Study Design and Setting: KORA-Age, a population-based cross-sectional study of the MONICA/KORA project, a randomized sample from Southern Germany of people aged 65 years or older.
Results: A total of 534 (51.5%) of 1,037 participants were characterized
as disabled. Disabled participants were on average 4.5 years older than those who were not disabled. Crude associations of left-axis deviation, ventricular conduction defects, atrial fibrillation, and QT prolongation with disability status were significant (P < 0.05). In models check details controlled for age and sex, these effects remained constant except for QT prolongation. In the models adjusted for the minimal sufficient adjustment set (consisting of the variables sex, physical activity, age, obesity, diabetes, education, heart diseases, income, lung diseases, and stroke) identified by a directed acyclic graph (DAG), no significant association could be shown.
Conclusion: Associations between specific ECG findings and disability were found in unadjusted analysis and logistic models adjusted for age and sex. However, when adjusting for other possible confounders identified by the DAG, all these associations were no
longer significant. It is important to adequately identify confounding in such settings. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.”
“BACKGROUND: Reduction of excess sludge production has become an urgent issue. An investigation into the influence of thermochemical sludge pretreatment on sludge reduction in a bench-scale selleck screening library anoxic-aerobic membrane bioreactor was performed. Two systems were operated. In one system, part of the mixed liquid GSK2126458 datasheet (1.5% of the influent flow rate) was pretreated thermochemically (at 80 degrees C, pH 11 and 3 h) and returned to the bioreactor. This study examined and evaluated the effect of thermochemical sludge pretreatment on the reduction of excess sludge and on the performance of the system.
RESULTS: The average
solubilization efficiency of the pretreated sludge was found to be about 0.2. The sludge production rate of the experimental system (E-MBR) was less than that of the control (C-MBR) by about 33%. The total phosphorus was removed mainly by normal cell synthesis, with removal efficiencies of 38-40% and 40-42% for the E-MBR and C-MBR, respectively. The total nitrogen removal in the E-MBR was slightly higher than in the C-MBR due to supply of soluble chemical oxygen demand (SCOD) from the digested sludge solution as an external carbon source. The mixed liquor volatile suspended solids (MLVSS) and mixed liquor suspended solids (MLSS) ratios for the two systems were almost identical, in the range 74-77%, indicating that the inorganics from the disintegrated cells do not accumulate as particulates in the reactor. The TMP was maintained at less than 6 cmHg for 180 days without membrane cleaning.