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Although there is a large gap between Black and White American life expectancies, the gap fell 48.9% between 1990 and 2018, mainly due to mortality declines among Black Americans. We examine age-specific mortality trends and racial gaps in life expectancy in high- and low-income US areas and with reference to six European countries. Inequalities in life expectancy are starker in the United States than in Europe. In 1990, White Americans and Europeans in high-income areas had similar overall life expectancy, while life expectancy for White Americans in low-income areas was lower. However, since then, even high-income White Americans have lost ground relative to Europeans. Meanwhile, the gap in life expectancy between Black Americans and Europeans decreased by 8.3%. Black American life expectancy increased more than White American life expectancy in all US areas, but improvements in lower-income areas had the greatest impact on the racial life expectancy gap. The causes that contributed the most to Black Americans’ mortality reductions included cancer, homicide, HIV, and causes originating in the fetal or infant period. Life expectancy for both Black and White Americans plateaued or slightly declined after 2012, but this stalling was most evident among Black Americans even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. If improvements had continued at the 1990 to 2012 rate, the racial gap in life expectancy would have closed by 2036. European life expectancy also stalled after 2014. Still, the comparison with Europe suggests that mortality rates of both Black and White Americans could fall much further across all ages and in both high-income and low-income areas.

Counting bacterial colonies on microbiological culture plates is a time-consuming, error-prone, nevertheless fundamental task in microbiology. Computer vision based approaches can increase the efficiency and the reliability of the process, but accurate counting is challenging, due to the high degree of variability of agglomerated colonies. In this paper, we propose a solution which adopts Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for counting the number of colonies contained in confluent agglomerates, that scored an overall accuracy of the 92.8% on a large challenging dataset. The proposed CNN-based technique for estimating the cardinality of colony aggregates outperforms traditional image processing approaches, becoming a promising approach to many related applications.

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This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).

Background. Approximately 20% of men and 15% of women remain childless at the end of their reproductive lifespan, with childlessness increasing over time, yet we lack a comprehensive understanding of the role and relative importance of diseases associated with childlessness, particularly among men. Methods. We examined all individuals born in Finland (n=1,035,928) and Sweden (n=1,509,092) between 1956 and 1968 (men) or 1956 and 1973 (women) and followed them up until the end of 2018. Socio-demographic, health, and reproductive information was obtained from nationwide registers. We assessed the association of 414 diseases across 16 categories with having no children by age 45 (women) and 50 (men) using a matched pair case-control design based on 71,524 pairs of full-sisters and 77,622 full-brothers who were discordant for childlessness as well as a population-based approach. Findings. Mental-behavioral, congenital anomalies, and endocrine-nutritional-metabolic disorders had the strongest associations with childlessness. Novel associations were discovered with inflammatory (eg. myocarditis) and autoimmune diseases (eg. juvenile idiopathic arthritis). Mental-behavioral disorders had stronger associations amongst men, particularly for schizophrenia and acute alcohol intoxication, while congenital anomalies, obesity-related diseases such as diabetes, and inflammatory diseases had stronger associations amongst women. Associations were dependent on the age at onset of the disease, with the strongest association observed earlier in women (21-25 years old) than men (26-30 years old). For most diseases, the association with childlessness was mediated by singlehood, especially in men. Some diseases, however, remained associated with childlessness among partnered individuals, including some mood- and endocrine-nutritional-metabolic disorders. All results can be explored in an interactive online dashboard. Interpretation. We provide evidence that disease burden across multiple domains is associated with childlessness, identifying modifiable mental-behavioral disorders and novel autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. Evidence can be used for targeted health interventions to counter decreasing fertility, reproductive health, involuntary childlessness, and shrinking populations.