Quality of life, cortisol blood levels and exercise in older adults: results of a randomized controlled trial.

INTRODUCTION: Cortisol plays a central role in the stress response; while high stress can determine physical and psychological impairment, moderate stress, with a mild increase in cortisol level, may have a positive effect on coping and physical performance. This trial attempted to determine whether cortisol levels were associated with Quality of Life (QoL) in a sample of elderly subjects undertaking an exercise program. METHODS: 42 subjects aged ≥65 years were randomlyassigned in a 1:1 fashion either to a vigorous physical activity (VAG: N=21) or to a postural gimnastic group (PGG: N=21). Differences between the two groups in QoL (on SF-12), and blood cortisol levels were assessed by ANOVA at different times. RESULTS: In both the VAG and PGG, cortisol levels rose at the end of the trial, with statistically significant differences as compared to the baseline. QoL at the end of the trial was higher than in the national normative sample. Cortisol and QoL in both groups decreased slightly 12 weeks after the end of the trial (T2); however, only in the VAG did the difference from the initial level remain statistically significant. At T1 and T2, subjects with higher SF-12 scores were found in subsamples in both groups with cortisol levels moderately increased (between 200 and 300 mg/ml). CONCLUSION: In a sample of elderly subjects undergoing two different kinds of exercise, a better perception of Quality of Life was associated with a moderate, non-pathological increase in cortisol. The results need to be confirmed by trials on larger samples.

FDup: a framework for general-purpose and efficient entity deduplication of record collections.

Deduplication is a technique aiming at identifying and resolving duplicate metadata records in a collection. This article describes FDup (Flat Collections Deduper), a general-purpose software framework supporting a complete deduplication workflow to manage big data record collections: metadata record data model definition, identification of candidate duplicates, identification of duplicates. FDup brings two main innovations: first, it delivers a full deduplication framework in a single easy-to-use software package based on Apache Spark Hadoop framework, where developers can customize the optimal and parallel workflow steps of blocking, sliding windows, and similarity matching function via an intuitive configuration file; second, it introduces a novel approach to improve performance, beyond the known techniques of "blocking" and "sliding window", by introducing a smart similarity matching function T-match. T-match is engineered as a decision tree that drives the comparisons of the fields of two records as branches of predicates and allows for successful or unsuccessful early-exit strategies. The efficacy of the approach is proved by experiments performed over big data collections of metadata records in the OpenAIRE Research Graph, a known open access knowledge base in Scholarly communication.