Background Medication discrepancies in care transitions and medication non-adherence are problematic. Few interventions consider the entire process, from the hospital to the patient’s medication use at home.

Aim In preparation for randomised controlled trials (RCTs), this study aimed (1) to investigate the feasibility of recruitment and retention of patients and data collection to reduce medication discrepancies at discharge and improve medication adherence and (2) to explore the outcomes of the interventions.

Method Participants were recruited from a hospital and a residential area. Hospital patients participated in a pharmacist-led intervention to establish a correct medication list upon discharge and a follow-up interview two weeks post-discharge. All participants received a person-centred adherence intervention for three to six months. Discrepancies in the medication lists, the Beliefs about Medicines Questionnaire (BMQ-S), and the Medication Adherence Report Scale (MARS-5) were assessed.

Results Of 87 asked to participate, 35 were included, and 12 completed the study. Identifying discrepancies, discussing discrepancies with physicians, and performing follow-up interviews were possible. Conducting the adherence intervention was also possible using individual health plans for medication use. Among the seven hospital patients, 24 discrepancies were found. Discharging physicians agreed that all discrepancies were errors, but only ten were corrected in the discharge information. Ten participants decreased their total BMQ-S concern scores, and seven increased their total MARS-5 scores.

Conclusion Based on this study, conducting the two RCTs separately may increase the inclusion rate. Data collection was feasible. Both interventions were feasible in many aspects but need to be optimised in upcoming RCTs.

We study a novel degenerate and singular elliptic operator (Delta) over tilde ((tau, chi)) defined by (Delta) over tilde ((tau, chi))u = tau(x, Du)(|Du|Delta(1)u + chi(x, Du)Delta(infinity)u), where the singular weights tau(x, s) > 0 and chi(x, s) >= 0 are continuous functions on Omega x R-n\{0}. The operator (Delta) over tilde ((tau, chi)) is an extension of Delta((p, q))u |Du|(q)Delta(1)u + (p -1)|Du|(p-2)Delta(infinity)u, p >= 1, q >= 0, introduced by the authors in Baravdishet al. (2020), which in turn is an extension of the p- Laplace operator Delta(p). We establish the well-posedness of the Neumann boundary value problem for the parabolic equation u(t) = (Delta) over tilde ((tau, chi)) in the framework of viscosity solutions. For the solution u, the weight chi controls the evolution along the tangential and the normal directions, respectively, on the level surface of u. The weight tau controls the total speed of the evolution of u. We also prove the consistency and the convergence of the numerical scheme for the finite differences method of the parabolic equation above. Numerical simulations show that our novel nonlinear operator (Delta) over tilde ((tau, chi)) gives better results than both the Perona-Malik (Perona and Malik, 1990) and total variation (TV) methods (Chan and Shen, 2005) when applied to image enhancement.

Atherosclerosis is the main killer in the west and therefore a major health challenge today. Total serum cholesterol and lipoprotein concentrations, used as clinical markers, fail to predict the majority of cases, especially between the risk scale extremes, due to the high complexity in lipoprotein structure and composition. In particular, low-density lipoprotein (LDL) plays a key role in atherosclerosis development, with LDL size being a parameter considered for determining the risk for cardiovascular diseases. Determining LDL size and structural parameters is challenging to address experimentally under physiological-like conditions. This article describes the biochemistry and ultrastructure of normolipidemic and hypertriglyceridemic LDL fractions and subfractions using small-angle X-ray scattering. Our results conclude that LDL particles of hypertriglyceridemic compared to healthy individuals 1) have lower LDL core melting temperature, 2) have lower cholesteryl ester ordering in their core, 3) are smaller, rounder and more spherical below melting temperature, and 4) their protein-containing shell is thinner above melting temperature.

The ability of mixotrophs to combine phototrophy and phagotrophy is now well recognized and found to have important implications for ecosystem dynamics. In this paper, we examine the dynamical consequences of the invasion of mixotrophs in a system that is a limiting case of the chemostat. The model is a hybrid of a competition model describing the competition between autotroph and mixotroph populations for a limiting resource, and a predator--prey-type model describing the interaction between autotroph and herbivore populations. Our results show that mixotrophs are able to invade in both autotrophic environments and environments described by interactions between autotrophs and herbivores. The interaction between autotrophs and herbivores might be in equilibrium or cycle. We find that invading mixotrophs have the ability to both stabilize and destabilize autotroph-herbivore dynamics depending on the competitive ability of mixotrophs. The invasion of mixotrophs can also result in multiple attractors.

We have in a previous study introduced a novel elliptic operator Delta((p,q))u = vertical bar del u vertical bar(q) Delta(1)u + (p - 1) vertical bar del u vertical bar(p-2)Delta(infinity) u, p >= 1, q >= 0, as a generalization of the p-Laplace operator. In this paper, we establish the well-posedness of the parabolic equation u(t) =vertical bar del u vertical bar(1-q) Delta((1+q,q)), where q = q(vertical bar del u vertical bar) is continuous and has range in [0, 1], in the framework of viscosity solutions. We prove the consistency and convergence of the numerical scheme of finite differences of this parabolic equation. Numerical simulations shows the advantage of this operator applied to image enhancement.

Kriterium av Rosenzweig-MacArthur (1963) är ett grafiskt kriterium för att belysa lokal stabilitet för Gause-typ Jägar-byte system. Det är oklart om en liknade kriterium också finns för system med resurs term, t ex, chemostat modell (Kooi et al 1998). I denna artikel gav vi ett positivt svar till denna fråga med hjälp av implicit funktion teori.

The Rosenzweig-MacArthur (1963) criterion is a graphical criterion that has been widely used for elucidating the local stability properties of the Gause (1934) type predator-prey systems. It has not been stated whether a similar criterion holds for models with explicit resource dynamics (Kooi et al. (1998)), like the chemostat model. In this paper we use the implicit function theorem and implicit derivatives for proving that a similar graphical criterion holds under chemostat conditions, too.

In this work we introduce a novel operator ∆_(p;q) as an extended family of operators that generalize the p-Laplace operator. The operator is derived with an emphasis on image processing applications, and particularly, with a focus on image denoising applications. We propose a non-linear transition function, coupling p and q, which yields a non-linear ltering scheme analogous to adaptive spatially dependent total variation and linear ltering. Well-posedness of the nal parabolic PDE is established via pertubation theory and connection to classical results in functional analysis. Numerical results demonstrates the applicability of the novel operator∆_ (p;q).

In this paper, a nonlinear mathematical model is presented for the transmission dynamics of HIV/AIDS in Cuba. Due to Cuba's highly successful national prevention program, we assume that the only mode of transmission is through contact with those yet to be diagnosed with HIV. We find the equilibria of the governing nonlinear system, perform a linear stability analysis, and then provide results on global stability.

On infinitesimally short time intervals various processes contributing to population change tend to operate independently so that we can simply add their contributions (Metz and Diekmann, The dynamics of physiologically structured populations, 1986, p. 3). This is one of the cornerstones for differential equations modeling in general. Complicated models for processes interacting in a complex manner may be built up, and not only in population dynamics. The principle holds as long as the various contributions are taken into account exactly. In this paper we discuss commonly used approximations that may lead to non-removable dependency terms potentially affecting the long run qualitative behavior of the involved equations. We prove that these terms do not produce such effects in the simplest and most interesting biological case, but the general case is left open. Our main result is a rather complete analysis of an important limiting case. Once complete knowledge of the qualitative properties of simple models is obtained, it greatly facilitates further studies of more complex models. A consequence of our analysis is that standard methods can be applied. However, the application of those methods is far from straightforward and require non-trivial estimates in order to make them valid for all values of the parameters. We focus on making these proofs as elementary as possible.

In this paper we present a model for describing the position distribution of the endocardium in the two-chamber apical long-axis view of the heart in clinical B-mode ultrasound cycles. We propose a novel Bayesian formulation, including priors for spatial and temporal smoothness, and preferred shapes and position. The shape model takes into account both endocardium, atrial region and apex. The likelihood is built using a statistical signal model, which attempts to closely model a censored signal. In addition, the use of a censored Gamma mixture model with unknown censoring point, to handle artefacts resulting from left-censoring of the in US clinical B-mode, is to our knowledge novel. The posterior density is sampled by the Gibbs method to estimate the expected latent variable representation of the endocardium, which we call the Bayesian Probability Map; the map describes the probability of pixels being classified as being within the endocardium. The regularization parameters of the model are estimated by cross-validation, and the results are compared against the two-chamber apical model of Chen et al.