Effects of rope skipping exercise on working memory and cardiorespiratory fitness in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Introduction: Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) exhibit deficits in working memory (WM) and cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF), both of which are closely associated with the core symptoms of ADHD. This study aimed to investigate the effects of rope skipping exercise (RSE) on the WM and CRF of children with ADHD, to provide a theoretical foundation for the optimization of exercise intervention programs tailored to children with ADHD. Methods: This study recruited 55 children (age range 6-12 years) and randomly assigned them into three groups: the ADHD with RSE (AWRSE, n=22, mean age: 10.18 ± 1.10 years), the ADHD with sports game (SG) (AWSG, n=16, mean age: 9.38 ± 0.96 years), and the typically developing (TD) control group (CG, n=17, mean age: 8.94 ± 0.56 years). The AWRSE underwent a RSE intervention, while the other two groups participated in SG. The exercise intervention lasted for 8 weeks, with sessions held twice a week for 60 minutes each, at a moderate-to-vigorous-intensity (64-95% HRmax). All children in each group underwent pre-test and post-test, including height, weight, BMI, n-back, and 20mSRT. One-way analysis of variance (Ony-way ANOVA) and paired sample t-test were used to analyze inter- and intra-group differences respectively. Results: Before the intervention, children with ADHD exhibited a significantly lower VO2max compared to the TD children (p<0.05), and there was no significant difference in the other indicators between the groups (p>0.05). After the intervention, no significant inter-group differences were found across all indices for the three groups of children (p > 0.05). The AWRSE had significant improvements in the accuracy of 1-back task, Pacer (laps), and VO2max (p<0.05), with the level of CRF approaching that of TD children. A significant decrease in response time for the 1-back task was observed in the CG. Conclusion: An 8-week RSE intervention is an effective therapeutic approach for children with ADHD, significantly enhancing their WM and CRF.

Current agreement between ActiGraph and CUPAR in measuring moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity for adolescents.

The study aims to develop and validate the Curriculum-related Physical Activity Recall questionnaire (CUPAR) as a measure of physical activity in adolescents. 83 middle-school students (13.23 ± 0.74 yrs) completed the CUPAR and whore ActiGraph accelerometers for seven consecutive days. Correlations and Bland-Altman plots were to examine the agreement between these two measures. Significant correlations were observed between the CUPAR and ActiGraph accelerometer for 5-day MPA (r = 0.29, p < 0.01), and for both 5-day and 7-day VPA (r = 0.47 and 0.79, ps < 0.01), and MVPA (r = 0.79 and 0.42, ps < 0.01). Plots showed reasonable agreement between the CUPAR and ActiGraph estimates of VPA and MVPA. The agreement between CUPAR and ActiGraph was higher for in-school VPA (r = 0.58, p < 0.01) and MVPA (r = 0.44, p < 0.01) as compared to the out-school VPA (r = 0.22, p < 0.05) and MVPA (r = 0.26, p < 0.05). The CUPAR can reduce respondents' burden, representing a reliable and efficient measure of physical activity among adolescents, especially for PA occurred during in-school sessions and at vigorous intensity.

Age and school-segment difference in daily sedentary behavior and physical activity among student (9-23 years): a cross-sectional accelerometer-based survey.

This study is cross-sectional in nature and aims to investigate and track sedentary behavior (SB) and physical activity among student (aged 9-23 years) for seven consecutive days using an accelerometer. It also intends to analyze the current status of the daily activities of students using age and school-segment differences. The study recruits a total of 384 students [age: 14.41 ± 3.52 years; body mass index (BMI): 19.66 ± 3.67] from four schools out of which 180 (46.88%) were male. The study uses the means and standard deviations for statistical analysis and independent sample t-tests to determine gender differences. Analysis of covariance is used to determine whether or not daily SB and physical activity were statistically significant students according to gender and school segment followed by LSD post hoc tests for multiple comparisons. The results demonstrate that students were less physically active [moderate- to vigorous-intensity physical activity (MVPA):60.4 ± 23.48 min/day] and more sedentary (598.47 ± 162.63 min/day). The sedentary time of the students displays an inverted U-trend, and their participation in MVPA exhibits a W-shape. After controlling for BMI, the results of ANCOVA point to a significant school-segment effect (p < 0.001) for SB (F = 83, ηp2 = 0.4) and physical activity (low-intensity physical activity: F = 108.61, ηp2 = 0.47; MPA: F = 401.65, ηp2 = 0.76; high-intensity physical activity: F = 88.43, ηp2 = 0.42; MVPA: F = 118.42, ηp2 = 0.49). Based on the behavioral characteristics of students across school segments, this study concluded that interventions targeting students' physical activity and physical health should be school segment specific. The results of the study provide a basis for future analysis of factors influencing students' physical activity behaviors across school segments and for proposing targeted intervention strategies for the future.

The Effects of a Multicomponent Social Support Intervention on Physical Fitness and Exercise Attitude in Children: A 12-Week Randomized Controlled Trial.

Purpose: The current study is intended to assess the effects of a multicomponent social support intervention program on grip strength, sprinting, jumping, agility, flexibility, core strength and exercise attitude among children over a period of twelve weeks. Method: This study followed a randomized parallel design in which 366 children (age: 9.35 ± 1.12 years) in the 3rd−5th grade at an elementary school in China were allocated to an intervention group (n = 183) or a control group (n = 183). Participants were assessed twice (baseline and postintervention) for the following tests: (i) grip strength, (ii) 50 m dash, (iii) rope skipping, (iv) sit-ups, (v) sit-and-reach, and (vi) exercise attitude. The intervention group received the "Exercise Methods and Wellness Knowledge Guide (EMWKG)" leaflet three times a week. The control group was not required to make any changes. Results: Significant increases in pre−post left-hand grip strength (Cohen's d = 0.10, p < 0.001), right-hand grip strength (Cohen's d = 0.09, p < 0.001), and behavioral intention (Cohen's d = 0.17, p < 0.01) were observed in the intervention group. Students in the control group showed significant decreases in three indicators: both 50 m (Cohen's d = 0.19, p < 0.01) and sit-ups (Cohen's d = 0.14, p < 0.05) as well as sit-and-reach (Cohen's d = 0.46, p < 0.001). Significant differences (p < 0.001) were found between the two groups in right-hand grip strength (F = 7.109, ηp2 = 0.020), sit-and-reach (F = 11.255, ηp2 = 0.031), and subjective standards (F = 15.461, ηp2 = 0.043). A comparison of the post hoc test results showed that the intervention group scored 0.519 kg (95% CI: 0.136−0.901, Cohen's d = 0.27), 0.944 cm (95% CI: 0.0391−1.497, Cohen's d = 0.35), and 2.535 points (95% CI: 1.267−3.803, Cohen's d = 0.41) higher than the control group in right-hand grip strength, sit-and-reach, and subjective standards, respectively. Conclusion: This combined social support theory-based intervention was effective in improving exercise attitude and fitness among children in 12 weeks.

Effects of a SMART Goal Setting and 12-Week Core Strength Training Intervention on Physical Fitness and Exercise Attitudes in Adolescents: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

This study aimed to analyze the impacts of a 12-week core strength training (CST) and goal-setting (GS) program on the core endurance, agility, sprinting, jumping, grip strength, and exercise attitude in a group of adolescents. This study followed a randomized parallel design in which 362 adolescents (age: 14.5 ± 1.07 years; body mass index: 19.82 ± 3.64) were allocated to a GS (n = 89), CST (n = 92), or GS + CST (n = 90) program or to a control group (n = 91). Participants were assessed two times (baseline and postintervention) for the following tests: (i) 50 m dash, (ii) grip strength, (iii) long jump, (iv) 1000 m running for boys and 800 m for girls, (v) core endurance, and (vi) exercise attitude. Significant differences (p < 0.05, η2p = 0.035−0.218) were found between the four groups of the six components of physical fitness and the three components of attitude toward exercise (target attitudes, behavioral habits, and sense of behavioral control). Between-group analysis revealed that the GS + CST had significant advantages (p < 0.05) over the CON in terms of the 50 m dash (Cohen's d = 0.06), grip strength (Cohen's d = 0.19_left, 0.31_right), 800/1000 m running (Cohen's d = 0.41), core endurance (Cohen's d = 0.95), and sense of behavioral control (Cohen's d = 0.35). Between-group analysis also revealed that the CST had significant advantages over the CON in terms of grip strength (Cohen's d = 0.27_left, 0.39_right), 50 m (Cohen's d = 0.04), long jump (Cohen's d = 0.21), 800/1000 m (Cohen's d = 0.09), and core stability (Cohen's d = 0.63), which were significantly different from CON (p < 0.05). GS differed from CON only on 50 m (Cohen's d = 0.02) and core stability (Cohen's d = 0.13) with a small effect (p < 0.05). We conclude that the combined intervention of GS and CST is more effective in promoting fitness in adolescents, i.e., GS + CST > CST and GS + CST > GS.

Multi-Scale 2D Temporal Adjacency Networks for Moment Localization With Natural Language.

We address the problem of retrieving a specific moment from an untrimmed video by natural language. It is a challenging problem because a target moment may take place in the context of other temporal moments in the untrimmed video. Existing methods cannot tackle this challenge well since they do not fully consider the temporal contexts between temporal moments. In this paper, we model the temporal context between video moments by a set of predefined two-dimensional maps under different temporal scales. For each map, one dimension indicates the starting time of a moment and the other indicates the duration. These 2D temporal maps can cover diverse video moments with different lengths, while representing their adjacent contexts at different temporal scales. Based on the 2D temporal maps, we propose a Multi-Scale Temporal Adjacency Network (MS-2D-TAN), a single-shot framework for moment localization. It is capable of encoding the adjacent temporal contexts at each scale, while learning discriminative features for matching video moments with referring expressions. We evaluate the proposed MS-2D-TAN on three challenging benchmarks, i.e., Charades-STA, ActivityNet Captions, and TACoS, where our MS-2D-TAN outperforms the state of the art.

Value of Active Warming Devices for Intraoperative Hypothermia Prevention-A Meta-Analysis and Cost-Benefit Analysis.

PURPOSE: Historically, studies suggested that intraoperative hypothermia (IH) could result in significant resource consumption, but more recent studies have found the opposite. The purpose of this study is to estimate the value of active warming devices for IH prevention based on synthesized evidence. METHODS: A cost-benefit analysis was conducted using the effect of active warming versus passive warming devices for intraoperative hypothermia from a meta-analysis. The item-based aggregated treatment cost approach was adopted to estimate the cost of each adverse event, which was then weighted to calculate the total cost of IH. RESULTS: IH was associated with higher risks of bleeding, surgical site infection, and shivering compared with normothermia. The cost of one case of IH was $363.80, and the use of active warming devices might save $152.80. Extra investment in active warming (e.g., $291.00) might only be cost-beneficial when the minimum willingness-to-pay is $150.00. CONCLUSIONS: Synthesized evidence showed that the cost of IH might be overestimated. Furthermore, the value of using active warming devices remains uncertain because the willingness to pay may vary between decision-makers. As not enough awareness of hypothermia prevention in some countries, further research into the clinical use of active warming devices during major surgeries is warranted.

Longitudinal Association of Economic Growth with Lung Function of Chinese Children and Adolescents over 30 Years: Evidence from Seven Successive National Surveys.

(1) Background: Recent studies reported that decrease in lung function of Chinese children and adolescents continues to decline, although the change has been insignificant and has reached a plateau. However, studies have not explored the relationship between lung function and economic development in China. This study sought to explore the longitudinal association between socio-economic indicators and lung function; (2) Method: Data were obtained from seven successive national surveys conducted by the Chinese National Survey on Students' Constitution and Health from 1985 to 2014. Lung function of school-age children (7-22 years) was determined using forced vital capacity (FVC). GDP per capita and urbanization ratio were used as economic indicators. A fixed-effects model was employed to examine the longitudinal association after adjusting for height, weight, and time trends; (3) Results: Socio-economic indicators showed a U-curve relationship with lung function of boys and girls from urban and rural areas. Lung function initially decreased with GDP per capita or urbanization ratio and reached a minimum. Lung function then increased with increase in GDP per capita or urbanization ratio. The findings indicate that the relationship between economic growth and lung function is different in different development stages. In less-developed provinces, economic growth was negatively correlated with lung function, whereas, in developed provinces, economic growth was positively correlated with lung function; (4) Conclusion: The findings of the current study show that economic growth has significantly different effects on lung function at different economic levels. Therefore, governments should improve lung health in children and adolescents from low and middle economic regions.

Safety of intraoperative hypothermia for patients: meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials and observational studies.

BACKGROUND: Previous studies have shown that intraoperative hypothermia was associated with higher risks of clinical adverse events, but we found otherwise from recent evidences. This study aims to synthesize the existing evidence evaluating safety of intraoperative hypothermia. METHODS: Articles, reviews, ongoing trials and grey literatures were retrieved from PubMed, The Cochrane Library, Clinical Trails and CNKI (a Chinese national database) till February 2nd, 2019. Both randomized controlled trials and observational studies compared incidences of all sorts of intra- and post-operative consequences between hypothermia and normothermia were included. Researches comparing different warming systems were excluded. We also examined risks of hypothermia using lowered standards (35.5 °C and 35 °C) from a Chinese trial (ChiCTR-IPR-17011099). RESULTS: A total of 9 RCT studies and 11 observational studies were included. RCT-synthesized results showed that intraoperative hypothermia was associated with higher risks of bleeding (MD = 131.90, 95%CI: 117.42, 146.38), surgical site infection (RD = 0.14, 95%CI: 0.06, 0.21) and shivering (RD = 0.32, 95%CI: 0.06, 0.58) but with no significant differences in duration of surgery, hospital stay or mortality. Observational study-synthesized evidences showed that intraoperative hypothermia did not result in higher risks in any of these adverse events. Results didn't change even if the standard of hypothermia was lowered by 0.5-1.0 °C. CONCLUSIONS: The study indicates that the synthesized risks resulted by intra-operative hypothermia might be overestimated and the eligibility of 36 °C to define hypothermia is not sensitive enough. Given body-temperature protection has not been popularized in China, it is still critical to normalize the hypothermia prevention at this stage.

Economic Growth and Cardiorespiratory Fitness of Children and Adolescents in Urban Areas: A Panel Data Analysis of 27 Provinces in China, 1985-2014.

With rapid economic development in China, cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) of children and adolescents is on a decline. However, this appears to have slowed down, reaching stagnation in certain areas. However, it is unclear if the change in CRF is related to economic growth and development or not. This study describes trends in CRF of Chinese children and adolescents, and empirically tests the relationships between China's macro-economic developments and cardiorespiratory fitness of children and adolescents over the past 30 years using provincial panel data collected from one million samples. We used per capita disposable income as the economic indicator. CRF was assessed by using running tests: 50 m × 8 for boys and girls (7-12 years), 1000 m for boys (13-22 years), and 800 m for girls (13-22 years). The results show that economic growth has a U-shaped relationship with CRF of children and adolescents (both boys and girls). It appears that as incomes increased, CRF of urban male and female students in China gradually decreased to its lowest point, after which it showed an upward trend. From a horizontal perspective, it can be inferred that for low-developed provinces, increases in incomes cause a decrease in CRF levels. In contrast, for highly developed provinces, as incomes increase, CRF levels increase. This study provides the first empirical evidence of the relationship between macro-economy and CRF of youth, based on provincial panel data. The results presented here can be used to formulate health policies targeting the cardiorespiratory fitness of children and adolescents from middle-income provinces in China. This study also provides a reference for developing countries.

Effects on the medical revenue of comprehensive pricing reform in Chinese urban public hospitals after removing drug markups: case of Nanjing.

AIMS: The State Council of China requires that all urban public hospitals must eliminate drug markups by September 2017, and that hospital drugs must be sold at the purchase price. Nanjing-one of the first provincial capital cities to implement the reform-is studied to evaluate the effects of the comprehensive reform on drug prices in public hospitals, and to explore differential compensation plans. METHODS: Sixteen hospitals were selected, and financial data were collected over the 48-month period before the reform and for 12 months after the reform. An analysis was carried out using a simple linear interrupted time series model. RESULTS: The average difference ratio of drug surplus fell 13.39% after the reform, and the drug markups were basically eliminated. Revenue from medical services showed a net growth of 28.25%. The overall compensation received from government financial budget and medical service revenue growth was 103.69% for the loss from policy-permitted 15% markup sales, and 116.48% for the net loss. However, there were large differences in compensation levels at different hospitals, ranging from -21.92% to 413.74% by medical services revenue growth, causing the combined rate of both financial and service compensation to vary from 28.87-413.74%, There was a significant positive correlation between the services compensation rate and the proportion of medical service revenue (p < .001), and the compensation rate increased by 8% for every 1% increase in the proportion of services revenue. DISCUSSION: Nanjing's pricing and compensation reform has basically achieved the policy targets of eliminating the drug markups, promoting the growth of medical services revenue, and adjusting the structure of medical revenue. However, the growth rate of service revenue of hospitals varied significantly from one another. CONCLUSIONS: Nanjing's reform represents successful pricing and compensation reform in Chinese urban public hospitals. It is recommended that a differentiated and dynamic compensation plan should be established in accordance with the revenue structure of different hospitals.

Enhanced furfural production from raw corn stover employing a novel heterogeneous acid catalyst.

With the aim to enhance the direct conversion of raw corn stover into furfural, a promising approach was proposed employing a novel heterogeneous strong acid catalyst (SC-CaCt-700) in different solvents. The novel catalyst was characterized by elemental analysis, N2 adsorption-desorption, FT-IR, XPS, TEM and SEM. The developed catalytic system demonstrated superior efficacy for furfural production from raw corn stover. The effects of reaction temperature, residence time, catalyst loading, substrate concentration and solvent were investigated and optimized. 93% furfural yield was obtained from 150mg corn stover at 200°C in 100min using 45mg catalyst in γ-valerolactone (GVL). In comparison, 51.5% furfural yield was achieved in aqueous media under the same conditions (200°C, 5h, and 45mg catalyst), which is of great industrial interest. Furfural was obtained from both hemicelluloses and cellulose in corn stover, which demonstrated a promising routine to make the full use of biomass.

Image Search Reranking With Hierarchical Topic Awareness.

With much attention from both academia and industrial communities, visual search reranking has recently been proposed to refine image search results obtained from text-based image search engines. Most of the traditional reranking methods cannot capture both relevance and diversity of the search results at the same time. Or they ignore the hierarchical topic structure of search result. Each topic is treated equally and independently. However, in real applications, images returned for certain queries are naturally in hierarchical organization, rather than simple parallel relation. In this paper, a new reranking method "topic-aware reranking (TARerank)" is proposed. TARerank describes the hierarchical topic structure of search results in one model, and seamlessly captures both relevance and diversity of the image search results simultaneously. Through a structured learning framework, relevance and diversity are modeled in TARerank by a set of carefully designed features, and then the model is learned from human-labeled training samples. The learned model is expected to predict reranking results with high relevance and diversity for testing queries. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we collect an image search dataset and conduct comparison experiments on it. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed TARerank outperforms the existing relevance-based and diversified reranking methods.

BSIFT: toward data-independent codebook for large scale image search.

Bag-of-Words (BoWs) model based on Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) has been widely used in large-scale image retrieval applications. Feature quantization by vector quantization plays a crucial role in BoW model, which generates visual words from the high- dimensional SIFT features, so as to adapt to the inverted file structure for the scalable retrieval. Traditional feature quantization approaches suffer several issues, such as necessity of visual codebook training, limited reliability, and update inefficiency. To avoid the above problems, in this paper, a novel feature quantization scheme is proposed to efficiently quantize each SIFT descriptor to a descriptive and discriminative bit-vector, which is called binary SIFT (BSIFT). Our quantizer is independent of image collections. In addition, by taking the first 32 bits out from BSIFT as code word, the generated BSIFT naturally lends itself to adapt to the classic inverted file structure for image indexing. Moreover, the quantization error is reduced by feature filtering, code word expansion, and query sensitive mask shielding. Without any explicit codebook for quantization, our approach can be readily applied in image search in some resource-limited scenarios. We evaluate the proposed algorithm for large scale image search on two public image data sets. Experimental results demonstrate the index efficiency and retrieval accuracy of our approach.

Principal visual word discovery for automatic license plate detection.

License plates detection is widely considered a solved problem, with many systems already in operation. However, the existing algorithms or systems work well only under some controlled conditions. There are still many challenges for license plate detection in an open environment, such as various observation angles, background clutter, scale changes, multiple plates, uneven illumination, and so on. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme to automatically locate license plates by principal visual word (PVW), discovery and local feature matching. Observing that characters in different license plates are duplicates of each other, we bring in the idea of using the bag-of-words (BoW) model popularly applied in partial-duplicate image search. Unlike the classic BoW model, for each plate character, we automatically discover the PVW characterized with geometric context. Given a new image, the license plates are extracted by matching local features with PVW. Besides license plate detection, our approach can also be extended to the detection of logos and trademarks. Due to the invariance virtue of scale-invariant feature transform feature, our method can adaptively deal with various changes in the license plates, such as rotation, scaling, illumination, etc. Promising results of the proposed approach are demonstrated with an experimental study in license plate detection.

Interactive semisupervised learning for microarray analysis.

Microarray technology has generated vast amounts of gene expression data with distinct patterns. Based on the premise that genes of correlated functions tend to exhibit similar expression patterns, various machine learning methods have been applied to capture these specific patterns in microarray data. However, the discrepancy between the rich expression profiles and the limited knowledge of gene functions has been a major hurdle to the understanding of cellular networks. To bridge this gap so as to properly comprehend and interpret expression data, we introduce Relevance Feedback to microarray analysis and propose an interactive learning framework to incorporate the expert knowledge into the decision module. In order to find a good learning method and solve two intrinsic problems in microarray data, high dimensionality and small sample size, we also propose a semisupervised learning algorithm: Kernel Discriminant-EM (KDEM). This algorithm efficiently utilizes a large set of unlabeled data to compensate for the insufficiency of a small set of labeled data and it extends the linear algorithm in Discriminant-EM (DEM) to a kernel algorithm to handle nonlinearly separable data in a lower dimensional space. The Relevance Feedback technique and KDEM together construct an efficient and effective interactive semisupervised learning framework for microarray analysis. Extensive experiments on the yeast cell cycle regulation data set and Plasmodium falciparum red blood cell cycle data set show the promise of this approach.