BackgroundCachexia is a hallmark of pulmonary tuberculosis and is associated with poor prognosis. A better understanding of the mechanisms behind such weight loss could reveal targets for therapeutic intervention. The role of appetite-regulatory hormones in tuberculosis is unknown.Methods and Findings41 subjects with newly-diagnosed pulmonary TB (cases) were compared to 82 healthy controls. We measured appetite, body mass index (BMI), % body fat (BF), plasma peptide YY (PYY), leptin, ghrelin, and resistin for all subjects. Measurements were taken at baseline for controls and at treatment days 0, 30, and 60 for cases. Baseline appetite, BMI, and BF were lower in cases than in controls and improved during treatment. PYY, ghrelin, and resistin were significantly elevated in cases and fell during treatment. Leptin was lower in cases and rose with treatment. Appetite was inversely related to PYY in cases. High pre-treatment PYY predicted reduced gains in appetite and BF. PYY was the strongest independent predictor of appetite in cases across all time points.ConclusionsAppetite-regulatory hormones are altered in TB patients. As hormones normalize during treatment, appetite is restored and nutritional status improves. High baseline PYY is an indicator of poor prognosis for improvement in appetite and nutrition during treatment. Wasting in TB patients may partly be mediated by upregulation of PYY with resulting appetite suppression.

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Technology at the University of New Haven, in this paper, we illustrate how to use MATLAB to help students" learning of calculus-based business mathematics and apply the calculus principles to find solutions to real quantitative business problems. Our experience shows that MATLAB greatly saves students" efforts in learning difficult and pure calculus formulas and it is easy for business students to acquire the basic internal functions in using MATLAB.

In testing the mean of a population or comparing the means from two populations. There are several statistics available: the t-test, z-test, F-test and the chi-square test. Both the t-test and the z-test are usually used for continuous populations, and the chi-square test is used for categorical data. The F-test is used for comparing more than two means. In this paper we will discuss: 1) the conditions on using these tests; 2) the relationship among these test; and 3) illustration of the p-values of these tests by graphs. Some concluding remarks will be provided.

Increase in popularity of various deep learning methodologies has led to a huge increase in demand for training data. These training data often contain video featuring people but these videos often cannot be used due to privacy concerns as people are identifiable. We present an extension to the DeepDish object tracking system running on a Raspberry Pi. DeepDish performs object detection in the Raspberry Pi itself, avoiding the need to ship raw video data off the device. Our extension adds online face detection and blurring to preserve privacy. We implement and evaluate four different face detection algorithms, achieving 83% accuracy using YuNet, while increasing the latency by 75%. We then implement and evaluate three different object tracking algorithms to reduce the latency increase by running the simpler object tracking algorithm, reducing the number of calls to the expensive face detection algorithm. The result is a significant decrease in latency at the cost of a small decrease in accuracy. We also implemented and compared three different face obfuscation algorithms, one of which achieves differential privacy.