Disruptions in mental-health care during the pandemic left many Americans vulnerable. Among people ages 18 to 44, insurance claims related to psychotic episodes rose 30% to 2 million in 2023 from 2019, according to LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a data-analytics company. Around the U.S., hospitals are overwhelmed. Emergency rooms are adding security guards. Jails serve as a last resort for those unable to care for themselves.
Why women are at greater risk of autoimmune disease such as multiple sclerosis, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis is a long-standing medical mystery, and a team of researchers at Stanford University may now be a step closer to unraveling it.
How the female body handles its extra X chromosome (the male body has just one plus a Y chromosome) might be a factor that helps explain why women are more susceptible to these types of disorders, a new study has suggested. The predominantly chronic conditions involve an off-kilter immune system attacking its own cells and tissues.
While the research involving experiments on mice is preliminary, the observation, after further study, may help inform new treatments and ways to diagnose the diseases, said Dr. Howard Chang, seniorauthor of the paper published in the journal Cell on February 1.
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Other researchers had focused on the disorders’ “female bias” by analyzing sex hormones or chromosome counts. Chang instead zoned in on the role played by a molecule called Xist (pronounced exist) that is not present in male cells.
The Xist molecule’s main job is to deactivate the second female X chromosome in embryos, ensuring that the body’s cells don’t get a potentially toxic double whammy of the chromosome’s protein-coding genes.
“Xist is a very long RNA, 17,000 nucleotides long, or letters, and it associates with approximately almost 100 proteins,” Chang said. Xist molecules work with those proteins to shut down gene expression in the second X chromosome.
There’s a narrow path to such ostentation for the non-famous and non-college-interested who mock the idea of an actual job. Mize found his muse in the con and his ability to rope others into it. Here’s how they say it happened: He struck when you wanted cash. When totems of the middle class were slipping from reach. When you needed a down payment. To pay off credit cards. To start a business. When asking your parents for money made you feel like a failure. When you were suffocated by medical bills, neither earning enough to pay nor poor enough for government help.
Yet money alone doesn’t completely explain why the people closest to Mize entered the ring. Mize had a way of making himself your center of gravity, the one from whom you wanted approval, mentorship, love. Mize could be fun, even thrilling. But getting all that meant pleasing him. And pleasing him meant fraud.
The Dallas Police and Fire Pension System — which as been severely underfunded for years — still has about 25% of its assets tied up in private investments.
That’s according to pension system official’s briefing during Thursday’s Ad Hoc Committee on Pensions meeting.
Those include investments in an energy fund, natural resources — and assets in real estate. The private investments were deemed “legacy” assets that the pension system still maintains.
It was risky private investments that landed the system in the situation it’s in now — with over a billion dollars in unfunded liabilities.
“Currently we’ve gotten that down to 26%,” Dallas Police and Fire Pension System Chief Investment Officer Ryan Wagner said during the meeting.
The analysis of national mortality trends is critically dependent on the quality of the population, exposures and deaths data that underpin death rates. We develop a framework that allows us to assess data reliability and to identify anomalies, illustrated, by way of example, using England and Wales population data. First, we propose a set of graphical diagnostics that help to pinpoint anomalies. Second, we develop a simple Bayesian model that allows us to quantify objectively the size of any anomalies. Two-dimensional graphical diagnostics and modelling techniques are shown to improve significantly our ability to identify and quantify anomalies. An important conclusion is that significant anomalies in population data can often be linked to uneven patterns of births of people in cohorts born in the distant past. In the case of England and Wales, errors of more than 9% in the estimated size of some birth cohorts can be attributed to an uneven pattern of births. We propose methods that can use births data to improve estimates of the underlying population exposures. Finally, we consider the effect of anomalies on mortality forecasts and annuity values, and we find significant effects for some cohorts. Our methodology has general applicability to other sources of population data, such as the Human Mortality Database.
Keywords: Baby boom;Cohort–births–deaths exposures methodology; Convexity adjustment ratio; Deaths; Graphical diagnostics; Population data
Author(s): Andrew J.G.Cairns, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK David Blake, Cass Business School, London, UK Kevin Dowd Durham University Business School, UK and Amy R. Kessler Prudential Retirement, Newark, USA
Publication Date: 2016
Publication Site: Journal of the Royal Statistical Society
J. R. Statist. Soc. A (2016) 179, Part 4, pp. 975–1005
Objective—This report describes deaths from drug overdoses in 2020 in U.S. residents in 46 states and New York City by usual occupation and industry. August 22, 2023
Conclusions—Variation in drug overdose death rates and PMRs by usual occupation and industry in 2020 demonstrates the disproportionate burden of the ongoing drug overdose crisis on certain sectors of the U.S. workforce.
Methods—Frequencies, death rates, and proportionate mortality ratios (PMRs) are presented using the 2020 National Vital Statistics System mortality data file. Data were restricted to decedents aged 16–64 for rates and 15–64 for PMRs with usual occupations and industries in the paid civilian workforce. Age-standardized drug overdose death rates were estimated for usual occupation and industry groups overall, and age-adjusted drug overdose PMRs were estimated for each usual occupation and industry group overall and by sex, race and Hispanic-origin group, type of drug, and drug overdose intent. Age-adjusted drug overdose PMRs were also estimated for individual occupations and industries.
Results—Drug overdose mortality varied by usual occupation and industry. Workers in the construction and extraction occupation group (162.6 deaths per 100,000 workers, 95% confidence interval: 155.8–169.4) and construction industry group (130.9, 126.0–135.8) had the highest drug overdose death rates. The highest group-level drug overdose PMRs were observed in decedents in the construction and extraction occupation group and the construction industry group (145.4, 143.6–147.1 and 144.9, 143.2–146.5, respectively). Differences in drug overdose PMRs by usual occupation and industry group were observed within each sex, within each race and Hispanicorigin group, by drug type, and by drug overdose intent. Among individual occupations and industries, the highest drug overdose PMRs were observed in decedents who worked as fishers and related fishing occupations and in fishing, hunting, and trapping industries (193.1, 166.8–222.4 and 186.5, 161.7–214.1, respectively).
Author(s): Billock RM, Steege AL, Miniño A.
Publication Date: August 22, 2023
Publication Site: CDC, National Vital Statistics System
Importance Antivaccine sentiment is increasingly associated with conservative political positions. Republican-inclined states exhibit lower COVID-19 vaccination rates, but the association between political inclination and reported vaccine adverse events (AEs) is unexplored.
Objective To assess whether there is an association between state political inclination and the reporting rates of COVID-19 vaccine AEs.
Design, Setting, and Participants This cross-sectional study used the AE reports after COVID-19 vaccination from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database from 2020 to 2022, with reports after influenza vaccines from 2019 to 2022 used as a reference. These reports were examined against state-level percentage of Republican votes in the 2020 US presidential election.
Exposure State-level percentage of Republican votes in the 2020 US presidential election.
Main Outcomes and Measures Rates of any AE among COVID-19 vaccine recipients, rates of any severe AE among vaccine recipients, and the proportion of AEs reported as severe.
Results A total of 620 456 AE reports (mean [SD] age of vaccine recipients, 51.8 [17.6] years; 435 797 reports from women [70.2%]; a vaccine recipient could potentially file more than 1 report, so reports are not necessarily from unique individuals) for COVID-19 vaccination were identified from the VAERS database. Significant associations between state political inclination and state AE reporting were observed for all 3 outcomes: a 10% increase in Republican voting was associated with increased odds of AE reports (odds ratio [OR], 1.05; 95% CI, 1.05-1.05; P < .001), severe AE reports (OR, 1.25; 95% CI, 1.24-1.26; P < .001), and the proportion of AEs reported as severe (OR, 1.21; 95% CI, 1.20-1.22; P < .001). These associations were seen across all age strata in stratified analyses and were more pronounced among older subpopulations.
Conclusions and Relevance This cross-sectional study found that the more states were inclined to vote Republican, the more likely their vaccine recipients or their clinicians reported COVID-19 vaccine AEs. These results suggest that either the perception of vaccine AEs or the motivation to report them was associated with political inclination.
Image courtesy of Stockcharts.Com, inset by Centerpoint Securities, annotations by Mish.
Excerpt:
Technical patterns on 2-year, 10-year, and 30-year US treasuries all suggest yields are heading higher. Let’s also discuss the supporting fundamental case.
Centerpoint explains “An ascending triangle chart pattern is a bullish technical pattern that typically signals the continuation of an uptrend. They can signal a coming bullish breakout above an area of resistance after it has been tested several times.”
Many people do not believe in technical patterns, others believe in nothing else. Certainly, technical patterns fail often enough.
My take is they work best as entry and exit point strategies, especially when fundamentals align.
Now let’s turn to the paper. Here is what the authors find (weak correlation btw voting and vaccine injuries) , and here are the issues.
These data are ecological. It doesn’t prove that republicans themselves are more likely to report vaccine injuries. It would not be difficult to pair voting records with vaccine records at an individual patient level if the authors wished to do it right— another example of research laziness.
What if republicans actually DO have more vaccine injuries? The authors try to correct for the fact by adjusting for influenza adverse events.
Let me explain why this is a poor choice. The factors that predict whether someone has an adverse event to influenza vaccine may not be the same as those that predict adverse events from covid shots. It could be that there are actually more covid vaccine injuries in one group than another— even though both had equal rates of influenza injuries.
Another way to think of it is, there can be two groups of people and you can balance them by the rate with which they get headaches from drinking wine, but one group can be more likely to get headaches from reading without glasses because more people in that group wear glasses. In other words, states with more republicans might be states with specific co-morbidities that predict COVID vaccine adverse side effects but not influenza vaccine side effects. We already know that COVID vaccine injuries do affect different groups (young men, for e.g.).
Author(s): Vinay Prasad
Publication Date: 2 Apr 2024
Publication Site: Vinay Prasad’s Thoughts and Observations at substack
