Open Access

Objective We aimed to investigate the proportion of young patients not returning to work (NRTW) at 1 year after ischemic stroke (IS) and during follow-up, and clinical factors associated with NRTW. Methods Patients from the Helsinki Young Stroke Registry with an IS occurring in the years 1994–2007, who were at paid employment within 1 year before IS, and with NIH Stroke Scale score ≤15 points at hospital discharge, were included. Data on periods of payment came from the Finnish Centre for Pensions, and death data from Statistics Finland. Multivariate logistic regression analyses assessed factors associated with NRTW 1 year after IS, and lasagna plots visualized the proportion of patients returning to work over time. Results We included a total of 769 patients, of whom 289 (37.6%) were not working at 1 year, 323 (42.0%) at 2 years, and 361 (46.9%) at 5 years from IS. When adjusted for age, sex, socioeconomic status, and NIH Stroke Scale score at admission, factors associated with NRTW at 1 year after IS were large anterior strokes, strokes caused by large artery atherosclerosis, high-risk sources of cardioembolism, and rare causes other than dissection compared with undetermined cause, moderate to severe aphasia vs no aphasia, mild and moderate to severe limb paresis vs no paresis, and moderate to severe visual field deficit vs no deficit. Conclusions NRTW is a frequent adverse outcome after IS in young adults with mild to moderate IS. Clinical variables available during acute hospitalization may allow prediction of NRTW.

Nitric oxide adsorption on a Au(100) single crystal has been investigated to identify the type of adsorption, the adsorption site, and the orientation and alignment of the adsorbed NO relative to the surface. This was done using a combination of 3D-surface velocity map imaging, near-ambient pressure X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and density functional theory. NO was observed to be molecularly adsorbed on gold at ~200 K. Very narrow angular distributions and cold rotational distributions of photodesorbed NO indicate that NO adsorbs on high-symmetry sites on the Au crystal, with the N–O bond axis close to the surface normal. Our density functional theory calculations show that NO preferentially adsorbs on the symmetric bridge (2f) site, which ensures efficient overlap of the NO π* orbital with the orbitals on the two neighbouring Au atoms, and with the N–O bond axis aligned along the surface normal, in agreement with our conclusions from the rotational state distributions. The combination of XPS, which reveals the orientation of NO on gold, with 3D-surface velocity map imaging and density functional theory thus allowed us to determine the adsorption site, orientation and alignment of nitric oxide adsorbed on Au(100).

Agility is considered the silver bullet for survival in the VUCA world. However, many organisations are afraid of endangering their ISO 9001 certificate when introducing agile processes. A joint research project of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hannover and the DGQ has set itself the goal of providing more security in this area. The findings were based on interviews with managers and team members from various organisations of different sizes and industries working in an agile manner as well as on common audit practices and a literature analysis. The outcome presents a clear distinction of agility from flexibility as well as useful guidelines for the integration of agile processes in QM systems - for QM practitioners and auditors alike.

Background Uncomplicated urinary tract infections (UTI) are common in general practice and usually treated with antibiotics. This contributes to increasing resistance rates of uropathogenic bacteria. A previous trial showed a reduction of antibiotic use in women with UTI by initial symptomatic treatment with ibuprofen. However, this treatment strategy is not suitable for all women equally. Arctostaphylos uva-ursi (UU, bearberry extract arbutin) is a potential alternative treatment. This study aims at investigating whether an initial treatment with UU in women with UTI can reduce antibiotic use without significantly increasing the symptom burden or rate of complications. Methods This is a double-blind, randomized, and controlled comparative effectiveness trial. Women between 18 and 75 years with suspected UTI and at least two of the symptoms dysuria, urgency, frequency or lower abdominal pain will be assessed for eligibility in general practice and enrolled into the trial. Participants will receive either a defined daily dose of 3 × 2 arbutin 105 mg for 5 days (intervention) or fosfomycin 3 g once (control). Antibiotic therapy will be provided in the intervention group only if needed, i.e. for women with worsening or persistent symptoms. Two co-primary outcomes are the number of all antibiotic courses regardless of the medical indication from day 0–28, and the symptom burden, defined as a weighted sum of the daily total symptom scores from day 0–7. The trial result is considered positive if superiority of initial treatment with UU is demonstrated with reference to the co-primary outcome number of antibiotic courses and non-inferiority of initial treatment with UU with reference to the co-primary outcome symptom burden. Discussion The trial’s aim is to investigate whether initial treatment with UU is a safe and effective alternative treatment strategy in women with UTI. In that case, the results might change the existing treatment strategy in general practice by promoting delayed prescription of antibiotics and a reduction of antibiotic use in primary care.

The CogALex-V Shared Task provides two datasets that consists of pairs of words along with a classification of their semantic relation. The dataset for the first task distinguishes only between related and unrelated, while the second data set distinguishes several types of semantic relations. A number of recent papers propose to construct a feature vector that represents a pair of words by applying a pairwise simple operation to all elements of the feature vector. Subsequently, the pairs can be classified by training any classification algorithm on these vectors. In the present paper we apply this method to the provided datasets. We see that the results are not better than from the given simple baseline. We conclude that the results of the investigated method are strongly depended on the type of data to which it is applied.