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Background: Chemokines play a pivotal role in immune regulation and response, and previous studies suggest an association between immune deficiency and non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL).Methods: We evaluated the association between NHL and polymorphisms in 18 genes (CCL1, CCL2, CCL5, CCL7, CCL8, CCL11, CCL13, CCL18, CCL20, CCL24, CCL26, CCR1, CCR3, CCR4, CCR6, CCR7, CCR8, and CCR9) encoding for the CC chemokines using data from a population-based case–control study of NHL conducted in Connecticut women.Results:CCR8 was associated with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL; P = 0.012), and CCL13 was associated with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) or small lymphocytic lymphoma (SLL; P = 0.003) at gene level. After adjustment for multiple comparisons, none of the genes or single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) were associated with risk of overall NHL or NHL subtypes.Conclusions: Our results suggest that the genes encoding for CC chemokines are not significantly associated with the risk of NHL, and further studies are needed to verify these findings.Impact: Our data indicate that CC chemokine genes were not associated with NHL risk. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 22(7); 1332–5. ©2013 AACR.

XLSX file - 45K, Hardy Weinberg Equilibrium test for CC chemokine gene SNPs.

XLSX file - 223K, Associations between CC chemokine gene SNPs and risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) overall and its common subtypes including diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), follicular lymphoma (FL), and Chronic lymphocytic leukemia/small lymphocytic lymphoma (CLL/SLL).

We report on the physical-point RBC/UKQCD calculation of the leading isospin-breaking corrections to light-meson leptonic decays. This is highly relevant for future precision tests in the flavour physics sector, in particular the first-row unitarity of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix containing the elements $V_{us}$ and $V_{ud}$. The simulations were performed using Domain-Wall fermions for $2+1$ flavours, and with isospin-breaking effects included perturbatively in the path integral through order $\alpha$ and $(m_u - m_d)/\Lambda _{\mathrm{QCD}}$. We use QED$_{\mathrm{L}}$ for the inclusion of electromagnetism, and discuss here the non-locality of this prescription which has significant impact on the infinite-volume extrapolation., Comment: Proceedings for The 39th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, 8th-13th August, 2022, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universit\"at Bonn, Bonn, Germany

Background Prospective cohort studies on diet and cancer report risk associations as hazard ratios. But hazard ratios do not inform on the number of people who need to alter their dietary behaviours for preventing cancer. The objective of this study is to estimate the number of people that need to alter their diet for preventing one additional case of female breast or colorectal cancer. Methods Based on the largest prospective studies done in the USA and in Europe, we computed the number of subjects who need to alter their diet. Results For preventing one case of breast cancer, European women should increase their fruit consumption by 100 g/day during 33 000 person-years, and US women by 60 g/day during 10 600 person-years. For vegetables, European women should increase their consumption by 160 g/day during 26 900 person-years and US women by 100 g/day during 19 000 person-years. For preventing one case of colorectal cancer, European subjects should decrease their red meat consumption by 20 g/day during 26 100 person-years, and US subjects by 30 g/day during 8170 person-years. For processed meat, European subjects should decrease their consumption by 20 g/day during 17 400 person-years, and US subjects by 10 g/day during 7940 person-years. Conclusions Large number of subjects would need to alter their intake of fruits, vegetables, red and processed meat during many years in order to prevent one additional breast or colorectal cancer.

In recent years, lattice determinations of non-perturbative quantities such as $f_K$ and $f_\pi$, which are relevant for $V_{us}$ and $V_{ud}$, have reached an impressive precision of $\mathcal{O}(1\%)$ or better. To make further progress, electromagnetic and strong isospin breaking effects must be included in lattice QCD simulations. We present the status of the RBC\&UKQCD lattice calculation of isospin-breaking corrections to light meson leptonic decays. This computation is performed in a (2+1)-flavor QCD simulation using Domain Wall Fermions with near-physical quark masses. The isospin-breaking effects are implemented via a perturbative expansion of the action in $\alpha$ and $(m_u-m_d)$. In this calculation, we work in the electro-quenched approximation and the photons are implemented in the Feynman gauge and $\text{QED}_\text{L}$ formulation. In recent years, lattice determinations of non-perturbative quantities such as $f_K$ and $f_\pi$, which are relevant for $V_{us}$ and $V_{ud}$, have reached an impressive precision of $\mathcal{O}(1\%)$ or better. To make further progress, electromagnetic and strong isospin breaking effects must be included in lattice QCD simulations. We present the status of the RBC/UKQCD lattice calculation of isospin-breaking corrections to light meson leptonic decays. This computation is performed in a (2+1)-flavor QCD simulation using Domain Wall Fermions with near-physical quark masses. The isospin-breaking effects are implemented via a perturbative expansion of the action in $\alpha$ and $(m_u-m_d)$. In this calculation, we work in the electro-quenched approximation and the photons are implemented in the Feynman gauge and $\text{QED}_\text{L}$ formulation.

Radiative transfer is a notoriously difficult and computationally demanding problem. Yet, it is an indispensable ingredient in nearly all astrophysical and cosmological simulations. Choosing an appropriate discretization scheme is a crucial part of the simulation, since it not only determines the direct memory cost of the model but also largely determines the computational cost and the achievable accuracy. In this paper, we show how an appropriate choice of directional discretization scheme as well as spatial model mesh can help alleviate the computational cost, while largely retaining the accuracy. First, we discuss the adaptive ray-tracing scheme implemented in our 3D radiative transfer library Magritte, that adapts the rays to the spatial mesh and uses a hierarchical directional discretization based on HEALPix. Second, we demonstrate how the free and open-source software library Gmsh can be used to generate high quality meshes that can be easily tailored for Magritte. In particular, we show how the local element size distribution of the mesh can be used to optimise the sampling of both analytically and numerically defined models. Furthermore, we show that when using the output of hydrodynamics simulations as input for a radiative transfer simulation, the number of elements in the input model can often be reduced by an order of magnitude, without significant loss of accuracy in the radiation field. We demonstrate this for two models based on a hierarchical octree mesh resulting from adaptive mesh refinement (AMR), as well as two models based on smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) data., Comment: 12 pages, published in MNRAS

We present the status of our project to calculate $D \to \pi \ell \nu$, $D \to K \ell \nu$ and $D_s \to K \ell \nu$ semileptonic form factors using domain wall fermions for both heavy and light quarks. Our computations are performed using RBC/UKQCD's set of 2+1 flavour domain wall fermion and Iwasaki gauge field ensembles. We plan to calculate three-point functions covering the full, physically allowed kinematic range. Given that the signal decays faster than the noise, unambiguously and reliably extracting the ground state is critical for success. We include an analysis of operator diagonalisation within several possible $2 \times 2$ operator bases and find an admixture of gauged fixed wall and $\mathbb{Z} \left( 2 \right)$ wall sources to be acceptable at both zero and non-zero momentum. Initial results for semileptonic form factors are presented for first ensembles., Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, to be published in Proceedings of Science, The 38th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory

We construct an approximate trivializing map by using a Schwinger-Dyson equation. The advantage of this method is that: (1) The basis for the flow kernel can be chosen arbitrarily by hand. (2) It can be applied to the general action of interest. (3) The coefficients in the kernel are determined by lattice estimates of the observables, which does not require analytic calculations beforehand. We perform the HMC with the effective action obtained by the Schwinger-Dyson method, and show that we can have better control of the effective action than the known $t$-expansion construction. However, the algorithmic overhead is still large and overwhelming the gain though faster decorrelation is observed for long-range observables in some cases. This contribution reports the preliminary results of this attempt., Comment: 19 pages, 12 figures, talk presented at the 39th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2022)

Critical slowing down presents a critical obstacle to lattice QCD calculation at the smaller lattice spacings made possible by Exascale computers. Inspired by the concept of Fourier acceleration, we study a version of the Riemannian Manifold HMC (RMHMC) algorithm in which the canonical mass term of the HMC algorithm is replaced by a rational function of the SU(3) gauge covariant Laplacian. We have developed a suite of tools using Chebyshev filters based on the SU(3) gauge covariant Laplacian that provides the power spectra of both the gauge and fermion forces and determines the spectral dependence of the resulting RMHMC evolution of long- and short-distance QCD observables. These tools can be used to optimize the RMHMC mass term and to monitor the resulting acceleration mode-wise., 7 pages, 4 figures, 2021 Lattice Proceedings

Background Causes of variations in outcomes from cancer care in developed countries are often unclear. Australia has developed health system pathways describing consensus standards of optimal cancer care across the phases of prevention through to follow-up or end-of-life. These Optimal Care Pathways (OCP) were introduced from 2013 to 14. We investigated whether care consistent with the OCP improved outcomes for colon cancer patients. Methods Colon patients diagnosed from 2008 to 2014 were identified from the Australian State of Victoria Cancer Registry (VCR) and cases linked with State and Federal health datasets. Surrogate variables describe OCP alignment in our cohort, across three phases of the pathway; prevention, diagnosis and initial treatment and end-of-life. We assessed the impact of alignment on (1) stage of disease at diagnosis and (2) overall survival. Findings Alignment with the prevention phase of the OCP occurred for 88% of 13,539 individuals and was associated with lower disease stage at diagnosis (OR = 0.33, 95% confidence interval 0.24 to 0.42), improved crude three-year survival (69.2% versus 62.2%; p, Putting research into context • Factors accounting for cancer outcome disparities both between within and between countries in well-resourced health systems remain elusive. • In Australia, a nationally accepted evidenced based pathway of cancer care (the Optimal Care Pathway- OCP) has been developed through a multi-disciplinary clinician consensus based process, to establish the elements of quality care that should be offered to cancer patients. A project to assess the impact of the care that conforms with OCP standards on patient outcomes was undertaken. • A robust survival improvement was seen in the group of patients whose care was aligned to the OCP. This improvement in outcome did not depend on new diagnostic tests or treatments. • Alignment with pre-diagnosis pathway recommendations was associated with lower stage of disease at presentation, less emergency surgery and improved long term survival. • These findings have policy implications as it is demonstrated that subtle system level variation of care could impact favourably on outcomes.

In a population-based case control study of testicular germ cell tumors (TGCT), we reported a strong positive association between serum levels of Wolff's Group 1 (potentially estrogenic) polychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs) and risk of TGCT, and the observed associations were similar for both seminoma and non-seminoma. While the observed specific associations between TGCT and Wolff's Group 1 PCBs cannot be easily explained by bias or confounding, a question can still be asked, that is, could the relationship between PCBs and TGCT differ by age at diagnosis? PCBs tend to bioaccumulate, with more heavily chlorinated PCB congeners tending to have longer half-lives. Half-lives of PCB congeners were reported ranging from 4.6 years for PCB-28 to 41.0 years for PCB-156. The half-life for the heavy PCB congeners (17.8 years) was found to be approximately twice that for the light PCBs (9.6 years) in early studies. Therefore, the same PCB concentration measured in a 20-year-old vs. a 55-year-old is unlikely to represent the same lifetime PCB exposure or type of PCB exposure. In this analysis, we stratified the data by median age of diagnosis of TGCT and further stratified by histologic type of TGCT (seminoma vs non-seminoma) to explore if the risk of TGCT associated with PCB exposures differs by age.

Proton decay is a major prediction of Grand-Unified Theories (GUT) and its observation would indicate baryon number violation that is required for baryogenesis. Many decades of searching for proton decay have constrained its rate and ruled out some of the simplest GUT models. Apart from the baryon number-violating interactions, this rate also depends on transition amplitudes between the proton and mesons or leptons produced in the decay, which are matrix elements of three-quark operators. We report nonperturbative calculation of these matrix elements for the most studied two-body decay channels into a meson and antilepton done on a lattice with physical light and strange quark masses and lattice spacings $a\approx0.14$ and 0.20 fm. We perform nonperturbative renormalization and excited state analysis to control associated systematic effects. Our results largely agree with previous lattice calculations done with heavier quark masses and thus remove ambiguity in ruling out some simple GUT theories due to quark mass dependence of hadron structure., Comment: 34 pages, 18 figures

Background: The incidence of testicular germ cell tumors (TGCT) has continuously increased in Western countries over the last few decades. Some epidemiologic studies have reported that ser...

We calculate the strong isospin breaking and QED corrections to meson masses and the hadronic vacuum polarization in an exploratory study on a $64\times24^3$ lattice with an inverse lattice spacing of $a^{-1}=1.78$ GeV and an isospin symmetric pion mass of $m_\pi=340$ MeV. We include QED in an electro-quenched setup using two different methods, a stochastic and a perturbative approach. We find that the electromagnetic correction to the leading hadronic contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon is smaller than $1\%$ for the up quark and $0.1\%$ for the strange quark, although it should be noted that this is obtained using unphysical light quark masses. In addition to the results themselves, we compare the precision which can be reached for the same computational cost using each method. Such a comparison is also made for the meson electromagnetic mass-splittings., Comment: 49 pages, 20 figures

Background Occupational exposures in the rubber manufacturing industry showed an increased risk of cancer and have been classified as a group 1 carcinogen, largely from studies on workers employed before 1950s. Cancer sites considered as causally associated are bladder, lung and stomach, and leukaemia. Recent studies did not report an increased risk of cancer. Methods A meta-analysis was conducted on observational studies published until April 2016 on occupational exposures in the rubber manufacturing industry and risk of cancer. Case-control and cohort studies were included. Random effect models were used. Heterogeneity and publication bias were evaluated. Stratified analyses were conducted on study characteristics. Results The literature search identified 46 cohorts and 59 case-control studies. An increased risk was found for bladder cancer [standardised incidence ratio (SRR) = 1.36; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.18, 1.57], leukaemia (SRR = 1.29; 95% CI 1.11, 1.52), lymphatic and haematopoietic system (SRR = 1.16; 95% CI 1.02, 1.31) and larynx cancer (SRR = 1.46; 95% CI 1.10, 1.94). For lung cancer, a borderline statistically significant increased risk was identified (SRR = 1.08; 95% CI 0.99, 1.17). No association was found for stomach cancer (SRR = 1.06; 95% CI 0.95, 1.17). In stratified analyses, risks of cancer were not increased for workers employed after 1960 for bladder cancer (SRR = 1.06; 95% CI 0.66, 1.71), lung cancer (SRR = 0.94; 95% CI 0.68, 1.29) or leukaemia (SRR = 0.92; 95% CI 0.62, 1.36). Conclusions Risk of bladder cancer, lung cancer, leukaemia and larynx cancer were increased among workers in rubber industry. Evidence of elevated risks was no longer seen for bladder cancer, lung cancer or leukemia among workers first employed after 1960.

Objectives Increased cancer risks have been reported among workers in the rubber manufacturing industry employed before the 1960s, but it is unclear for workers hired subsequently. The present study focused on cancer incidence among rubber workers first employed after 1975 in Sweden and the UK. Methods Two cohorts of rubber workers employed for at least 1 year were analysed. Standardised incidence ratios (SIRs), based on country-specific and period-specific incidence rates, were analysed for all cancers combined (except non-melanoma skin), bladder, lung, stomach cancer, leukaemia, non-Hodgkin9s lymphoma and multiple myeloma. Exploratory analyses were conducted for other cancers with a minimum of 10 cases in both genders combined. Results 16 026 individuals (12 441 men; 3585 women) contributed to 397 975 person-years of observation, with 846 cancers observed overall (437 in the UK, 409 in Sweden). No statistically significant increased risk was observed for any site of cancer. A reduced risk was evident for all cancers combined (SIR=0.83, 95% CI (0.74 to 0.92)), lung cancer (SIR=0.74, 95% CI (0.59 to 0.93)), non-Hodgkin9s lymphoma (SIR=0.67, 95% CI (0.45 to 1.00)) and prostate cancer (SIR=0.77, 95% CI (0.64 to 0.92)). For stomach cancer and multiple myeloma, SIRs were 0.93 (95% CI (0.61 to 1.43)) and 0.92 (95% CI 0.44 to 1.91), respectively. No increased risk of bladder cancer was observed (SIR=0.88, 95% CI (0.61 to 1.28)). Conclusions No significantly increased risk of cancer incidence was observed in the combined cohort of rubber workers first employed since 1975. Continued surveillance of the present cohorts is required to confirm absence of long-term risk and confirmatory findings from other cohorts would be important.

Radiative transfer is a key component in almost all astrophysical and cosmological simulations. We present Magritte: a modern open-source software library for 3D radiative transfer. It uses a deterministic ray-tracer and formal solver, i.e. it computes the radiation field by tracing rays through the model and solving the radiative transfer equation in its second-order form along a fixed set of rays originating from each point. Magritte can handle structured and unstructured input meshes, as well as smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) particle data. In this first paper, we describe the numerical implementation, semi-analytic tests and cross-code benchmarks for the non-LTE line radiative transfer module of Magritte. This module uses the radiative transfer solver to self-consistently determine the populations of the quantised energy levels of atoms and molecules using an accelerated Lambda iteration (ALI) scheme. We compare Magritte with the established radiative transfer solvers Ratran (1D) and Lime (3D) on the van Zadelhoff benchmark and present a first application to a simple Keplerian disc model. Comparing with Lime, we conclude that Magritte produces more accurate and more precise results, especially at high optical depth, and that it is faster., 16 pages, accepted in MNRAS

Background We previously observed a rapid increase in the incidence of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) in men and women between 1935 and 1989 in the USA, using data from the Connecticut Tumor Registry. This increase appeared to be largely explained by a positive cohort effect, but no population-based study has been conducted to comprehensively examine age-period-cohort effects by histologic types for the past decade. Methods We calculated age-adjusted and age-specific incidence rates of the two major kidney-cancer subtypes RCC and renal urothelial carcinoma, and conducted an age-period-cohort analysis of 114 138 incident cases of kidney cancer reported between 1992 and 2014 to the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results programme. Results The age-adjusted incidence rates of RCC have been increasing consistently in the USA among both men and women (from 12.18/100 000 in 1992–1994 to 18.35/100 000 in 2010–2014 among men; from 5.77/100 000 in 1992–1994 to 8.63/100 000 in 2010–2014 among women). Incidence rates generally increased in successive birth cohorts, with a continuing increase in rates among the younger age groups (ages 0–54 years) in both men and women and among both Whites and Blacks. These observations were confirmed by age-period-cohort modelling, which suggested an increasing birth-cohort trend for RCC beginning with 1955 birth cohorts, regardless of the assumed value for the period effect for both men and women and for Whites and Blacks. Conclusions Known risk factors for kidney cancer may not fully account for the observed increasing rates or the birth-cohort pattern for RCC, prompting the need for additional etiologic hypotheses (such as environmental exposures) to investigate these descriptive patterns.

While progress in oncology has been remarkable in recent decades, not every cancer patient is benefitting from the advances made in treating their disease. The contrast in diagnosis, treatment and its outcome between high-resource and low-resource countries is dramatic. Africa presents an enormous challenge with population growth and life expectancy increasing in many countries as the toll of AIDS and other communicable diseases declines. However, there has been little investment in capacity of any sort to deal with the current cancer problem, never mind the rapid increase in incidence which is underway. This is a critical area for investment and not only of a purely financial nature. It is bad to have cancer and worse to have cancer if you are poor. The gap between rich and poor, highly educated and less educated and the North-South divide is substantial and continuing to grow. Radical solutions are urgently needed: the status quo is not an appropriate response to the current situation. Recognising that no single government or source of philanthropy has the means to solve this problem, new models are needed to cope with and improve this situation.

RBC/UKQCD is preparing a calculation of leptonic decay rates including isospin breaking corrections using a perturbative approach to include NLO contributions from QED effects. We present preliminary numerical results for a contribution to the leptonic pion decay rate and report on exploratory studies of computational techniques based on all-to-all propagators.