Search Results (4)

Purpose: To identify the effect of frailty and geriatric syndromes on the quality of life (QoL), of older adults receiving home care, taking into consideration their socioeconomic and homebound status, including multi-comorbidities. Patients and Methods: This cross-sectional study enrolled elders aged (≥65) years old, registered members of “Help at Home” programs in the Reference Region of Crete, from March to May 2019. Participants were screened using the WHOQOL-BREF for Quality of Life, geriatric syndromes such as frailty using the SHARE-Frailty Index (SHARE-Fi), the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), for cognitive function and the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS), for the assessment of depression. Results: The mean age of the 301 participants was 78.45 (±7.87) years old. The prevalence of frailty was 38.5%, severe depression 13.6%, cognitive dysfunction 87.8% and severe comorbidity 70.6%. Intriguingly, none of the participants (0%) was identified as free of comorbidity (CCI = 0–1). The overall QoL (ranging from 4–20) of the study participants was 13.24 (±4.09). The bivariate analysis showed that overall QoL significantly differed among older adults with frailty (15.91 vs. 11.56, p < 0.001), cognitive dysfunction (15.42 vs. 12.90, p < 0.001), depression (14.90 vs. 9.31, p < 0.001), and disability in Activities of Daily Living (13.67 vs. 10.67, p = 0.002), compared to non-frail, normal cognition and depression, and independent elders, respectively. Multiple linear regression models revealed that frail and depressive elders reported significantly lower QoL (β = −2.65, p < 0.001 and (β = −5.71, p < 0.001), compared to non-frail and older adults with no depressive symptoms, respectively, despite the fact that this association was not significant for older adults with dementia (β = −2.25, p = 0.159), even after adjusting for potential confounding effects (age, gender, comorbidity, homebound status, etc.). Conclusion: frailty and geriatric syndromes including comorbidities are important risk factors for “poor” QoL among older adults receiving home-based healthcare. Full article

Home range overlap/segregation has several important applications to wildlife conservation and management. In this work, we first address the issue of measuring the degree of overlap/segregation among an arbitrarily large number (i.e., n ≥ 2) of probabilistic animal home ranges (i.e., utilization distributions). This subject matter has recently been solved for home ranges measured as polygons (e.g., percent minimum convex polygons and multinuclear cores) but not yet for probabilistic ones. Accordingly, we introduce a novel index named the PGOI (probabilistic general overlap index), and its complement, the PGSI (probabilistic general segregation index), an index for computation of probabilistic home range overlap/segregation at individual, population and species levels. Whatever the number of probabilistic home ranges, the PGOI returns a single score ranging in the [0, 100] interval. We applied the PGOI to five lesser kestrels (Falco naumanni) at Santeramo in Colle (Apulia region; Southern Italy) as a case study. Our new index can be applied to any animal species and to home ranges derived from any type of probabilistic home range estimator. Full article

Australia is currently free of canine rabies. Spatio-ecological knowledge about dingoes in northern Australia is currently a gap that impedes the application of disease spread models and our understanding of the potential transmission of rabies, in the event of an incursion. We therefore conducted a one-year camera trap survey to monitor a dingo population in equatorial northern Australia. The population is contiguous with remote Indigenous communities containing free-roaming dogs, which potentially interact with dingoes. Based on the camera trap data, we derived dingo density and home range size estimates using maximum-likelihood, spatially explicit, mark–resight models, described dingo movements and evaluated spatial correlation and temporal overlap in activities between dingoes and community dogs. Dingo density estimates varied from 0.135 animals/km² (95% CI = 0.127–0.144) during the dry season to 0.147 animals/km² (95% CI = 0.135–0.159) during the wet season. The 95% bivariate Normal home range sizes were highly variable throughout the year (7.95–29.40 km²). Spatial use and daily activity patterns of dingoes and free-roaming community dogs, grouped over ~3 month periods, showed substantial temporal activity overlap and spatial correlation, highlighting the potential risk of disease transmission at the wild–domestic interface in an area of biosecurity risk in equatorial northern Australia. Our results have utility for improving preparedness against a potential rabies incursion. Full article

Home range (HR) studies are a particularly common approach to investigations of animal habitat use, resource availability, and response to management manipulation such as relocations. Terrapene carolina (Eastern box turtle) and its sister taxon T. ornata (Ornate box turtle) are especially popular subjects of HR studies because they are relatively easily tracked. Terrapene HR studies have revealed a wide variation in HR sizes within and between populations, due to factors such as differences in ecoregion and analytical approach (e.g., minimum convex polygons, kernel analysis, bivariate normal, multivariate Ornstein–Uhlenbeck stochastic process, harmonic means). We performed a meta-analysis of the available literature, including unpublished work to avoid bias due to under-publication, to explore the causes for variation in HR size. We found 19 studies reporting T. carolina HR sizes and seven studies reporting T. ornata HR sizes; the resulting meta-analysis revealed patterns that are not visible in the individual studies. We found important differences between the species: female T. ornata had smaller HRs than males, whereas the opposite is true for T. carolina, and T. ornata HRs were influenced by ecoregion, while T. carolina HRs were not similarly influenced. Not surprisingly, we found that choice of analysis technique affected HR estimate; analyses using ellipses resulted in larger HR estimates than all the other techniques, while kernels were smaller than minimum convex polygons. Although not indicated by individual studies, our meta-analysis showed that the HRs of relocated T. carolina females were significantly larger than those of non-relocated females. Although the number of individual turtles in studies varied from three to 25, the sample size did not significantly affect HR size. Full article