Hormonal and metabolic adaptation to fasting: effects on hypothalamus-pituitary-ovary axis and reproductive performance of rabbit does.

To assess the impact of acute caloric shortage on reproduction, rabbit does were either fed ad libitum (control, AL), or fasted for 24 (STF) or 48 h (LTF) before induction of ovulation with GnRH injection. Blood samples were collected during the last 3 h of fasting, and the following 4 h after GnRH injection, when feedwas provided again, to measure plasma concentrations of LH, estradiol-17 , leptin, insulin, T3, corticosterone, glucose, and NEFA. Before re-feeding, plasma leptin, insulin, and T3 concentrations were lower (P 640.01) in both fasted groups than in controls, but then gradually increased following realimentation to match those of controls. During fasting, corticosterone levels were higher (P 640.01) in LTF than in STF and AL does, but decreased to control values soon after realimentation. During fasting, plasma glucose concentrations did not differ among groups, but upon re-feeding they markedly increased (P 640.01)both in STF and LTF does. NEFA levels were also more elevated (P 640.01) in fasted rabbits than in controls, and rapidly decreased (P 640.01) after re-feeding. Following GnRH injection, LH peak was lower (P 640.01) in LTF than in AL and STF does. Estradiol-17 showed higher pulse frequency and amplitude in AL than in STF and LTF does. Compared to controls, receptivity rate of STF and LTF artificially inseminated does declined respectively by 1220.5% (P 640.05) and 1222.7%, and fertility rate by 1223.9% (P 640.05) and 21.4%, but no difference was found in ovulation rate. In summary, nutritional status of does, as modified by fasting, greatly influenced fertility, metabolic and reproductive hormones

Influence of medial patellofemoral osteoarthritis on the outcome of fixed bearing unicompartmental knee arthroplasty

A large body of work in the information retrieval area has highlighted that relevance is a complex and a challenging concept. The underlying complexity appears mainly from the fact that relevance is estimated by considering multiple dimensions and that most of them are subjective since they are user-dependent. While the most used dimension is topicality, recent works risen particularly from personalized information retrieval have shown that personal preferences and contextual factors such as interests, location and task peculiarities have to be jointly considered in order to enhance the computation of document relevance. To answer this challenge, the commonly used approaches are based on linear combination schemes that rely basically on the non-realistic independency property of the relevance dimensions. In this paper, we propose a novel fuzzy-based document relevance aggregation operator able to capture the user’s importance of relevance dimensions as well as information about their interaction. Our approach is empirically evaluated and relies on the standard TREC contextual suggestion dataset involving 635 users and 50 contexts. The results highlight that accounting jointly for individual differences toward relevance dimension importance as well as their interaction introduces a significant improvement in the retrieval performance