Exploring functional information among various brain regions across time enables understanding of healthy aging process and holds great promise for age-related brain disease diagnosis. This paper proposed a method to explore fractal complexity of the resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) signal in the human brain across the adult lifespan using Hurst exponent (HE). We took advantage of the examined rs-fMRI data from 116 adults 19 to 85 years of age (44.3 ± 19.4 years, 49 females) from NKI/Rockland sample. Region-wise and voxel-wise analyses were performed to investigate the effects of age, gender, and their interaction on complexity. In region-wise analysis, we found that the healthy aging is accompanied by a loss of complexity in frontal and parietal lobe and increased complexity in insula, limbic, and temporal lobe. Meanwhile, differences in HE between genders were found to be significant in parietal lobe (p = 0.04, corrected). However, there was no interaction between gender and age. In voxel-wise analysis, the significant complexity decrease with aging was found in frontal and parietal lobe, and complexity increase was found in insula, limbic lobe, occipital lobe, and temporal lobe with aging. Meanwhile, differences in HE between genders were found to be significant in frontal, parietal, and limbic lobe. Furthermore, we found age and sex interaction in right parahippocampal gyrus (p = 0.04, corrected). Our findings reveal HE variations of the rs-fMRI signal across the human adult lifespan and show that HE may serve as a new parameter to assess healthy aging process.

Relationships between stream water and air temperatures are often modeled using linear or nonlinear regression methods. Despite a strong relationship between water and air temperatures and a variety of models that are effective for data summarized on a weekly basis, such models did not yield consistently good predictions for summaries such as daily maximum temperature. A good predictive model for daily maximum temperature is required because daily maximum temperature is an important measure for predicting survival of temperature sensitive fish. To appropriately model the strong relationship between water and air temperatures at a daily time step, it is important to incorporate information related to the time of the year into the modeling. In this work, a time-varying coefficient model is used to study the relationship between air temperature and water temperature. The time-varying coefficient model enables dynamic modeling of the relationship, and can be used to understand how the air-water temperature relationship varies over time. The proposed model is applied to 10 streams in Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia using daily maximum temperatures. It provides a better fit and better predictions than those produced by a simple linear regression model or a nonlinear logistic model.

Rapid population ageing in China has urged the need to understand health transitions of older Chinese to assist the development of social security programmes and financial products aimed at funding long-term care. In this paper, we develop a new flexible approach to modelling health transitions in a multi-state Markov model that allows for age effects, time trends and age-time interactions. The model is implemented in the generalised linear modelling framework. We apply the model to evaluate health transitions of Chinese elderly using individual-level panel data from the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey for the period 1998–2012. Our results confirm that time trends and age–time interactions are important factors explaining health transitions in addition to the more commonly used age effects. We document that differences in disability and mortality rates continue to persist between urban and rural older Chinese. We also compute life expectancies and healthy life expectancies based on the proposed model as inputs for the development of aged care and financial services for older Chinese.

No abstract

No abstract