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Background: To enhance the usability of existing large population-based studies in epidemiologicresearch on office workers, we developed a procedure for a proxy variable on office worker in datawith open-ended responses on occupation. Methods: Self-reported open answers on occupation (n=3738) from the LifeGene pilot study werelinked to a modified version of the Swedish Standard Classification of Occupation 2012 (SSYK12). TheSSYK12 includes 8946 job titles with 4-digit codes which were categorized to managers, white-collarand blue-collar workers. Managers and white-collar workers were used as a proxy for office workers.We then used fuzzy string matching in R to calculate the Jaro-Winkler distance between the LifeGenepilot data answers on occupation and the modified SSYK12 job titles. Zero distance indicated aperfect match, whereas distances above zero were checked manually to assess various job titles asoffice worker or non-office worker. Thereafter, the resulting procedure was applied to the wholeLifeGene study with data on occupation (n=23 525). Results: We got perfect match against the modified SSYK12 job titles for 16 275 responses (69%) inthe large LifeGene data. Another 1721 responses (7%) matched occupations that we had manuallydefined as office worker or non-office worker in the pilot data set, and the remaining 5529 (24%)were unmatched. Among the matched occupations, 15 159 (84%) were office-workers, 2493 (14%)non-office workers, and 344 (2%) nondistinctive. Conclusion: The procedure for a proxy variable on office worker allowed us to classify three quartersof the open-ended responses on occupation., The poster will be displayed on June 12th, 2024, during “Coffee and poster viewing” at 13:30 - 14:20, Chr. HansenAuditorium, building 34.

Office workers spend most of their working time being sedentary, contributing to a sedentary lifestyle that increases the risk of developing disease and disability. A gradual decline in cardiorespiratory fitness among adults, along with increased rate of non-communicable diseases across developed countries, makes the workplace an important opportunity for promoting healthy behaviors. This study aimed to investigate: how office companies in Sweden organize and provide workplace health promotion services related to physical activity; the companies vision for providing workplace health promotion; and potential facilitators and barriers. Nine informants from eight companies participated in the study, and both qualitative and quantitative data were collected by semi-structured interviews. Informants were selected through purposive sampling in collaboration with eight companies in the office market, including companies that own and develop office buildings, shared workspaces, interior design, sustainable solutions, or consult on issues related to the office sector. The framework method was used to analyze the data in a flexible and systematic way. The results showed that workplace health promotion is implemented to maintain employee health, productivity, and employee branding. Also, a significant number of financial resources, organizational support and office space are devoted to workplace health promotion. Convenience and easy access to storage and fitness facilities are key facilitators. In conclusion, this study highlights the importance of employees engagement in developing and improving workplace health promotion and addressing work-life balance constraints that hinder a healthy lifestyle. Removing barriers on an organizational level may improve the usage of workplace health promotion related to physical activity among office employees.

This paper develops a unified testing methodology for high-dimensional generalized multivariate analysis of variance (GMANOVA) models. We derive a test of the bilateral linear hypothesis on the mean matrix in a general scenario where the dimensions of the observed vector may exceed the sample size, design may be unbalanced, the population distribution may be non-normal and the underlying group covariance matrices may be unequal. The suggested methodology is suitable for many inferential problems, such as the one-way MANOVA test and the test for multivariate linear hypothesis on the mean in the polynomial growth curve model. As a key component of our test procedure, we propose a bias-corrected estimator of the Frobenius norm of the mean matrix. We derive null and non-null asymptotic distributions of the test statistic under a general high-dimensional asymptotic framework that allows the dimensionality to arbitrarily exceed the sample size of a group. The accuracy of the proposed test in a finite sample setting is investigated through simulations conducted for several high-dimensional scenarios and various underlying population distributions in combination with different within-group covariance structures. For a practical demonstration we consider a daily Canadian temperature dataset that exhibits group structure, and conclude that the interaction of latitude and longitude has no effect to predict the temperature., Funding Agencies|Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, and Culture [18K03419]; JSPS [JP16K16018]

Outdoor office work is an emerging aspect of the concept of ‘new ways of working’, but only sparse data are available about the environmental qualities of the outdoor office space, experiences of office workers, and work-related well-being of outdoor office work. Here, we present an exploratory pilot study on well-being and outdoor office work in a public urban space. An outdoor office was set up in the courtyard of a university campus, and the participants (n = 16) conducted office work outdoors for 30 min and thereafter participated in an eye-tracking session for 11–15 min (n = 8) and subsequently filled out surveys (n = 16). The eye tracker allowed the discovery of natural and built elements in the outdoor environment that caught the participants’ visual attention, whereas the surveys assessed aspects of their subjective experiences of the outdoor office space (its visual and spatial qualities) and the work there. The results are presented as network graphs where correlations are shown regarding different aspects of office work outdoors. The results indicate that outdoor office work in a public urban space may promote work-related well-being in terms of positive outdoor office space experiences. Based on the findings, a preliminary set of outdoor office qualities is proposed. Those qualities relate to the legibility and imageability of the outdoor office space, its focal points, and depth/spaciousness, in addition to attributes of usability and environmental richness, including if the outdoor office space affords natural contact and supports activities, in addition to social and individual interactions and relations.

(1) Background: The World Health Organization recommends active commuting as a source of physical activity. Active commuting is determined by various factors, including the socioeconomic status (SES) of families and neighborhoods, distance to schools, perceived neighborhood safety, lifestyles, and availability of walkways and biking paths. This study aimed to assess factors associated with modes of transportation to and from school among adolescents aged 16–19 living in a middle-sized city in Sweden. (2) Method: Three hundred and fourteen students, of whom 55% were females, from schools in the city of Västerås participated in the study. Printed as well as web-based self-administered questionnaires were used to collect the data. (3) Results: Adolescents living in high SES neighborhoods were 80% more likely to bike or walk to school (OR = 1.80; CI: 1.01, 3.20) than adolescents living in low SES neighborhoods. Furthermore, active commuting was associated with higher consumption of fruits and vegetables (OR = 1.77; CI: 1.05, 2.97) and less consumption of junk foods (OR = 0.43; CI: 0.26, 0.71), as compared to passive commuting. (4) Conclusions: Active commuting is a cost-effective and sustainable source of regular physical activity and should be encouraged at a societal level.

BACKGROUND: A recent genome-wide association study (GWAS) identified 99 loci that contain genetic risk variants shared between asthma, hay fever, and eczema. Many more risk loci shared between these common allergic diseases remain to be discovered, which could point to new therapeutic opportunities. OBJECTIVE: We sought to identify novel risk loci shared between asthma, hay fever, and eczema by applying a gene-based test of association to results from a published GWAS that included data from 360,838 subjects. METHODS: We used approximate conditional analysis to adjust the results from the published GWAS for the effects of the top risk variants identified in that study. We then analyzed the adjusted GWAS results with the EUGENE gene-based approach, which combines evidence for association with disease risk across regulatory variants identified in different tissues. Novel gene-based associations were followed up in an independent sample of 233,898 subjects from the UK Biobank study. RESULTS: Of the 19,432 genes tested, 30 had a significant gene-based association at a Bonferroni-corrected P value of 2.5 × 10-6. Of these, 20 were also significantly associated (P < .05/30 = .0016) with disease risk in the replication sample, including 19 that were located in 11 loci not reported to contain allergy risk variants in previous GWASs. Among these were 9 genes with a known function that is directly relevant to allergic disease: FOSL2, VPRBP, IPCEF1, PRR5L, NCF4, APOBR, IL27, ATXN2L, and LAT. For 4 genes (eg, ATXN2L), a genetically determined decrease in gene expression was associated with decreased allergy risk, and therefore drugs that inhibit gene expression or function are predicted to ameliorate disease symptoms. The opposite directional effect was observed for 14 genes, including IL27, a cytokine known to suppress TH2 responses. CONCLUSION: Using a gene-based approach, we identified 11 risk loci for allergic disease that were not reported in previous GWASs. Functional s

Background Immune system dysfunction may be associated with eating disorders (ED) and could have implications for detection, risk assessment, and treatment of both autoimmune diseases and EDs. However, questions regarding the nature of the relationship between these two disease entities remain. We evaluated the strength of associations for the bidirectional relationships between EDs and autoimmune diseases. Methods In this nationwide population-based study, Swedish registers were linked to establish a cohort of more than 2.5 million individuals born in Sweden between January 1, 1979 and December 31, 2005 and followed up until December 2013. Cox proportional hazard regression models were used to investigate: (a) subsequent risk of EDs in individuals with autoimmune diseases; and (b) subsequent risk of autoimmune diseases in individuals with EDs. Results We observed a strong, bidirectional relationship between the two illness classes indicating that diagnosis in one illness class increased the risk of the other. In women, the diagnoses of autoimmune disease increased subsequent hazards of anorexia nervosa (AN), bulimia nervosa (BN), and other eating disorders (OED). Similarly, AN, BN, and OED increased subsequent hazards of autoimmune diseases.Gastrointestinal-related autoimmune diseases such as, celiac disease and Crohns disease showed a bidirectional relationship with AN and OED. Psoriasis showed a bidirectional relationship with OED. The previous occurence of type 1 diabetes increased the risk for AN, BN, and OED. In men, we did not observe a bidirectional pattern, but prior autoimmune arthritis increased the risk for OED. Conclusions The interactions between EDs and autoimmune diseases support the previously reported associations. The bidirectional risk pattern observed in women suggests either a shared mechanism or a third mediating variable contributing to the association of these illnesses., Funding Agencies|Swedish Research Council [538-2013-8864]; Anorexia Nervosa Genetics Initiative (ANGI), an initiative of the Klarman Family Foundation; National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship [1000183151]; Swedish Research Council through the Swedish Initiative for Research on Microdata in the Social And Medical Sciences (SIMSAM) [340-2013-5867]; Stockholm County Council (ALF-projects); Shire; Foundation of Hope: Research and Treatment of Mental Illness

Background: Immune system dysfunction may be associated with eating disorders, and associations could have implications for detection, risk assessment, and treatment of both autoimmune diseases and eating disorders. However, questions regarding the nature of the relationship between these two disease entities remain. We evaluated the strength of associations for the bidirectional relationships between eating disorders and autoimmune diseases. Methods: In this nationwide population-based cohort study, Swedish registers were linked to establish a cohort of more than 2.5 million individuals born in Sweden between January 1, 1979 and December 31, 2005 and followed-up until December 2013. Cox proportional hazard regression models were used to investigate: 1) subsequent risk of eating disorders in individuals with autoimmune diseases; and 2) subsequent risk of autoimmune diseases in individuals with eating disorders. Results: We observed a strong, bidirectional relationship between the two classes of illness indicating that diagnosis in one illness class increased the risk of the other. In women, autoimmune disease diagnoses increased subsequent hazard of anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and other eating disorders. Similarly, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and other eating disorders increased subsequent hazard of autoimmune diseases. The gastrointestinal-related autoimmune diseases celiac disease and Crohn's disease showed a bidirectional relationship with anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders. Psoriasis showed a bidirectional relationship with other eating disorders. Prior type 1 diabetes increased risk for anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and other eating disorders. In men, we did not observe a bidirectional pattern, but prior autoimmune arthritis increased risk for other eating disorders. Conclusions: The associations between eating disorders and autoimmune diseases provide additional support for previously reported associations. The bidirectional risk pa

Background: A number of factors regarding blood collection, handling and storage may affect sample quality. The purpose of this study was to assess the impact on plasma protein profiles by delayed centrifugation and plasma separation and multiple freeze-thaw cycles. Methods: Blood samples drawn from 16 healthy individuals were collected into ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid tubes and kept either at 4 degrees C or 22 degrees C for 1-36 h prior to centrifugation. Plasma samples prepared 1 h after venipuncture were also subjected to two to eight cycles of freezing at -80 degrees C and thawing at 22 degrees C. Multiplex proximity extension assay, an antibody-based protein assay, was used to investigate the influence on plasma proteins. Results: Up to 36 h delay before blood centrifugation resulted in significant increases of 16 and 40 out of 139 detectable proteins in samples kept at 4 degrees C or 22 degrees C, respectively. Some increases became noticeable after 8 h delay at 4 degrees C but already after 1 h at 22 degrees C. For samples stored at 4 degrees C, epidermal growth factor (EGF), NF-kappa-B essential modulator, SRC, interleukin 16 and CD6 increased the most, whereas the five most significantly increased proteins after storage at 22 degrees C were CD40 antigen ligand (CD40-L), EGF, platelet-derived growth factor subunit B, C-X-C motif chemokine ligand 5 and matrix metallopeptidase 1 (MMP1). Only matrix metallopeptidase 7 (MMP7) decreased significantly over time and only after storage at 22 degrees C. No protein levels were found to be significantly affected by up to eight freeze-thaw cycles. Conclusions: Plasma should be prepared from blood after a limited precentrifugation delay at a refrigerated temperature. By contrast, the influence by several freeze-thaw cycles on detectable protein levels in plasma was negligible.

Asthma, hay fever (or allergic rhinitis) and eczema (or atopic dermatitis) often coexist in the same individuals, partly because of a shared genetic origin. To identify shared risk variants, we performed a genome-wide association study (GWAS; n = 360,838) of a broad allergic disease phenotype that considers the presence of any one of these three diseases. We identified 136 independent risk variants (P < 3 × 10-8), including 73 not previously reported, which implicate 132 nearby genes in allergic disease pathophysiology. Disease-specific effects were detected for only six variants, confirming that most represent shared risk factors. Tissue-specific heritability and biological process enrichment analyses suggest that shared risk variants influence lymphocyte-mediated immunity. Six target genes provide an opportunity for drug repositioning, while for 36 genes CpG methylation was found to influence transcription independently of genetic effects. Asthma, hay fever and eczema partly coexist because they share many genetic risk variants that dysregulate the expression of immune-related genes.

Objective: To explore associations between diet-related greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE), nutrient intakes and adherence to the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations among Swedish adults. Design: Diet was assessed by 4 d food records in the Swedish National Dietary Survey. GHGE was estimated by linking all foods to carbon dioxide equivalents, using data from life cycle assessment studies. Participants were categorized into quartiles of energy-adjusted GHGE and differences between GHGE groups regarding nutrient intakes and adherence to nutrient recommendations were explored. Setting: Sweden. Subjects: Women (n 840) and men (n 627) aged 18-80 years. Results: Differences in nutrient intakes and adherence to nutrient recommendations between GHGE groups were generally small. The dietary intake of participants with the lowest emissions was more in line with recommendations regarding protein, carbohydrates, dietary fibre and vitamin D, but further from recommendations regarding added sugar, compared with the highest GHGE group. The overall adherence to recommendations was found to be better among participants with lower emissions compared with higher emissions. Among women, 27% in the lowest GHGE group adhered to at least twenty-three recommendations compared with only 12% in the highest emission group. For men, the corresponding figures were 17 and 10 %, respectively. Conclusions: The study compared nutrient intakes as well as adherence to dietary recommendations for diets with different levels of GHGE from a national dietary survey. We found that participants with low-emission diets, despite higher intake of added sugar, adhered to a larger number of dietary recommendations than those with high emissions.

Objective: To examine whether vagotomy decreases the risk of Parkinson disease (PD). Methods: Using data from nationwide Swedish registers, we conducted a matched-cohort study of 9,430 vagotomized patients (3,445 truncal and 5,978 selective) identified between 1970 and 2010 and 377,200 reference individuals from the general population individually matched to vagotomized patients by sex and year of birth with a 40: 1 ratio. Participants were followed up from the date of vagotomy until PD diagnosis, death, emigration out of Sweden, or December 31, 2010, whichever occurred first. Vagotomy and PD were identified from the Swedish Patient Register. We estimated hazard ratios (HRs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) using Cox models stratified by matching variables, adjusting for country of birth, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes mellitus, vascular diseases, rheumatologic disease, osteoarthritis, and comorbidity index. Results: A total of 4,930 cases of incident PD were identified during 7.3 million person-years of follow-up. PD incidence (per 100,000 person-years) was 61.8 among vagotomized patients (80.4 for truncal and 55.1 for selective) and 67.5 among reference individuals. Overall, vagotomy was not associated with PD risk (HR 0.96, 95% CI 0.78-1.17). However, there was a suggestion of lower risk among patients with truncal vagotomy (HR 0.78, 95% CI 0.55-1.09), which may be driven by truncal vagotomy at least 5 years before PD diagnosis (HR 0.59, 95% CI 0.37-0.93). Selective vagotomy was not related to PD risk in any analyses. Conclusions: Although overall vagotomy was not associated the risk of PD, we found suggestive evidence for a potential protective effect of truncal, but not selective, vagotomy against PD development.

The analysis of high-throughput data commonly used in modern applications poses many statistical challenges, one of which is the selection of a small subset of features that are likely to be informative for a specific project. This issue is crucial for success of supervised classification in very high-dimensional setting with sparsity patterns. In this paper, we derive an asymptotic framework that represents sparse and weak blocks model and suggest a technique for block-wise feature selection by thresholding. Our procedure extends the standard Higher Criticism (HC) thresholding to the case where dependence structure underlying the data can be taken into account and is shown to be optimally adaptive, i. e. performs well without knowledge of the sparsity and weakness parameters. We empirically investigate the detection boundary of our HC procedure and performance properties of some estimators of sparsity parameter. The relevance and benefits of our approach in high-dimensional classification is demonstrated using both simulation and real data.

Recent work has shown that the Lasso-based regularization is very useful for estimating the high-dimensional inverse covariance matrix. A particularly useful scheme is based on penalizing the l(1) norm of the off-diagonal elements to encourage sparsity. We embed this type of regularization into high-dimensional classification. A two-stage estimation procedure is proposed which first recovers structural zeros of the inverse covariance matrix and then enforces block sparsity by moving non-zeros closer to the main diagonal. We show that the block-diagonal approximation of the inverse covariance matrix leads to an additive classifier, and demonstrate that accounting for the structure can yield better performance accuracy. Effect of the block size on classification is explored, and a class of as ymptotically equivalent structure approximations in a high-dimensional setting is specified. We suggest a variable selection at the block level and investigate properties of this procedure in growing dimension asymptotics. We present a consistency result on the feature selection procedure, establish asymptotic lower an upper bounds for the fraction of separative blocks and specify constraints under which the reliable classification with block-wise feature selection can be performed. The relevance and benefits of the proposed approach are illustrated on both simulated and real data., QC 20120717

We investigate discretization of continuous variables for classification problems in a high-dimensional framework. As the goal of classification is to correctly predict a class membership of an observation, we suggest a discretization method that optimizes the discretization procedure using the misclassification probability as a measure of the classification accuracy. Our method is compared to several other discretization methods as well as result for continuous data. To compare performance we consider three supervised classification methods, and to capture the effect of high dimensionality we investigate a number of feature variables for a fixed number of observations. Since discretization is a data transformation procedure, we also investigate how the dependence structure is affected by this. Our method performs well, and lower misclassification can be obtained in a high-dimensional framework for both simulated and real data if the continuous feature variables are first discretized. The dependence structure is well maintained for some discretization methods., 1