Supplemental fish oil decreases urinary excretion of a marker of bone resorption in healthy adults

Background: Incorporation of fish oil (FO) into the diet of rodents has been shown to result in positive changes in bone health. Currently it is poorly understood if FO has the same effects on bone health in humans. The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of supplemental FO on levels of urinary N-terminal cross-linked telopeptide (NTx), which is a marker of bone breakdown, and how this is related to the morning levels of salivary cortisol and urinary excretion of interleukin 6 (IL-6). Methods: A total of twenty-eight females and twelve males(35 ± 13yrs; 69.1 ± 14.1kg; 29.4 ± 9.2% body fat; mean ± SD) participated in this study. All testing was conducted in the morning following an overnight fast. Baseline measurements of salivary cortisol were collected via passive drool and baseline measurements of urinary NTxand IL- 6 were collected from the second void of the day and corrected for creatinine excretion. After baseline testing, subjects were assigned randomly in a double blind manner to one of two groups: 4 g/d of Safflower Oil (SO) or 4 g/d of FO supplying 1,600 mg/d eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and 800 mg/d docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). All tests were repeated following 6wk of treatment. A treatment by time, repeated measures ANOVA was used to evaluate differences between groups over time, and a standard Pearson’s r was used to evaluate correlations. Additionally, within group pre-post differences were evaluated using a repeated measures t-test. For all analysis, the alpha level was set at p\u3c0.05. Results: Compared to the SO group, there was a significant decrease in urinary creatinine corrected NTx excretion following FO treatment (SO = 17.5 ± 42.9 BCE/mM; FO = -11.3 ± 27.7 BCE/mM; p=0.02). There was also a tendency for urinary creatinine corrected IL-6 excretion (SO = -0.08 ± 1.18pg/mg; FO = -1.8 ± 3.8 pg/mg; p=0.08), and salivary cortisol (SO = 0.029±0.283 μg/dL; FO = -0.069 ± 0.144 μg/dL; p=0.13) to decrease following FO treatment.When analyzed independently, however, there was a significant pre-post reduction for salivary cortisol in the FO group (p=0.04), with no change in the SO group (p=0.68), as well as a significant reduction pre-post for urinary IL-6 in the FO group (p=0.05), with no change in the SO group (p=0.78). However, the change in urinary NTx concentrationwas not related to the change insalivary cortisol concentration( r=-0.017, p=0.9), or the change in urinary IL-6 concentration (r=-0.323, p=0.26). Conclusions: Six weeks of supplementation with FO in adults significantly decreased urinary NTx excretion, but this change was not related to changes in cortisol or IL-6

The cognitive neuroscience of prehension: recent developments

Prehension, the capacity to reach and grasp, is the key behavior that allows humans to change their environment. It continues to serve as a remarkable experimental test case for probing the cognitive architecture of goal-oriented action. This review focuses on recent experimental evidence that enhances or modifies how we might conceptualize the neural substrates of prehension. Emphasis is placed on studies that consider how precision grasps are selected and transformed into motor commands. Then, the mechanisms that extract action relevant information from vision and touch are considered. These include consideration of how parallel perceptual networks within parietal cortex, along with the ventral stream, are connected and share information to achieve common motor goals. On-line control of grasping action is discussed within a state estimation framework. The review ends with a consideration about how prehension fits within larger action repertoires that solve more complex goals and the possible cortical architectures needed to organize these actions

Parallel Cost Analysis of Distributed Systems

We present a novel static analysis to infer the parallel cost of distributed systems. Parallel cost differs from the standard notion of serial cost by exploiting the truly concurrent execution model of distributed processing to capture the cost of synchronized tasks executing in parallel. It is challenging to analyze parallel cost because one needs to soundly infer the parallelism between tasks while accounting for waiting and idle processor times at the different locations. Our analysis works in three phases: (1) It first performs a block-level analysis to estimate the serial costs of the blocks between synchronization points in the program; (2) Next, it constructs a distributed ow graph (DFG) to capture the parallelism, the waiting and idle times at the locations of the distributed system; Finally, (3) the parallel cost can be obtained as the path of maximal cost in the DFG. A prototype implementation demonstrates the accuracy and feasibility of the proposed analysis