Quality of private and public ambulatory health care in low and middle income countries: systematic review of comparative studies

Paul Garner and colleagues conducted a systematic review of 80 studies to compare the quality of private versus public ambulatory health care in low- and middle-income countries

The role of mothers-in-law in antenatal care decision-making in Nepal: a qualitative study

Background Antenatal care (ANC) has been recognised as a way to improve health outcomes for pregnant women and their babies. However, only 29% of pregnant women receive the recommended four antenatal visits in Nepal but reasons for such low utilisation are poorly understood. As in many countries of South Asia, mothers-in-law play a crucial role in the decisions around accessing health care facilities and providers. This paper aims to explore the mother-in-law’s role in (a) her daughter-in-law’s ANC uptake; and (b) the decision-making process about using ANC services in Nepal. Methods In-depth interviews were conducted with 30 purposively selected antenatal or postnatal mothers (half users, half non-users of ANC), 10 husbands and 10 mothers-in-law in two different (urban and rural) communities. Results Our findings suggest that mothers-in-law sometime have a positive influence, for example when encouraging women to seek ANC, but more often it is negative. Like many rural women of their generation, all mothers-in-law in this study were illiterate and most had not used ANC themselves. The main factors leading mothers-in-law not to support/ encourage ANC check ups were expectations regarding pregnant women fulfilling their household duties, perceptions that ANC was not beneficial based largely on their own past experiences, the scarcity of resources under their control and power relations between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law. Individual knowledge and social class of the mothers-in-law of users and non-users differed significantly, which is likely to have had an effect on their perceptions of the benefits of ANC. Conclusion Mothers-in-law have a strong influence on the uptake of ANC in Nepal. Understanding their role is important if we are to design and target effective community-based health promotion interventions. Health promotion and educational interventions to improve the use of ANC should target women, husbands and family members, particularly mothers-in-law where they control access to family resources

Genetic Architecture of Highly Complex Chemical Resistance Traits across Four Yeast Strains

Many questions about the genetic basis of complex traits remain unanswered. This is in part due to the low statistical power of traditional genetic mapping studies. We used a statistically powerful approach, extreme QTL mapping (X-QTL), to identify the genetic basis of resistance to 13 chemicals in all 6 pairwise crosses of four ecologically and genetically diverse yeast strains, and we detected a total of more than 800 loci. We found that the number of loci detected in each experiment was primarily a function of the trait (explaining 46% of the variance) rather than the cross (11%), suggesting that the level of genetic complexity is a consistent property of a trait across different genetic backgrounds. Further, we observed that most loci had trait-specific effects, although a small number of loci with effects in many conditions were identified. We used the patterns of resistance and susceptibility alleles in the four parent strains to make inferences about the allele frequency spectrum of functional variants. We also observed evidence of more complex allelic series at a number of loci, as well as strain-specific signatures of selection. These results improve our understanding of complex traits in yeast and have implications for study design in other organisms

Assessing the need for follow-up: The relationship of prognosis to posthospitalization adjustment

Parents of children (N-64) hospitalized at a psychiatric hospital between the years 1971 and 1976 rated their child's adjustment in a number of behavioral areas. Problems in school, making friends, acting age-appropriately, and handling aggression were reported to be the major sources of difficulty for 40% of the former patients. No statistical relationship was found between clinicians' prognosis at discharge and children's post-hospitalization adjustment. The authors discuss some of the variables that mitigate against accurate outcome pre diction and argue for the integration of an organized follow-up program into their treatment program.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43949/1/10578_2005_Article_BF01433501.pd

Swearing, Euphemisms, and Linguistic Relativity

Participants read aloud swear words, euphemisms of the swear words, and neutral stimuli while their autonomic activity was measured by electrodermal activity. The key finding was that autonomic responses to swear words were larger than to euphemisms and neutral stimuli. It is argued that the heightened response to swear words reflects a form of verbal conditioning in which the phonological form of the word is directly associated with an affective response. Euphemisms are effective because they replace the trigger (the offending word form) by another word form that expresses a similar idea. That is, word forms exert some control on affect and cognition in turn. We relate these findings to the linguistic relativity hypothesis, and suggest a simple mechanistic account of how language may influence thinking in this context

Finding the sources of missing heritability in a yeast cross

For many traits, including susceptibility to common diseases in humans, causal loci uncovered by genetic mapping studies explain only a minority of the heritable contribution to trait variation. Multiple explanations for this "missing heritability" have been proposed. Here we use a large cross between two yeast strains to accurately estimate different sources of heritable variation for 46 quantitative traits and to detect underlying loci with high statistical power. We find that the detected loci explain nearly the entire additive contribution to heritable variation for the traits studied. We also show that the contribution to heritability of gene-gene interactions varies among traits, from near zero to 50%. Detected two-locus interactions explain only a minority of this contribution. These results substantially advance our understanding of the missing heritability problem and have important implications for future studies of complex and quantitative traits

A Measure of the Promiscuity of Proteins and Characteristics of Residues in the Vicinity of the Catalytic Site That Regulate Promiscuity

Promiscuity, the basis for the evolution of new functions through ‘tinkering’ of residues in the vicinity of the catalytic site, is yet to be quantitatively defined. We present a computational method Promiscuity Indices Estimator (PROMISE) - based on signatures derived from the spatial and electrostatic properties of the catalytic residues, to estimate the promiscuity (PromIndex) of proteins with known active site residues and 3D structure. PromIndex reflects the number of different active site signatures that have congruent matches in close proximity of its native catalytic site, the quality of the matches and difference in the enzymatic activity. Promiscuity in proteins is observed to follow a lognormal distribution (μ = 0.28, σ = 1.1 reduced chi-square = 3.0E-5). The PROMISE predicted promiscuous functions in any protein can serve as the starting point for directed evolution experiments. PROMISE ranks carboxypeptidase A and ribonuclease A amongst the more promiscuous proteins. We have also investigated the properties of the residues in the vicinity of the catalytic site that regulates its promiscuity. Linear regression establishes a weak correlation (R2∼0.1) between certain properties of the residues (charge, polar, etc) in the neighborhood of the catalytic residues and PromIndex. A stronger relationship states that most proteins with high promiscuity have high percentages of charged and polar residues within a radius of 3 Å of the catalytic site, which is validated using one-tailed hypothesis tests (P-values∼0.05). Since it is known that these characteristics are key factors in catalysis, their relationship with the promiscuity index cross validates the methodology of PROMISE

Nucleotide-Oligomerization-Domain-2 Affects Commensal Gut Microbiota Composition and Intracerebral Immunopathology in Acute Toxoplasma gondii Induced Murine Ileitis

Background Within one week following peroral high dose infection with Toxoplasma (T.) gondii, susceptible mice develop non-selflimiting acute ileitis due to an underlying Th1-type immunopathology. The role of the innate immune receptor nucleotide-oligomerization-domain-2 (NOD2) in mediating potential extra-intestinal inflammatory sequelae including the brain, however, has not been investigated so far. Methodology/Principal Findings Following peroral infection with 100 cysts of T. gondii strain ME49, NOD2-/- mice displayed more severe ileitis and higher small intestinal parasitic loads as compared to wildtype (WT) mice. However, systemic (i.e. splenic) levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines such as TNF-α and IFN-γ were lower in NOD2-/- mice versus WT controls at day 7 p.i. Given that the immunopathological outcome might be influenced by the intestinal microbiota composition, which is shaped by NOD2, we performed a quantitative survey of main intestinal bacterial groups by 16S rRNA analysis. Interestingly, Bifidobacteria were virtually absent in NOD2-/- but not WT mice, whereas differences in remaining bacterial species were rather subtle. Interestingly, more distinct intestinal inflammation was accompanied by higher bacterial translocation rates to extra- intestinal tissue sites such as liver, spleen, and kidneys in T. gondii infected NOD2-/- mice. Strikingly, intracerebral inflammatory foci could be observed as early as seven days following T. gondii infection irrespective of the genotype of animals, whereas NOD2-/- mice exhibited higher intracerebral parasitic loads, higher F4/80 positive macrophage and microglia numbers as well as higher IFN-γ mRNA expression levels as compared to WT control animals. Conclusion/Significance NOD2 signaling is involved in protection of mice from T. gondii induced acute ileitis. The parasite-induced Th1-type immunopathology at intestinal as well as extra-intestinal sites including the brain is modulated in a NOD2-dependent manner

Comparing different models of the development of verb inflection in early child Spanish

How children acquire knowledge of verb inflection is a long-standing question in language acquisition research. In the present study, we test the predictions of some current constructivist and generativist accounts of the development of verb inflection by focusing on data from two Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 2;0 and 2;6. The constructivist claim that children's early knowledge of verb inflection is only partially productive is tested by comparing the average number of different inflections per verb in matched samples of child and adult speech. The generativist claim that children's early use of verb inflection is essentially error-free is tested by investigating the rate at which the children made subjectverb agreement errors in different parts of the present tense paradigm. Our results show: 1) that, although even adults ' use of verb inflection in Spanish tends to look somewhat lexically restricted, both children's use of verb inflection was significantly less flexible than that of their caregivers, and 2) that, although the rate at which the two children produced subjectverb agreement errors in their speech was very low, this overall error rate hid a consistent pattern of error in which error rates were substantially higher in low frequency than in high frequency contexts, and substantially higher for low frequency than for high frequency verbs. These results undermine the claim that children's use of verb inflection is fully productive from the earliest observable stages, and are consistent with the constructivist claim that knowledge of verb inflection develops only gradually