Aerospace Medicine and Biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 274)

This bibliography lists 128 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in July 1985

Sleeping on a problem: the impact of sleep disturbance on intensive care patients - a clinical review

Sleep disturbance is commonly encountered amongst intensive care patients and has significant psychophysiological effects, which protract recovery and increases mortality. Bio-physiological monitoring of intensive care patients reveal alterations in sleep architecture, with reduced sleep quality and continuity. The etiological causes of sleep disturbance are considered to be multifactorial, although environmental stressors namely, noise, light and clinical care interactions have been frequently cited in both subjective and objective studies. As a result, interventions are targeted towards modifiable factors to ameliorate their impact. This paper reviews normal sleep physiology and the impact that sleep disturbance has on patient psychophysiological recovery, and the contribution that the clinical environment has on intensive care patients' sleep

Mechanomorphosis: Science, Management, and “Human Machinery” in Industrial Canada, 1900–45

By the early 20th century, the changes taking place in western industrial capitalist nations prompted an adaptive shift in the socioeconomic delineation of human bodies, and in scientific theories about how they worked and how they could be put to work. Just as the rising social sciences borrowed from medicine to convey images of social malaise, medicine increasingly appropriated an industrial vocabulary to conceptualize bodily health. Depicted variously as a machine, a motor, a factory in itself, the human body absorbed industrial symbolism. Modern industry demanded an intensification of labour that made bodily efficiency paramount. The corresponding definition of health also shifted, from emphasis on physical endurance, which could be secured by simple replacement of outworn workers, to optimum labour efficiency, which had to be actively instilled in all workers, present and future. Scientific management programs were easily integrated with regulatory medical notions concerning the human body and human nature, as science, medicine and technology combined forces to promote a machine ethic that equated modernity, progress, efficiency, and national health. This paper considers the relationship between changing conceptualizations of the human body, developing medical influence and state regulation of health, and attempts to “Taylorize” the labour process in early 20th century Canada

Parameter interdependence and success of skeletal muscle modelling

In muscle and movement modelling it is almost invariably assumed that force actually exerted is determined by several independent factors. This review considers the fact that length force characteristics are not a relatively fixed property of muscle but should be considered the product of a substantial number of interacting factors. Level of activation and recruitment are influential factors in relation to aspects of muscle architecture. For the level of activation effects of its short term history (potentiation, fatigue in sustained contractions) have to be taken into account and are reviewed on the basis of recent experimental results as well as available literature. History is also an important determinant for the effect of length changes. This concept is introduced on the basis of recent experimental evidence as well as available literature. Regarding effects of muscle architecture, the concepts of primary and secondary distribution of fibre mean sarcomere length are introduced as well as effects of muscle geometry for mono- and bi-articular muscles on those distributions. Implications for motor control are discussed and the need for intramuscular coordination indicated

From metagenomics to the metagenome: Conceptual change and the rhetoric of translational genomic research

As the international genomic research community moves from the tool-making efforts of the Human Genome Project into biomedical applications of those tools, new metaphors are being suggested as useful to understanding how our genes work – and for understanding who we are as biological organisms. In this essay we focus on the Human Microbiome Project as one such translational initiative. The HMP is a new ‘metagenomic’ research effort to sequence the genomes of human microbiological flora, in order to pursue the interesting hypothesis that our ‘microbiome’ plays a vital and interactive role with our human genome in normal human physiology. Rather than describing the human genome as the ‘blueprint’ for human nature, the promoters of the HMP stress the ways in which our primate lineage DNA is interdependent with the genomes of our microbiological flora. They argue that the human body should be understood as an ecosystem with multiple ecological niches and habitats in which a variety of cellular species collaborate and compete, and that human beings should be understood as ‘superorganisms’ that incorporate multiple symbiotic cell species into a single individual with very blurry boundaries. These metaphors carry interesting philosophical messages, but their inspiration is not entirely ideological. Instead, part of their cachet within genome science stems from the ways in which they are rooted in genomic research techniques, in what philosophers of science have called a ‘tools-to-theory’ heuristic. Their emergence within genome science illustrates the complexity of conceptual change in translational research, by showing how it reflects both aspirational and methodological influences

Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes, supplement 129, June 1974

This special bibliography lists 280 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in May 1974

Mortality and immortality : the Nobel Prize as an experiment into the effect of status upon longevity

It has been known for centuries that the rich and famous have longer lives than the poor and ordinary. Causality, however, remains trenchantly debated. The ideal experiment would be one in which extra status could somehow be dropped upon a sub-sample of individuals while those in a control group of comparable individuals received none. This paper attempts to formulate a test in that spirit. It collects 19th-century birth data on science Nobel Prize winners. Correcting for potential biases, we estimate that winning the Prize, compared to merely being nominated, is associated with between 1 and 2 years of extra longevity

Systolic ejection murmurs and the left ventricular outflow tract in boxer dogs

Turbulence of various genesis in the left ventricular outflow tract (LVOT) causes systolic ejection murmurs. The prevalence of murmurs in adult boxer dogs is 50-80%, the majority of which are of low intensity. Some of the murmurs are caused by aortic stenosis (AS), while the origin of the others is unclear. The aim of this thesis was to study the physiology and clinical evaluation of systolic ejection murmurs and their relation to the development of the LVOT in boxers with and without AS. Growing and adult boxer dogs were examined by the standard methods cardiac auscultation, ECG, phonocardiography and echocardiography. Additionally, the complementary methods time-frequency and complexity analyses of heart murmurs and contrast echocardiography were evaluated. Studies on inter-observer variation in cardiac auscultation proved the importance of experience in detection and grading of low intensity ejection murmurs. Excitement of the dogs by exercise or noise stimulation (barking dog and squeaky toy) caused higher murmur grades, longer murmur duration and increased aortic flow velocities. No differences were found between diameters measured at different levels of the LVOT in growing boxers. Contrast echocardiography enhanced Doppler signals, but did not allow evaluation of myocardial blood flow. Using time-frequency analysis, duration of murmur frequency >200 Hz proved useful for differentiation between dogs with mild AS and dogs without. Combining assessment of murmur duration >200 Hz and complexity analysis using the correlation dimension (T2), a sensitivity of 94% and a specificity of 82% for differentiation between dogs with and without AS was achieved. The variability in presence and intensity of low intensity murmurs during growth was high. None of the young dogs developed AS, whereas 3 out of 16 individuals developed mild-moderate aortic insufficiency. Aortic or pulmonic flow velocities did not differ significantly between growing dogs with or without low intensity murmurs. In conclusion, the variability in presence and intensity of low intensity ejection murmurs in boxers is high during growth with no obvious progression. Both in young and adult boxers the murmur grade increased during excitement, which may be due to rapid flow in a comparatively small LVOT that has been suggested for the boxer breed. Experience is important in cardiac auscultation of low intensity murmurs. Therefore, assessment of murmur duration > 200 Hz combined with T2 analysis may be a useful complementary method for diagnosis of cardiovascular function in dogs