Correlation between estimated pulse wave velocity values from two equations in healthy and under cardiovascular risk populations.

INTRODUCTION: Equations can calculate pulse wave velocity (ePWV) from blood pressure values (BP) and age. The ePWV predicts cardiovascular events beyond carotid-femoral PWV. We aimed to evaluate the correlation between four different equations to calculate ePWV. METHODS: The ePWV was estimated utilizing mean BP (MBP) from office BP (MBPOBP) or 24-hour ambulatory BP (MBP24-hBP). We separated the whole sample into two groups: individuals with risk factors and healthy individuals. The e-PWV was calculated as follows: [Formula: see text] [Formula: see text] We calculated the concordance correlation coefficient (Pc) between e1-PWVOBP vs e2-PWVOBP, e1-PWV24-hBP vs e2-PWV24-hBP, and mean values of e1-PWVOBP, e2-PWVOBP, e1-PWV24-hBP and e2-PWV24-hBP. The multilevel regression model determined how much the ePWVs are influenced by age and MBP values. RESULTS: We analyzed data from 1541 individuals; 1374 ones with risk factors and 167 healthy ones. The values are presented for the entire sample, for risk-factor patients and for healthy individuals respectively. The correlation between e1-PWVOBP with e2-PWVOBP and e1-PWV24-hBP with e2-PWV24-hBP was almost perfect. The Pc for e1-PWVOBP vs e2-PWVOBP was 0.996 (0.995-0.996), 0.996 (0.995-0.996), and 0.994 (0.992-0.995); furthermore, it was 0.994 (0.993-0.995), 0.994 (0.994-0.995), 0.987 (0.983-0.990) to the e1-PWV24-hBP vs e2-PWV24-hBP. There were no significant differences between mean values (m/s) for e1-PWVOBP vs e2-PWVOBP 8.98±1.9 vs 8.97±1.8; p = 0.88, 9.14±1.8 vs 9.13±1.8; p = 0.88, and 7.57±1.3 vs 7.65±1.3; p = 0.5; mean values are also similar for e1-PWV24-hBP vs e2-PWV24-hBP, 8.36±1.7 vs 8.46±1.6; p = 0.09, 8.50±1.7 vs 8.58±1.7; p = 0.21 and 7.26±1.3 vs 7.39±1.2; p = 0.34. The multiple linear regression showed that age, MBP, and age2 predicted more than 99.5% of all four e-PWV. CONCLUSION: Our data presents a nearly perfect correlation between the values of two equations to calculate the estimated PWV, whether utilizing office or ambulatory blood pressure.

Assessing police topological efficiency in a major sting operation on the dark web.

The networked nature of criminals using the dark web is poorly understood and infrequently studied, mostly due to a lack of data. Rarer still are studies on the topological effectiveness of police interventions. Between 2014 and 2016, the Brazilian Federal Police raided a child pornography ring acting inside the dark web. With these data, we build a topic-view network and compare network disruption strategies with the real police work. Only 7.4% of the forum users share relevant content, and the topological features of this core differ markedly from other clandestine networks. Approximately 60% of the core users need to be targeted to fully break the network connectivity, while the real effect of the arrests was similar to random failure. Despite this topological robustness, the overall "viewership network" was still well disrupted by the arrests, because only 10 users contributed to almost 1/3 of the total post views and 8 of these were apprehended. Moreover, the users who were arrested provided a total of 60% of the viewed content. These results indicate that for similar online systems, aiming at the users that concentrate the views may lead to more efficient police interventions than focusing on the overall connectivity.