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Child maltreatment often has a negative impact on the development of social behavior and health. The biobehavioral mechanisms through which these adverse outcomes emerge, however, are not clear. To better understand the ways in which early life adversity affects subsequent social behavior, changes in the neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) in children (n = 73) aged 8.1–11.5 years following a laboratory stressor were examined. Girls with histories of physical abuse have higher levels of urinary OT and lower levels of salivary cortisol following the stressor when compared to controls. Abused and control boys, however, do not differ in their hormonal responses. These data suggest that early adversity may disrupt the development of the stress regulation system in girls by middle childhood.

Objective To compare the diagnostic accuracy of dual-energy (DE) virtual non-contrast computed tomography (vNCT) to non-contrast CT (NCT) for the diagnosis of adrenal adenomas. Methods Search of multiple databases and grey literature was performed. Two reviewers independently applied inclusion criteria and extracted data. Risk of bias was assessed using QUADAS-2. Summary estimates of diagnostic accuracy were generated and sources of heterogeneity were assessed. Results Five studies (170 patients; 192 adrenal masses) were included for diagnostic accuracy assessment; all used dual-source dual-energy CT. Pooled sensitivity for adrenal adenoma on vNCT was 54% (95% CI: 47–62%). Pooled sensitivity for NCT was 57% (95% CI: 45–69%). Pooling of specificity was not performed since no false positives were reported. There was a trend for overestimation of HU density on vNCT as compared to NCT which appeared related to contrast timing. Potential sources of bias were seen regarding the index test and reference standard for the included studies. Potential sources of heterogeneity between studies were seen in adenoma prevalence and intravenous contrast timing. Conclusions vNCT images generated from dual-energy CT demonstrated comparable sensitivity to NCT for the diagnosis of adenomas; however the included studies are heterogeneous and at high risk for some types of bias. Key points • Similar sensitivity of vNCT to NCT for diagnosis of adenoma • Heterogeneity could be related to vNCT from early (<=60 sec) CECT studies • Could not pool specificity as there were no false positives • Small number of heterogeneous studies at high risk of bias

The period to 2035 is likely to be characterised by instability between states and in relations between groups within states. It is predicted to include climate change, rapid population growth, resource scarcity, resurgence in ideology, and shifts in power from west to east. Many of these changes are likely to have an impact on the health of civil societies and those military personnel deployed by states to counter these challenges. This paper considers the potential impact of emerging global strategic trends on health service support (HSS) in the Future Operating Environment 2035. Global Strategic Trends-Out to 2040, The Future Character of Conflict and NATO Strategic Foresight Analysis Report 2013 provide the foundations of the paper. The study concludes that future impacts on HSS are neither completely predictable nor predetermined, and there is always a possibility of a strategic shock. Knowledge of vulnerability, however, allows an informed approach to the development and evaluation of adaptive strategies to lessen risks to health.

The final major development in 2014 was the production of Joint Tactics Techniques and Procedures on Force Health Protection and Health Risk Management. 4 This document provides guidance to aid health service support and planning staff working at the tactical and operational level on the conduct of force health protection and health risk management.

For thirty years after Franklin Pierce's death, the ex-president's reputation remained low in the estimation of historians and the public. Most saw Pierce and his successor James Buchanan as primary culprits in the sectional discord leading to the Civil War. Between 1900 and 1915, however, Pierce's reputation improved, with the sectional healing represented by Blue-Gray reunions on former battlefields like Gettysburg and the election of only the second Democratic president since the war, Woodrow Wilson. This process of healing was particularly difficult in Pierce's home state of New Hampshire. In a classic case of contested memory, the Grand Army of the Republic repeatedly stymied Democratic attempts to raise a statue to the state's only president and criticized Pierce as a traitor and Confederate sympathizer. The Democrats, however, took over the New Hampshire governor's chair in 1913, and the legislature voted to honor Pierce with a statue. In that small early twentieth-century window, Franklin Pierce became a beneficiary of hard-earned sectional reconciliation.

We develop a generalized projective gauge theory of gravity and spinorial matter, incorporating both non-metricity and torsion. The work is divided into three parts.Part I provides a thorough review of affine geometry, decomposing arbitrary affine connections into Levi-Civita, disformation, and contorsion. We discuss curvature tensors, their contractions, and the role of projective and symmetric projective transformations. A review of the Einstein-Hilbert action and its field equations sets the stage for exploring projective deformations. Common modifications—matter coupling and a cosmological constant—are introduced, then recast in differential form language (Palatini formalism). We also review the Metric-Affine gauge theory of gravity and its Mobius representation, along with topological terms (Euler, Pontrjagin, Nieh-Yan) and Bianchi identities. Motivations for a projective approach include the string theoretic derivation of the Diffeomorphism gauge potential, its role in analogy to the electromagnetic gauge potential, and the higher-dimensional volume bundle that unifies projective transformations and reparameterizations. The Thomas-Whitehead (TW) model is reviewed, showing how its projective Schouten tensor (Diffeomorphism field adjacent) can yield a Higgs-like potential that induces a cosmological constant and mass.Part II constructs projective space from the affine tangent bundle, identifies its group of transformations (Projective General Linear Group), and derives the projective algebra under Lorentz decomposition, showing a group contraction results in a pseudo-affine group. We extend the volume bundle to incorporate translations of the contact point between spacetime and projective tangent spaces, and introduce a factoring-map whose minimal condition for a projective structure generates a new scalar field. The newly found projective symmetric teleparallel (PST) connections are then defined, yielding torsion-free, flat, projectively invariant connections. Generalizing to non-inertial frames, and using nonlinear gauge symmetry realizations to implement local Lorentz symmetry, we construct a general geometric framework that unifies TW and Metric-Affine gravity with projectively invariant spacetime torsion. We introduce projective generalized Higgs fields and show how certain gauge choices reduce these to fundamental projective fields, and how they may be used to define fundamental geometric objects such as the projective 2-frame and spacetime connection. A Lovelock-inspired action is shown to support only curvature (metric) dynamics, implying a topologically constrained Schouten field via the Pontrjagin density. The projective Pontrjagin density is shown to contain a new topological invariant, not present in the literature. We analyze the solution space, revealing possible nontrivial projective torsion vector modes and degenerate co-frames, while recovering an (A)-dS description of spacetime, with bare cosmological constant modified by a rigid Schouten field.Part III formulates projective spinors by defining gamma matrices via the projective linear group metric, then employing nonlinear gauge symmetry realizations to ensure local Lorentz covariance. A general spinor metric introduces a complex phase of redundancy. Requiring a real, Hermitian action leads to a self-adjoint operator that eliminates any coupling to non-metricity, leaving torsion as the sole gravitational interaction with spinors—reducing effectively to an Einstein-Cartan-type theory. An induced chiral mass emerges without the CP violation plaguing TW theory, potentially aiding neutrino mass models. Projective spinor currents and chiral currents are briefly investigated, and the foundations of future work are built to explore the full coupling of projective gravity and matter, and a projective description of the chiral anomaly.

The Thomas-Whitehead (TW) projective theory of gravity has its origin in 1 + 1(+1) dimensional string theory. The coadjoint elements of the Virasoro algebra contain the Diffeomorphism field, identified by its transformation behavior under the coadjoint action. Through a correspondence with Sturm-Liouville operators, the Diffeomorphism field is identified with the potential. When lifted to a higher dimensional classical theory, the Diffeomorphism field appears as a component of a projective connection.In m spacetime dimensions, the projective spin connection, rather, the framed projective connection appears as a nonlinear connection taking values in the Lie algebra of a particular subgroup of the general linear group in m + 1 dimensions. These vertical translations are restored and a composite coset element is formed. The resulting nonlinear connection may be viewed as a general pre-projective connection. Emphasis is put on the utilization of covariant generalized Higgs fields in this construction. Some properties of the present connection are investigated and compared with what is known about the TW projective connection.This document seeks a basis-independent description of projective gravity, wherein the recently discovered Diffeomorphism field retains dynamics. Without an additional metric structure, only one option presents itself as a governing action functional. The projective Pontryagin density is formed and the associated Chern-Simons forms computed. The latter appear nearly identical to the Chern-Simons forms of Metric-Affine gravitational gauge theories coupled to a scalar field when expanded about the maximally symmetric (anti) de Sitter solutions. In a similar fashion, the associated field equations serve to produce the Bianchi identities.Once a metric structure is introduced, further action functionals become available. However, this imposition requires the stability group be Lorentzian. This makes available a notion of Lie algebra dual. Two dual operations are considered. The first follows the work of Stelle and West, utilizing a fundamental algebraic vector field to explicitly reduce the symmetry group. The second is an ordinary duality, which is utilized to form a Lovelock-type action. Both models are solved and discussed. None of these models appear to produce dynamics for the Diffeomorphism field.Matter fields are here considered in the nonlinear setting. This straight-forward process reveals a discrepancy when compared to the common uses of projective matter fields. In avoidance of this, the common form is adopted and all new structure reduced, such that the setting which results is that of TW theory. The TW-Dirac model is revisited and written in a manifestly covariant form upon the dimensional reduction to spacetime. A non-hermitian chiral coupling to the Diffeomorphism scalar is re-confirmed. However, the induced chiral mass is shown to contain both hermiticity-respecting and violating contributions. The implications of this are left for future work.