In addition to older age and severe acute pain, this study suggests that impaired physical and social functioning from acute zoster pain may play a role in the development of PHN in this prospective cohort study of HZ patients from North and Latin America and Asia.

Background: Although smoking has been recognized as a risk factor for many respiratory diseases, its effects of influenza-associated morbidity and mortality remain controversial. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to assess the impact of smoking on influenza-associated hospital admissions, intensive care unit (ICU) admissions, and deaths. Methods: We searched the databases of PubMed, CINAHL, EMBASE, and the China National Knowledge Infrastructure for all observational studies published between 1 January 2000 and 30 November 2017 on ever-active/secondhand smoking and influenza-associated hospital admissions, ICU admissions, and deaths. We pooled data using random effect models. Results: The initial search retrieved 7495 articles, of which 20 studies were included for systematic review, and 12 studies (eight case–control studies, two cohort studies, and two cross-sectional studies) with 18612 subjects were included in meta-analysis. The overall quality of selected studies was moderate. Ever-active smokers had higher odds of hospital admissions (odds ratio [OR] = 1.5; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.3, 1.7) and ICU admissions (OR 2.2; 95% CI = 1.4, 3.4) after influenza infections, as compared with never smokers. No association was observed between ever-active smoking and influenza-associated deaths. We found a positive association between secondhand smoking and influenza-associated hospital admissions, but only in children below 15 years of age. Conclusions: The literature evidence showed that smoking was consistently associated with higher risk of hospital admissions after influenza infection, but the results for ICU admissions and deaths were less conclusive because of the limited number of studies.

Telocytes (TCs) are a novel type of interstitial cell of whom presence has been recently documented in many tissues and organs. However, whether TCs exists in bone marrow is still not reported. This study aims to find out TCs in mice bone marrow by using scanning electron microscope (SEM) and transmission electron microscope (TEM). SEM images showed that in mice bone marrow most of TCs have small spherical cell body (usually 4–6 μm diameter) with thin long telopodes (Tps; usually one to three). The longest Tp observed was about 70 μm, with an uneven calibre. Direct intercellular contacts exist between TCs. TEM shows mitochondria within dilations of Tps. Also, by TEM, we show the close spatial relations of Tps with blood vessels. In conclusion, this study provides ultrastructural evidence regarding the existence of TCs in mice bone marrow, in situ.

A large number of single-channel noise-reduction algorithms have been proposed based largely on mathematical principles. Most of these algorithms, however, have been evaluated with English speech. Given the different perceptual cues used by native listeners of different languages including tonal languages, it is of interest to examine whether there are any language effects when the same noise-reduction algorithm is used to process noisy speech in different languages. A comparative evaluation and investigation is taken in this study of various single-channel noise-reduction algorithms applied to noisy speech taken from three languages: Chinese, Japanese, and English. Clean speech signals (Chinese words and Japanese words) were first corrupted by three types of noise at two signal-to-noise ratios and then processed by five single-channel noise-reduction algorithms. The processed signals were finally presented to normal-hearing listeners for recognition. Intelligibility evaluation showed that the majority of noise-reduction algorithms did not improve speech intelligibility. Consistent with a previous study with the English language, the Wiener filtering algorithm produced small, but statistically significant, improvements in intelligibility for car and white noise conditions. Significant differences between the performances of noise-reduction algorithms across the three languages were observed.

A couple of studies have been conducted with able-bodied subjects and/or arm amputees to investigate the impact of arm position changes in the practical use of a multifunctional myoelectric prosthesis. The classification accuracy calculated offline from electromyography (EMG) recordings was used as a performance metric in these studies, which is not a true measure of real-time control performance. In this study, the influence of arm position changes on the real-time performance of EMG pattern recognition (EMG-PR) control was quantitatively evaluated with four real-time metrics including motion response time, motion completion time, motion completion rate, and dynamic efficiency. Ten able-bodied subjects participated in the study and a cascade classifier built with both EMG and mechanomyogram (MMG) recordings was proposed to reduce the impact of arm position variation. The pilot results showed that arm position changes would substantially affect the real-time performance of EMG pattern-recognition based prosthesis control. Using a cascade classifier could significantly increase the average real-time completion rate (p-value<0.01). This suggests that the proposed cascade classifier may have potential to reduce the influence of arm position variation on the real-time control performance of a prosthesis.