Life's Essential 8: Updating and Enhancing the American Heart Association's Construct of Cardiovascular Health: A Presidential Advisory from the American Heart Association

In 2010, the American Heart Association defined a novel construct of cardiovascular health to promote a paradigm shift from a focus solely on disease treatment to one inclusive of positive health promotion and preservation across the life course in populations and individuals. Extensive subsequent evidence has provided insights into strengths and limitations of the original approach to defining and quantifying cardiovascular health. In response, the American Heart Association convened a writing group to recommend enhancements and updates. The definition and quantification of each of the original metrics (Life's Simple 7) were evaluated for responsiveness to interindividual variation and intraindividual change. New metrics were considered, and the age spectrum was expanded to include the entire life course. The foundational contexts of social determinants of health and psychological health were addressed as crucial factors in optimizing and preserving cardiovascular health. This presidential advisory introduces an enhanced approach to assessing cardiovascular health: Life's Essential 8. The components of Life's Essential 8 include diet (updated), physical activity, nicotine exposure (updated), sleep health (new), body mass index, blood lipids (updated), blood glucose (updated), and blood pressure. Each metric has a new scoring algorithm ranging from 0 to 100 points, allowing generation of a new composite cardiovascular health score (the unweighted average of all components) that also varies from 0 to 100 points. Methods for implementing cardiovascular health assessment and longitudinal monitoring are discussed, as are potential data sources and tools to promote widespread adoption in policy, public health, clinical, institutional, and community settings

Norovirus Infection in Young Nicaraguan Children Induces Durable and Genotype-Specific Antibody Immunity

There are significant challenges to the development of a pediatric norovirus vaccine, mainly due to the antigenic diversity among strains infecting young children. Characterizing human norovirus serotypes and understanding norovirus immunity in naïve children would provide key information for designing rational vaccine platforms. In this study, 26 Nicaraguan children experiencing their first norovirus acute gastroenteritis (AGE) episode during the first 18 months of life were investigated. We used a surrogate neutralization assay that measured antibodies blocking the binding of 13 different norovirus virus-like particles (VLPs) to histo-blood group antigens (HBGAs) in pre- and post-infection sera. To assess for asymptomatic norovirus infections, stools from asymptomatic children were collected monthly, screened for norovirus by RT-qPCR and genotyped by sequencing. Seroconversion of an HBGA-blocking antibody matched the infecting genotype in 25 (96%) of the 26 children. A subset of 13 (50%) and 4 (15%) of the 26 children experienced monotypic GII and GI seroconversion, respectively, strongly suggesting a type-specific response in naïve children, and 9 (35%) showed multitypic seroconversion. The most frequent pairing in multitypic seroconversion (8/12) were GII.4 Sydney and GII.12 noroviruses, both co-circulating at the time. Blocking antibody titers to these two genotypes did not correlate with each other, suggesting multiple exposure rather than cross-reactivity between genotypes. In addition, GII titers remained consistent for at least 19 months post-infection, demonstrating durable immunity. In conclusion, the first natural norovirus gastroenteritis episodes in these young children were dominated by a limited number of genotypes and induced responses of antibodies blocking binding of norovirus VLPs in a genotype-specific manner, suggesting that an effective pediatric norovirus vaccine likely needs to be multivalent and include globally dominant genotypes. The duration of protection from natural infections provides optimism for pediatric norovirus vaccines administered early in life

The Development of a Conceptual Framework and Tools to Assess Undergraduates' Principled Use of Models in Cellular Biology

Recent science education reform has been marked by a shift away from a focus on facts toward deep, rich, conceptual understanding. This requires assessment that also focuses on conceptual understanding rather than recall of facts. This study outlines our development of a new assessment framework and tool—a taxonomy— which, unlike existing frameworks and tools, is grounded firmly in a framework that considers the critical role that models play in science. It also provides instructors a resource for assessing students' ability to reason about models that are central to the organization of key scientific concepts. We describe preliminary data arising from the application of our tool to exam questions used by instructors of a large-enrollment cell and molecular biology course over a 5-yr period during which time our framework and the assessment tool were increasingly used. Students were increasingly able to describe and manipulate models of the processes and systems being studied in this course as measured by assessment items. However, their ability to apply these models in new contexts did not improve. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results and the future directions for our research

Performance of Analytic Orbit Propagators on a Hypercube and a Workstation Cluster

In this paper we discuss the benefit of par allel computing in propagating orbits of ob jects. Several analytic methods are now in use operationally . We will discuss three such schemes. We demonstrate the benefit of par allelism by using an INTEL iPSC hyper cube and by using a cluster of Unix based workstations running Parallel Virtual Machine PVM. The software PVM allows a heterogeneous set of networked workstations to appear as a multicomputer. We will show that one can achieve near 100% efficiency on the hypercube

The ability of plants to produce strigolactones affects rhizosphere community composition of fungi but not bacteria

Strigolactones are an important group of plant hormones. When released from roots, they act as signalling molecules that induce branching of arbuscular mycorrhizal hyphae. However, the extent to which they affect the rhizosphere microbiome is unknown. Filling this knowledge gap is important because the diversity and composition of the root-associated microbiome influence plant fitness. In this study, we hypothesised that strigolactone-producing plants harbour a different community of rhizosphere bacteria and fungi compared to plants whose strigolactone synthesis is impaired. To test this hypothesis, we compared the diversity of rhizosphere bacterial and fungal communities associated with wild-type Arabidopsis thaliana and a mutant impaired in the production of strigolactones due to a disruption of the MORE AXILLARY GROWTH 4 (MAX4) gene. Our results indicate that the plant's ability to produce strigolactone is significantly correlated with changes in the composition (beta diversity) of rhizosphere fungal but not bacterial communities. No differences in alpha diversity (richness and evenness) were observed for either bacterial or fungal communities between the rhizospheres of max4 and wild-type. Epicoccum nigrum, Penicillium, Fibulochlamys chilensis, Herpotrichiellaceae, Mycosphaerella and Mycosphaerellaceae were among the fungal taxa possibly attracted to or mostly influenced by strigolactones given that they were present at higher abundances in the rhizosphere of the wild-type compared to the mutant. Our study provides evidence that rhizosphere fungal diversity are more strongly affected than bacterial diversity by the plant's ability to produce strigolactones.Lilia C. Carvalhais, Vivian A. Rincon-Florez, Philip B. Brewer, Christine A. Beveridge, Paul G. Dennis, Peer M. Schen