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Maternal iron status during pregnancy and respiratory and atopic outcomes in the offspring: a Mendelian randomisation study.
INTRODUCTION: Limited evidence from birth cohort studies suggests that lower prenatal iron status may be a risk factor for childhood respiratory and atopic outcomes, but these observational findings may be confounded. Mendelian randomisation (MR) can potentially provide unconfounded estimates of causal effects by using common genetic variants as instrumental variables. We aimed to study the relationship between prenatal iron status and respiratory and atopic outcomes in the offspring using MR. METHODS: In the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children birth cohort, we constructed four maternal genotypic risk scores by summing the total number of risk alleles (associated with lower iron status) across single nucleotide polymorphisms known to be associated with at least one of four iron biomarkers (serum iron, ferritin, transferrin and transferrin saturation). We used MR to study their associations with respiratory and atopic outcomes in children aged 7-9 years (n=6002). RESULTS: When analyses were restricted to mothers without iron supplementation during late pregnancy, negative associations were found between the maternal transferrin saturation score and childhood forced expiratory volume in 1 s and forced vital capacity (difference in age, height and gender-adjusted SD units per SD increase in genotypic score: -0.05 (-0.09, -0.01) p=0.03, and -0.04 (-0.08, 0.00) p=0.04, respectively). CONCLUSION: Using MR we have found weak evidence suggesting that low maternal iron status during pregnancy may cause impaired childhood lung function
Diffusion of hydrogen in crystalline silicon
The coefficient of diffusion of hydrogen in crystalline silicon is calculated
using tight-binding molecular dynamics. Our results are in good quantitative
agreement with an earlier study by Panzarini and Colombo [Phys. Rev. Lett. 73,
1636 (1994)]. However, while our calculations indicate that long jumps dominate
over single hops at high temperatures, no abrupt change in the diffusion
coefficient can be observed with decreasing temperature. The (classical)
Arrhenius diffusion parameters, as a consequence, should extrapolate to low
temperatures.Comment: 4 pages, including 5 postscript figures; submitted to Phys. Rev. B
Brief Repor
Problems with Sleep Do Not Predict Self-Reported Driving Factors and Perception in Older Drivers: Evidences from the Candrive II Prospective Cohort
Given that sleep problems and serious motor vehicle collisions are increasingly prevalent in older adults, even minor drowsiness could potentially contribute to driving patterns in older drivers. To date, it is unknown whether less serious problems with sleep influence driving frequency and ability in older adults. We investigated the influence of everyday sleep disturbances on driving practices and driver perceptions in a large cohort of healthy older drivers. Selfreported measures of sleep problems were used to investigate the influence of sleep disturbance on self-reported driving practices and perceived driving abilities. On two measures of self-reported driving outcomes, participants with problems with rated themselves more poorly. However, this relationship disappeared when health and demographic variables were entered prior in hierarchical regression analyses. Our results show that the relationship between sleep problems, driving frequency and perceived abilities is better explained by mediating demographic, health, and cognitive factors
A generalized theory for current-source density analysis in brain tissue
The current-source density (CSD) analysis is a widely used method in brain
electrophysiology, but this method rests on a series of assumptions, namely
that the surrounding extracellular medium is resistive and uniform, and in some
versions of the theory, that the current sources are exclusively made by
dipoles. Because of these assumptions, this standard model does not correctly
describe the contributions of monopolar sources or of non-resistive aspects of
the extracellular medium. We propose here a general framework to model electric
fields and potentials resulting from current source densities, without relying
on the above assumptions. We develop a mean-field formalism which is a
generalization of the standard model, and which can directly incorporate
non-resistive (non-ohmic) properties of the extracellular medium, such as ionic
diffusion effects. This formalism recovers the classic results of the standard
model such as the CSD analysis, but in addition, we provide expressions to
generalize the CSD approach to situations with non-resistive media and
arbitrarily complex multipolar configurations of current sources. We found that
the power spectrum of the signal contains the signature of the nature of
current sources and extracellular medium, which provides a direct way to
estimate those properties from experimental data, and in particular, estimate
the possible contribution of electric monopoles.Comment: Physical Review E, in press, 201
An emerging and enigmatic spectral class of isolated DAe white dwarfs
Two recently discovered white dwarfs, WDJ041246.84754942.26 and
WDJ165335.21100116.33, exhibit H and H Balmer line emission
similar to stars in the emerging DAHe class, yet intriguingly have not been
found to have detectable magnetic fields. These white dwarfs are assigned the
spectral type DAe. We present detailed follow-up of the two known DAe stars
using new time-domain spectroscopic observations and analysis of the latest
photometric time-series data from TESS and ZTF. We measure the upper magnetic
field strength limit of both stars as MG. The DAe white dwarfs
exhibit photometric and spectroscopic variability, where in the case of
WDJ041246.84754942.26 the strength of the H and H emission
cores varies in anti-phase with its photometric variability over the spin
period, which is the same phase relationship seen in DAHe stars. The DAe white
dwarfs closely cluster in one region of the Gaia Hertzsprung-Russell diagram
together with the DAHe stars. We discuss current theories on non-magnetic and
magnetic mechanisms which could explain the characteristics observed in DAe
white dwarfs, but additional data are required to unambiguously determine the
origin of these stars.Comment: 20 pages, 16 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRA
European Respiratory Society International Congress 2018: four shades of epidemiology and tobacco control
In this article, early career members and experienced members of the Epidemiology and Environment Assembly of the European Respiratory Society highlight and summarise a selection of six sessions from the Society’s annual congress, which in 2018 was held in Paris, France. The topics covered in these sessions span from cutting-edge molecular epidemiology of lung function to clinical, occupational and environmental epidemiology of respiratory disease, and from emergent tobacco products to tobacco control
On Second-Order Monadic Monoidal and Groupoidal Quantifiers
We study logics defined in terms of second-order monadic monoidal and
groupoidal quantifiers. These are generalized quantifiers defined by monoid and
groupoid word-problems, equivalently, by regular and context-free languages. We
give a computational classification of the expressive power of these logics
over strings with varying built-in predicates. In particular, we show that
ATIME(n) can be logically characterized in terms of second-order monadic
monoidal quantifiers
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