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The Australian Imaging, Biomarkers and Lifestyle (AIBL) Flagship Study of Ageing is a prospective study of 1,112 individuals (211 with Alzheimer's disease (AD), 133 with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and 768 healthy controls (HCs)). Here we report diagnostic and cognitive findings at the first (18-month) follow-up of the cohort. The first aim was to compute rates of transition from HC to MCI, and MCI to AD. The second aim was to characterize the cognitive profiles of individuals who transitioned to a more severe disease stage compared with those who did not.
Methods:
Eighteen months after baseline, participants underwent comprehensive cognitive testing and diagnostic review, provided an 80 ml blood sample, and completed health and lifestyle questionnaires. A subgroup also underwent amyloid PET and MRI neuroimaging.
Results:
The diagnostic status of 89.9% of the cohorts was determined (972 were reassessed, 28 had died, and 112 did not return for reassessment). The 18-month cohort comprised 692 HCs, 82 MCI cases, 197 AD patients, and one Parkinson's disease dementia case. The transition rate from HC to MCI was 2.5%, and cognitive decline in HCs who transitioned to MCI was greatest in memory and naming domains compared to HCs who remained stable. The transition rate from MCI to AD was 30.5%.
Conclusion:
There was a high retention rate after 18 months. Rates of transition from healthy aging to MCI, and MCI to AD, were consistent with established estimates. Follow-up of this cohort over longer periods will elucidate robust predictors of future cognitive decline.
Having been relatively apolitical during the early stages of his career – he spent a fellowship year in Berlin soon after Hitler's appointment as German Chancellor without showing much apparent interest in what was beginning to take place in the political realm – Sartre became, in the years following the Second World War, the quintessential public intellectual. The chronology of his path is well documented, and it is intertwined with the evolution of his philosophy. In this chapter, that path will be quickly retraced, with brief pauses at some of its most salient markers.
Sartre's path to political engagement
Sartre had a fairly strong sense of identification with his generation; he was not alone in regarding it, in retrospect, as the “between the wars generation”. His studies dominated his life in the years immediately following the First World War, and he then performed eighteen months of military service, compulsory for French males, as a meteorologist. His first career appointment was at the lycée in Le Havre, where he taught philosophy for several years before and after his time in Germany. Meanwhile, he was undertaking various writing ventures, with mixed success, including the ongoing rewriting of the novel, eventually entitled Nausea, which, when finally published in 1938, brought him considerable acclaim. Little by little, political realities began increasingly to impinge on his consciousness and his life.
Few if any other modern Western philosophical movements have had as strong an impact on the general culture as has existentialism. The epicenter of this impact was certainly Paris, especially the Latin Quarter of Paris, and the time of maximum intensity was the period following the end of the Second World War, during which Paris had been under German occupation. But of course there had been existentialist stirrings, at least some of which had had broader cultural influence beyond the world of philosophy, in other places and long before that time, and there would be existentialist waves of extended cultural influence in many other countries for years to come, arguably right up to the present time. It would be impossible to track down and catalogue all of these earlier and later impacts; and any such enterprise would be burdened from the start by disagreements concerning just which cultural tendencies were “really” influenced by existentialism and to what degree, as well as by the question of just which of the various “existentialisms” were of greater importance in such-and-such an instance. After all, both “existentialism” and “culture” are concepts with exceedingly vague edges.
The nature of this difficulty can perhaps most easily be seen if we focus our attention initially on the immediate post-war Paris scene to which I have referred, on the highly diverse currents that were operative even within that comparatively small “epicenter” within just a few years' time. A recounting of the interaction of a few of these currents will at the same time offer insights into just how strongly existentialism influenced the society in question and into something of the nature of that influence.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote several significant essays dealing with and criticizing colonialism and neocolonialism, the most enduringly famous being no doubt his provocative preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961 when the French government was still asserting its sovereignty over Fanon's adopted land of Algeria. Sartre accepted his invitation and wrote a forthright tour dʾhorizon, taking as its initial focus what Continental European philosophers sometimes call "philosophical anthropology": the question, treated by Sartre as a methodological one, of how to understand human behavior in a social context. Seriality is characteristic not only of early human societies, however, but is to be found in many contemporary situations as well: Sartre gives us, for example, some unforgettable descriptions of commuters queuing for a bus; of citizens listening impotently, in millions of homes, to a government-controlled radio station; of the functioning of the stock market; and the like.
The recent increase in terrorist bomb attacks on urban civilian targets in Europe and the USA has emphasized the need for all relevant health provision team members to become familiar with the pathophysiology and treatment of the resulting injuries. This chapter focuses on blast injuries, considers recent advances in ventilation strategies for acute lung injury (ALI)/acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), and describes how this has been applied in the treatment of the severe blast injuries patient. Smoke, hot gas, or chemical inhalation injury are the most common cause of acute deterioration in lung function in burn injury patients and should always be suspected. Pulmonary contusion is a common lesion occurring in patients sustaining severe blunt chest trauma. The diagnosis of traumatic lung injury is usually made clinically with confirmation by chest radiography. Blunt thoracic trauma can result in significant morbidity in injured patients.
Estimating how the use of production contracts affects farm productivity is difficult when unobservable factors are correlated with both the decision to contract and productivity. To account for potential selection bias, this study uses the local availability of production contracts as an instrument for whether a farm uses a contract in order to estimate the impact of contract use on total factor productivity. Results indicate that use of a production contract is associated with a large increase in productivity for feeder-to-finish hog farms in the United States. The instrumental variable method makes it credible to assert that the observed association is a causal relationship rather than simply a correlation.
The U.S. hog industry has experienced dramatic structural changes and rapid increases in farm productivity. A stochastic frontier analysis is used to measure hog enterprise total factor productivity (TFP) growth between 1992 and 2004 and to decompose this growth into technical change and changes in technical efficiency, scale efficiency, and allocative efficiency. Productivity gains over the 12-year period are found to be explained almost entirely by technical progress and by improvements in scale efficiency. Differences in TFP growth rates in the Southeast and Heartland regions were found to be explained primarily by differences in farm size growth rates.
The U.S. hog industry has experienced dramatic structural changes and rapid increases in farm productivity. A stochastic frontier analysis is used to measure hog enterprise total factor productivity (TFP) growth between 1992 and 2004 and to decompose this growth into technical change and changes in technical efficiency, scale efficiency, and allocative efficiency. Productivity gains over the 12-year period are found to be explained almost entirely by technical progress and by improvements in scale efficiency. Differences in TFP growth rates in the Southeast and Heartland regions were found to be explained primarily by differences in farm size growth rates.
Exploratory factor analysis was used to identify approaches to farm management based on a list of management questions posed to a sample of U.S. cash-grain farmers. Three approaches were identified by the factor analysis: price negotiation, long-term cost control, and input adjustment. Estimated factor scores regressed against farm and operator characteristics indicate a profile of producers using each approach that is closely related to stage-of-life of the farm operator and farm business. In addition to operator age and planning horizon, operator risk preference and farm organization and location were other important determinants of the approach to management.
The rapid adoption of genetically engineered (GE) crops by U.S. farmers suggests that these technologies have been perceived to improve farm financial performance. This study develops and applies an econometric model to data from corn and soybean producers in order to evaluate the financial impacts of the adoption of GE crops. Results indicate that the adoption of GE crops has had a limited impact on financial performance that varies by crop, type of technology, type of farm, and region of the nation. Factors other than the financial impacts appear to be important reasons for the rapid adoption of GE crops.