To study the effect of myopia and spectacle wear on bicycle-related injuries in rural Chinese students. Myopia is common among Chinese students but few studies have examined its effect on daily activities.
Methods
Data on visual acuity, refractive error, current spectacle wear, and history of bicycle use and accidents during the past 3 years were sought from 1891 students undergoing eye examinations in rural Guangdong province.
Results
Refractive and accident data were available for 1539 participants (81.3%), among whom the mean age was 14.6 years, 52.5% were girls, 26.8% wore glasses, and 12.9% had myopia of less than −4 diopters in both eyes. More than 90% relied on bicycles to get to school daily. A total of 2931 accidents were reported by 423 participants, with 68 requiring medical attention. Male sex (odds ratio, 1.55;P < .001) and spectacle wear (odds ratio, 1.38;P = .04) were associated with a higher risk of accident, but habitual visual acuity and myopia were unassociated with the crash risk, after adjusting for age, sex, time spent riding, and risky riding behaviors.
Conclusion
These results may be consistent with data on motor vehicle accidents implicating peripheral vision (potentially compromised by spectacle wear) more strongly than central visual acuity in mediating crash risk.
Background & Objective . IRIS is an important complication that occurs during management of HIV-TB coinfection and it poses difficulty in diagnosis. Previous studies have reported variable incidence of IRIS. The present study was undertaken to describe the pattern of TB-associated IRIS using recently proposed consensus case-definitions for TB-IRIS for its use in resource-limited settings. Methods . A prospective analysis of ART-naïve adults started on HAART from November, 2008 to May, 2010 was done in a tertiary care hospital in north India. A total 224 patients divided into two groups, one with HIV-TB and the other with HIV alone, were followedup for a minimum period of 3 months. The diagnosis of TB was categorised as ‘‘definitive’’ and ‘‘probable’’. Results . Out of a total of 224 patients, 203 completed followup. Paradoxical TB-IRIS occurred in 5 of 123 (4%) HIV-TB patients while 6 of 80 (7.5%) HIV patients developed ART-associated TB. A reduction in plasma viral load was significantly (P=.016) associated with paradoxical TB-IRIS. No identifiable risk factors were associated with the development of ART-associated TB. Conclusion . The consensus case-definitions are useful tools in the diagnosis of TB-associated IRIS. High index of clinical suspicion is required for an early diagnosis.
How to efficiently serve LLMs in practice has become exceptionally challenging due to their prohibitive memory and computation requirements. In this study, we investigate optimizing the KV cache, whose memory footprint poses a critical bottleneck in LLM inference, especially when dealing with long context tasks. To tackle the challenge, we introduce MiniKV, a KV cache optimization method that simultaneously preserves long context task accuracy while significantly reducing KV cache size via a novel 2-bit layer-discriminative KV cache. More importantly, we develop specialized CUDA kernels to make MiniKV compatible with FlashAttention. Experiments on a wide range of long context tasks show that MiniKV effectively achieves 86% KV cache compression ratio while recovering over 98.5% of accuracy, outperforming state-of-the-art methods while achieving excellent measured system performance improvements.
To evaluate visual acuity, visual function, and prevalence of refractive error among Chinese secondary-school children in a cross-sectional school-based study.Uncorrected, presenting, and best corrected visual acuity, cycloplegic autorefraction with refinement, and self-reported visual function were assessed in a random, cluster sample of rural secondary school students in Xichang, China.Among the 1892 subjects (97.3% of the consenting children, 84.7% of the total sample), mean age was 14.7 +/- 0.8 years, 51.2% were female, and 26.4% were wearing glasses. The proportion of children with uncorrected, presenting, and corrected visual disability (< or = 6/12 in the better eye) was 41.2%, 19.3%, and 0.5%, respectively. Myopia < -0.5, < -2.0, and < -6.0 D in both eyes was present in 62.3%, 31.1%, and 1.9% of the subjects, respectively. Among the children with visual disability when tested without correction, 98.7% was due to refractive error, while only 53.8% (414/770) of these children had appropriate correction. The girls had significantly (P < 0.001) more presenting visual disability and myopia < -2.0 D than did the boys. More myopic refractive error was associated with worse self-reported visual function (ANOVA trend test, P < 0.001).Visual disability in this population was common, highly correctable, and frequently uncorrected. The impact of refractive error on self-reported visual function was significant. Strategies and studies to understand and remove barriers to spectacle wear are needed.
Abstract Objectives We assessed associations between child stunting, recovery, and faltering with schooling and human capital skills in a native Amazonian society of horticulturalists‐foragers (Tsimane'). Methods We used cross‐sectional data (2008) from 1262 children aged 6 to 16 years in 53 villages to assess contemporaneous associations between three height categories: stunted (height‐for‐age Z score, HAZ<–2), moderately stunted (–2 ≤ HAZ≤–1), and nonstunted (HAZ>–1), and three categories of human capital: completed grades of schooling, test‐based academic skills (math, reading, writing), and local plant knowledge. We used annual longitudinal data (2002–2010) from all children ( n = 853) in 13 villages to estimate the association between changes in height categories between the first and last years of measure and schooling and academic skills. Results Stunting was associated with 0.4 fewer completed grades of schooling (∼24% less) and with 13–15% lower probability of showing any writing or math skills. Moderate stunting was associated with ∼20% lower scores in local plant knowledge and 9% lower probability of showing writing skills, but was not associated with schooling or math and writing skills. Compared with nonstunted children, children who became stunted had 18–21% and 15–21% lower probabilities of showing math and writing skills, and stunted children had 0.4 fewer completed grades of schooling. Stunted children who recovered showed human capital outcomes that were indistinguishable from nonstunted children. Conclusions The results confirm adverse associations between child stunting and human capital skills. Predictors of growth recovery and faltering can affect human capital outcomes, even in a remote, economically self‐sufficient society.
HIV has increased the incidence of tuberculosis (TB) by up to sevenfold in African countries, but antiretroviral therapy (ART) reduces the incidence of AIDS-related TB. We use a mathematical model to investigate the short-term and long-term impacts of ART on the incidence of TB, assuming that people are tested for HIV once a year, on average, and start ART at a fixed time after HIV seroconversion or at a fixed CD4(+) cell count. We fit the model to trend data on HIV prevalence and TB incidence in nine countries in sub-Saharan Africa. If HIV-positive people start ART within 5 y of seroconversion, the incidence of AIDS-related TB in 2015 will be reduced by 48% (range: 37-55%). Long-term reductions depend sensitively on the delay to starting ART. If treatment is started 5, 2, or 1 y after HIV seroconversion, or as soon as people test positive, the incidence in 2050 will be reduced by 66% (range: 57-80%), 95% (range: 93-96%), 97.7% (range: 96.9-98.2%) and 98.4% (range: 97.8-98.9%), respectively. In the countries considered here, early ART could avert 0.71 ± 0.36 [95% confidence interval (CI)] million of 3.4 million cases of TB between 2010 and 2015 and 5.8 ± 2.9 (95% CI) million of 15 million cases between 2015 and 2050. As more countries provide ART at higher CD4(+) cell counts, the impact on TB should be investigated to test the predictions of this model.
Background: Seasons affect many social, economic, and biological outcomes, particularly in low-resource settings, and some studies suggest that birth season affects child growth.Aim: To study a predictor of stunting that has received limited attention: birth season.Subjects and methods: This study uses cross-sectional data collected during 2008 in a low-resource society of horticulturists-foragers in the Bolivian Amazon, Tsimane'. It estimates the associations between birth months and height-for-age Z-scores (HAZ) for 562 girls and 546 boys separately, from birth until age 11 years or pre-puberty, which in this society occurs ∼13–14 years.Results: Children born during the rainy season (February–May) were shorter, while children born during the end of the dry season and the start of the rainy season (August–November) were taller, both compared with their age–sex peers born during the rest of the year. The correlations of birth season with HAZ were stronger for boys than for girls. Controlling for birth season, there is some evidence of eventual partial catch-up growth, with the HAZ of girls or boys worsening until ∼ age 4–5 years, but improving thereafter. By age 6 years, many girls and boys had ceased to be stunted, irrespective of birth season.Conclusion: The results suggest that redressing stunting will require attention to conditions in utero, infancy and late childhood.