aggregates of htt that accumulate into the hallmark proteina- ceous inclusion bodies associated with HD. htt is also highly associated with numerous cellular and subcellular membranes that contain a variety of lipids. As lipid homeostasis and metabolism abnormalities are observed in HD patients, we investigated how varying both the sphingomyelin (SM) and ganglioside (GM1) contents modifies the interactions …

Building Connected Communities: Halton, Burlington – 2016 Census Older Immigrants, Sheridan Centre For Elder Research

Data Sheets

This data sheet provides a picture of the available relevant characteristics of the community at the time of the census (2016). We have included data both from those individuals over the age of 65 at the time of the census, as well as those who are in the age cohort just below (50 – 64), so those engaged in planning for future community needs can anticipate where growth or reduction in needs may be.

These numbers may be used to provide an overall picture of the municipality or region as a whole, and may be used to help guide municipality/region-wide …