"There is no expiration date": a qualitative analysis using the Social Cognitive Theory to identify factors influencing physical activity among adults living with advanced cancer.

PURPOSE: To identify cognitive, behavioral, environmental, and other factors that influence physical activity in adults with advanced cancer using qualitative, semi-structured interviews. METHODS: Eighteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with adults living with stage IV breast, prostate, or colorectal cancer; or multiple myeloma recruited from the University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center. We used the Social Cognitive Theory to design the interview guide and a reflexive thematic approach for analysis. RESULTS: Participants were 62 years old on average and currently receiving treatment. Despite reporting numerous barriers to physical activity, most participants discussed engaging in some physical activity. Participants reported difficulties coping with changes in physical functioning especially due to fatigue, weakness, neuropathy, and pain. While cold weather was seen as a deterrent for activity, access to sidewalks was a commonly reported feature of neighborhood conduciveness for physical activity. Regardless of current activity levels, adults with advanced cancer were interested in engaging in activities to meet their goals of gaining strength and maintaining independence. Having a conversation with a provider from their cancer care team about physical activity was seen as encouraging for pursuing some activity. CONCLUSIONS: Adults living with advanced cancer are interested in pursuing activity to gain strength and maintain independence despite reported barriers to physical activity. To ensure patients are encouraged to be active, accessible resources, targeted referrals, and interventions designed to address their goals are critical next steps. RELEVANCE: Integrating conversations about physical activity into oncology care for adults living with advanced cancer is an important next step to encourage patients to remain active and help them improve strength and maintain quality of life and independence.

Constructing Residential Histories in a General Population-Based Representative Sample.

Research on neighborhoods and health typically measures neighborhood context at a single point in time. However, neighborhood exposures accumulate over the life course, influenced by both residential mobility and neighborhood change, with potential implications for estimating the impact of neighborhoods on health. Commercial databases offer fine-grained longitudinal residential address data that can enrich life-course spatial epidemiology research, and validated methods for reconstructing residential histories from these databases are needed. Our study draws on unique data from a geographically diverse, population-based representative sample of adult Wisconsin residents and the LexisNexis (New York, New York) Accurint, a commercial personal profile database, to develop a systematic and reliable methodology for constructing individual residential histories. Our analysis demonstrated that creating residential histories across diverse geographical contexts is feasible, and it highlights differences in the information obtained from available residential histories by age, education, race/ethnicity, and rural/urban/suburban residency. Researchers should consider potential address data availability and information biases favoring socioeconomically advantaged individuals and their implications for studying health inequalities. Despite these limitations, LexisNexis data can generate varied residential exposure metrics and be linked to contextual data to enrich research into the contextual determinants of health at varied geographic scales.

A multi-site trial of an electronic health integrated physical activity promotion intervention in breast and endometrial cancers survivors: MyActivity study protocol.

Despite the known benefits of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) for breast and endometrial cancer survivors, most are insufficiently active, interventions response is heterogeneous, and MVPA programming integration into cancer care is limited. A stepped care approach, in which the least resource-intensive intervention is delivered first and additional components are added based on individual response, is one strategy to enhance uptake of physical activity programming. However, the most effective intervention augmentation strategies are unknown. In this singly randomized trial of post-treatment, inactive breast and endometrial cancer survivors (n = 323), participants receive a minimal intervention including a Fitbit linked with their clinic's patient portal and, in turn, the electronic health record (EHR) with weekly feedback delivered via the portal. MVPA progress summaries are sent to participants' oncology team via the EHR. MVPA adherence is evaluated at 4, 8, 12, 16 and 20 weeks; non-responders (those meeting ≤80% of the MVPA goal over previous 4 weeks) at each timepoint are randomized once for the remainder of the 24-week intervention to one of two "step-up" conditions: (1) online gym or (2) coaching calls, while responders continue with the minimal Fitbit+EHR intervention. The primary outcome is ActiGraph-measured MVPA at 24 and 48 weeks. Secondary outcomes include symptom burden and functional performance at 24 and 48 weeks. This trial will inform development of an effective, scalable, and tailored intervention for survivors by identifying non-responders and providing them with the intervention augmentations necessary to increase MVPA and improve health outcomes. Clinical Trials Registration # NCT04262180.

Payday lenders and premature mortality.

Relationships between debt and poor health are worrisome as access to expensive credit expands and population health worsens along certain metrics. We focus on payday lenders as one type of expensive credit and investigate the spatial relationships between lender storefronts and premature mortality rates. We combine causes of death data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and payday lender locations at the county-level in the United States between 2000 and 2017. After accounting for county socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, the local presence of payday lenders is associated with an increased incidence risk of all-cause and specific-cause premature mortality. State regulations may attenuate these relationships, which provides insights on policy strategies to mitigate health impacts.

Integrating Diabetes Prevention Education Among Teenagers Involved in Summer Employment: Encouraging Environments for Health in Adolescence (ENHANCE).

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) in youth is a growing healthcare and public health concern. It is costly, and youth suffer from disabling and deadly comorbid conditions at a faster pace than adult onset. However, T2D is preventable. The population of obese youth at greatest risk for T2D is of minority race/ethnicity and socioeconomically disadvantaged background, which creates barriers to health promoting lifestyles. Despite being the first line of prevention efforts for T2D, efficacious behavioral lifestyle interventions are still lacking at the community level. During the summers of 2016 and 2017, a study integrated obesity and diabetes prevention health education into TeenWorks summer employment program at Indy Urban Acres in Indianapolis, Indiana. Results were analyzed using paired sample t-tests. Participants (N = 168) had a mean age of 15.8 ± 0.7 years, 61% female, 13% Hispanic, 80% Black. By the end of the intervention, physical activity (p = 0.000) and prevention knowledge (p = 0.000) were significantly higher. Dietary intake (p = 0.204), self-efficacy (p = 0.58), food insecurity (p = 0.058) and depression screening scores (p = 0.809) were not significantly different. In light of the continuing childhood obesity epidemic and increasing prevalence of prediabetes and T2D in youth, there is a pressing need to understand and reduce barriers to obesity and diabetes prevention in high-risk populations. This study demonstrated the feasibility of integrating obesity and T2D prevention health education into a teen summer employment program.

Simultaneous entanglement swapping of multiple orbital angular momentum states of light.

High-bit-rate long-distance quantum communication is a proposed technology for future communication networks and relies on high-dimensional quantum entanglement as a core resource. While it is known that spatial modes of light provide an avenue for high-dimensional entanglement, the ability to transport such quantum states robustly over long distances remains challenging. To overcome this, entanglement swapping may be used to generate remote quantum correlations between particles that have not interacted; this is the core ingredient of a quantum repeater, akin to repeaters in optical fibre networks. Here we demonstrate entanglement swapping of multiple orbital angular momentum states of light. Our approach does not distinguish between different anti-symmetric states, and thus entanglement swapping occurs for several thousand pairs of spatial light modes simultaneously. This work represents the first step towards a quantum network for high-dimensional entangled states and provides a test bed for fundamental tests of quantum science.Entanglement swapping in high dimensions requires large numbers of entangled photons and consequently suffers from low photon flux. Here the authors demonstrate entanglement swapping of multiple spatial modes of light simultaneously, without the need for increasing the photon numbers with dimension.

Image reconstruction from photon sparse data.

We report an algorithm for reconstructing images when the average number of photons recorded per pixel is of order unity, i.e. photon-sparse data. The image optimisation algorithm minimises a cost function incorporating both a Poissonian log-likelihood term based on the deviation of the reconstructed image from the measured data and a regularization-term based upon the sum of the moduli of the second spatial derivatives of the reconstructed image pixel intensities. The balance between these two terms is set by a bootstrapping technique where the target value of the log-likelihood term is deduced from a smoothed version of the original data. When compared to the original data, the processed images exhibit lower residuals with respect to the true object. We use photon-sparse data from two different experimental systems, one system based on a single-photon, avalanche photo-diode array and the other system on a time-gated, intensified camera. However, this same processing technique could most likely be applied to any low photon-number image irrespective of how the data is collected.

Engineering two-photon high-dimensional states through quantum interference.

Many protocols in quantum science, for example, linear optical quantum computing, require access to large-scale entangled quantum states. Such systems can be realized through many-particle qubits, but this approach often suffers from scalability problems. An alternative strategy is to consider a lesser number of particles that exist in high-dimensional states. The spatial modes of light are one such candidate that provides access to high-dimensional quantum states, and thus they increase the storage and processing potential of quantum information systems. We demonstrate the controlled engineering of two-photon high-dimensional states entangled in their orbital angular momentum through Hong-Ou-Mandel interference. We prepare a large range of high-dimensional entangled states and implement precise quantum state filtering. We characterize the full quantum state before and after the filter, and are thus able to determine that only the antisymmetric component of the initial state remains. This work paves the way for high-dimensional processing and communication of multiphoton quantum states, for example, in teleportation beyond qubits.

Reconstructing high-dimensional two-photon entangled states via compressive sensing.

Accurately establishing the state of large-scale quantum systems is an important tool in quantum information science; however, the large number of unknown parameters hinders the rapid characterisation of such states, and reconstruction procedures can become prohibitively time-consuming. Compressive sensing, a procedure for solving inverse problems by incorporating prior knowledge about the form of the solution, provides an attractive alternative to the problem of high-dimensional quantum state characterisation. Using a modified version of compressive sensing that incorporates the principles of singular value thresholding, we reconstruct the density matrix of a high-dimensional two-photon entangled system. The dimension of each photon is equal to d = 17, corresponding to a system of 83521 unknown real parameters. Accurate reconstruction is achieved with approximately 2500 measurements, only 3% of the total number of unknown parameters in the state. The algorithm we develop is fast, computationally inexpensive, and applicable to a wide range of quantum states, thus demonstrating compressive sensing as an effective technique for measuring the state of large-scale quantum systems.

Discriminating single-photon states unambiguously in high dimensions.

The ability to uniquely identify a quantum state is integral to quantum science, but for nonorthogonal states, quantum mechanics precludes deterministic, error-free discrimination. However, using the nondeterministic protocol of unambiguous state discrimination enables the error-free differentiation of states, at the cost of a lower frequency of success. We discriminate experimentally between nonorthogonal, high-dimensional states encoded in single photons; our results range from dimension d=2 to d=14. We quantify the performance of our method by comparing the total measured error rate to the theoretical rate predicted by minimum-error state discrimination. For the chosen states, we find a lower error rate by more than 1 standard deviation for dimensions up to d=12. This method will find immediate application in high-dimensional implementations of quantum information protocols, such as quantum cryptography.

Coherent ultrafast measurement of time-bin encoded photons.

Time-bin encoding is a robust form of optical quantum information, especially for transmission in optical fibers. To readout the information, the separation of the time bins must be larger than the detector time resolution, typically on the order of nanoseconds for photon counters. In the present work, we demonstrate a technique using a nonlinear interaction between chirped entangled time-bin photons and shaped laser pulses to perform projective measurements on arbitrary time-bin states with picosecond-scale separations. We demonstrate a tomographically complete set of time-bin qubit projective measurements and show the fidelity of operations is sufficiently high to violate the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt-Bell inequality by more than 6 standard deviations.

Generation of orbital angular momentum Bell states and their verification via accessible nonlinear witnesses.

The controlled generation of entangled states and their subsequent detection are integral aspects of quantum information science. In this Letter, we implement a simple and precise technique that produces any of the four Bell states in the orbital angular momentum degree of freedom. We then use these states to perform the first experimental demonstration of an accessible nonlinear entanglement witness. Such a witness determines entanglement by using the same measurements as required for a linear witness but can detect, in this case, twice as many states as a single linear witness can. We anticipate that our method of state preparation and nonlinear witnesses will have further uses in areas of quantum science, such as superdense coding and quantum key distribution.

Entangled Bessel-Gaussian beams.

Orbital angular momentum (OAM) entanglement is investigated in the Bessel-Gaussian (BG) basis. Having a readily adjustable radial scale, BG modes provide an alternative basis for OAM entanglement over Laguerre-Gaussian modes. We show that the OAM bandwidth in terms of BG modes can be increased by selection of particular radial wavevectors and leads to a flattening of the spectrum, which allows for higher dimensionality in the entangled state. We demonstrate entanglement in terms of BG modes by performing a Bell-type experiment and showing a violation of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality for the ℓ = ±1 subspace. In addition, we use quantum state tomography to indicate higher-dimensional entanglement in terms of BG modes.