Evaluation of Adherence to Nutritional Intervention Through Trajectory Analysis.

Classical pre-post intervention studies are often analyzed using traditional statistics. Nevertheless, the nutritional interventions have small effects on the metabolism and traditional statistics are not enough to detect these subtle nutrient effects. Generally, this kind of studies assumes that the participants are adhered to the assigned dietary intervention and directly analyzes its effects over the target parameters. Thus, the evaluation of adherence is generally omitted. Although, sometimes, participants do not effectively adhere to the assigned dietary guidelines. For this reason, the trajectory map is proposed as a visual tool where dietary patterns of individuals can be followed during the intervention and can also be related with nutritional prescriptions. The trajectory analysis is also proposed allowing both analysis: 1) adherence to the intervention and 2) intervention effects. The analysis is made by projecting the differences of the target parameters over the resulting trajectories between states of different time-stamps which might be considered either individually or by groups. The proposal has been applied over a real nutritional study showing that some individuals adhere better than others and some individuals of the control group modify their habits during the intervention. In addition, the intervention effects are different depending on the type of individuals, even some subgroups have opposite response to the same intervention.

[DIRECTIONALITY OF THE BIOLOGICAL EFFECT OF DRINKING WATER].

There have been performed the studies of the dimensional parameters of peroxide associates in drinking water, per- forming regulatory functions in cellular metabolism, that determine the character of the biological response of the human body to drinking water The direction of action of peroxide associates type Σ [(HO2-(*) ... OH-(*) (H2O) tp)]q, (where (H2O) tp is an associate with the tetragonal structure (Walrafen pentamer Is ice VI), q is the degree of association p--parameter of ion coordination) on the cellular structures of the organism is associated with their quantum properties, determining the macroscopic parameters of the electron wave packets. Research has confirmed the addressness of the nonlocal entering electron to certain cellular structures of the body, which is determined by the structural similarity of centers of condensation of electrons in the cells of systems and organs of the body with the parameters of the electron wave packets in the associates. Methodology for the estimation of the orientation of biological effect of the drinking water to the systems of the body on the base of the analysis of variations in heart rhythm under non-contact influence of water on the human body and its relationship with the dimensional parameters and peroxide activity of associates in drinking water can be suggested for the implementation of screening tests for drinking water quality, taking into account both the individualfeatures of responses of body systems to drinking water and its group action.

[KEEPING THE ELECTRON-DONOR PROPERTIES OF DRINKING WATER].

In a study there was performed the experimental evaluation of long-term structural--physical changes of the phase of associated water in drinking water treated in hypomagnetic conditions according to the the technology providing the retention of of ortho/para isomers of water in the presence of a catalyst--triplet oxygen. According to the results of measurements ofparameters of nano-associates formed in the water there was found a series ofconsistencies, allowing to determine the mechanisms of the impact of hypomagnetic treatment on the catalytic properties ofwater and long-term stability of its activated state, that provides the long-term maintenance of high biological activity of drinking water. In particular, under hypomagnetic conditions of the treatment there is formed denser packing of amorphous ice--VI in the composition of associates peroxide, serving as a kind of "reservoir" of atmospheric gases. In such a "reservoir" there realized higher pressure, compared with normal geophysical conditions, that stimulates the gas-phase reactions with the formation of dimers and trimers of oxygen existing in the 2-electron--active configurations with binding energies of 0.3 eVand ~0.2 eV providing phase modulation, resulting in condensation of environment additional electrons on paramagnetic oxygen, which provides the long-term maintenance of the electron--donor ability of water and electrically non-equilibrium state.

Knowledge Discovery on Functional Disabilities: Clustering Based on Rules versus other Approaches.

In Europe senior citizens are a fast growing part of population, increasing proportion of disabled persons and that of persons with reduced quality of life. The concept of disability itself is not always precise and quantifiable. To improve agreement on it, the World Health Organization (WHO) developed the clinical test WHO Disability Assessment Schedule, (WHO-DASII) that includes physical, mental, and social well-being, as a generic measure of functioning. From the medical point of view, the purpose of this work is to extract knowledge about performance of the WHO-DASII using a sample of patients from an italian hospital.This Knowledge Discovery problem has been faced by using clustering based on rules, an hybrid AI and Statistics technique introduced by Gibert (1994), which combines some Inductive Learning (from AI) with clustering (from Statistics) to extract knowledge from certain complex domains in form of tipical profiles. In this paper, the results of applying this technique to the WHO-DASII results is presented together with a comparison of other more classical analysis approaches.

Onset of antidepressant action: a pharmacological question?

OBJECTIVE: This study was conducted to analyse the onset of action of antidepressants in naturalistic conditions. METHOD: Multicenter, prospective, open-label, non-comparative naturalistic study among 582 depressed outpatients treated with mirtazapine. The patients were assessed at screening, and after 1, 2 and 4 weeks by the 17-item Hamilton depression rating scale (17-HAM-D) and clinical global impression (CGI). Onset of action was measured by traditional analyses based on the time to a persistent reduction of more than 50% from baseline on the 17-HAM-D. Patients were grouped into four groups: very fast responders, fast responders, traditional responders and partial or non-responders. The non-parametric Kruskall-Wallis test was used to assess differences between the groups and logistic regression to predict response after 1 week of treatment. RESULTS: 16% of patients had a very fast response, 42.1% a fast response, 26.5% a traditional response and 15.5% a partial or non-response. There were no significant differences between these groups with regard to dose of mirtazapine or sociodemographic characteristics. The baseline total 17-HAM-D was lower in the faster groups than in the slower groups. The evolution of 17-HAM-D items was similar in each responder group. CONCLUSION: Time to response varied from early faster response to late slower response. The evolution of 17-HAM-D for each type of response was similar, but occurred at a different time in each group.