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Resedent Study- Reducing Sedentary Behaviour May Slow Cognitive Decline In Older Adults With Mild Cognitive Impairment: A Pilot Study, Kirsten B. Dillon

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Physical activity (PA) has been shown to slow down dementia. Unfortunately, older adults spend most of their day in sedentary behaviours (SB). Breaking up prolonged bouts of sitting with intermittent bouts of light intensity PA may reduce glycemic variability in the brain; potentially mitigating cognitive decline. This study investigated how interrupting SB with 10 min bouts of light intensity PA 3x a day would affect mild to moderate cognitive impairment progression (primary outcome) in older adults residing in an assisted living facility. Participants (n=25) were assigned in clusters into a two arm 10-week single site pilot randomized controlled trial. Secondary …

An Application Of The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem: Optimizing Cluster Method Parameters To Produce Predictive Data For Hiv Outbreaks, Connor J. Chato, Art Fy Poon

Western Research Forum

Background

A popular approach to study HIV outbreaks is to cluster cases based on genetic similarity. However, there is no widely-used statistical criterion which optimizes the parameters for sequence-based clustering methods. The relationship between a cluster-defining similarity threshold and it’s associated set of clusters can be analogized to the aggregation level in the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP).

Hypothesis

Based on the selection of aggregation level for study partitions in MAUP, we present a statistical framework to optimize the similarity threshold for pairwise distance algorithm TN93 (http://github.com/veg/tn93). We hypothesize that defining this threshold includes case connections such that …

Measuring Quality Of Life In Patients With Rotator Cuff Disorders, Rochelle Furtado

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Rotator cuff disorders (RCDs) are a common musculoskeletal problem with a higher prevalence in women and after the age of 60. Due to the increasing need for patient-centered care, researchers have been directed towards the use of patient reported outcomes (PROs) to evaluate the progress of patient recovery, as the experience varies across individuals.

Recently, the Western Ontario Rotator Cuff Index was reduced in items to create the shortened version of the Western Ontario Rotator Cuff Index (Short-WORC). However, the Short-WORC’s psychometrics have yet to be evaluated. Therefore, this mixed-methods thesis aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Short-WORC …

Hiv-1 Group M Subtype Fitness, Disease Progression, And Entry Efficiency, Colin M. Venner

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) emerged in the human population shortly after the turn of the 19th century. Distribution of HIV-1 across the globe over the past 30–35 years can be traced to founder events with primordial HIV strains from sub-Saharan Africa. Even considering the burden of HIV in Africa, our knowledge of HIV-1 disease is still largely limited to subtype B HIV-1, a strain responsible for 3 million infections in North America and Europe as compared to the 33 million that are infected with HIV-1 subtypes A, C, D, and circulating and unique recombinant forms.

This dissertation analyzes …