The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup, held in Germany from June 9 to July 9, 2006, provided an opportunity to examine the relation between emotional stress and the incidence of cardiovascular events.

Background: Numerous studies have found that ambient air pollution has been associated with cardiovascular disease exacerbation. Objectives: Given previous findings, we hypothesized that particulate air pollution might induce systemic inflammation in myocardial infarction (MI) survivors, contributing to an increased vulnerability to elevated concentrations of ambient particles. Methods: A prospective longitudinal study of 1,003 MI survivors was performed in six European cities between May 2003 and July 2004. We compared repeated measurements of interleukin 6 (IL-6), fibrinogen, and C-reactive protein (CRP) with concurrent levels of air pollution. We collected hourly data on particle number concentrations (PNC), mass concentrations of particulate matter (PM) < 10 μm (PM10) and < 2.5 μm (PM2.5), gaseous pollutants, and meteorologic data at central monitoring sites in each city. City-specific confounder models were built for each blood marker separately, adjusting for meteorology and time-varying and time-invariant covariates. Data were analyzed with mixed-effects models. Results: Pooled results show an increase in IL-6 when concentrations of PNC were elevated 12–17 hr before blood withdrawal [percent change of geometric mean, 2.7; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.0–4.6]. Five day cumulative exposure to PM10 was associated with increased fibrinogen concentrations (percent change of arithmetic mean, 0.6; 95% CI, 0.1–1.1). Results remained stable for smokers, diabetics, and patients with heart failure. No consistent associations were found for CRP. Conclusions: Results indicate an immediate response to PNC on the IL-6 level, possibly leading to the production of acute-phase proteins, as seen in increased fibrinogen levels. This might provide a link between air pollution and adverse cardiac events.

Collostructional analysis is a corpus-based quantitative method of measuring the mutual attraction of lexemes and constructions (cf. Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003) which has gained considerable popularity among corpus linguists and especially cognitive linguists with a statistical bent. For many less statistically minded linguists, it has proven rather difficult to evaluate the theoretical background assumptions and cognitive underpinnings of collostructional analysis and to compare them to alternative ways of modelling lexicogrammatical attraction phenomena. This paper aims to spell out these premises and foundations in terms comprehensible to a wider audience. It begins with a concise survey of how collostructional analysis works and then reports on a number of practical, theoretical and statistical issues of which both practitioners of the method and those who try to appreciate results of its application should be aware. With these issues in mind we then discuss alternative ways of calculating and interpreting lexicogrammatical attraction. The advantages and disadvantages of the different methods are discussed, also against the background of the results of studies that have tried to evaluate the measures by means of external evidence from psycholinguistic experiments. Finally, cognitive underpinnings of lexicogrammatical associations and implications for the different approaches are discussed. It is argued that at present we lack adequate knowledge about the ways in which discourse frequencies affect entrenchment. We conclude that the complexities of the relation between corpus frequencies and degrees of entrenchment are still rather poorly understood, and make suggestions for future work.