Acute hormonal response to glucose, lipids and arginine infusion in overweight cats

In cats, the incidence of obesity and diabetes is increasing, and little is known about specific aspects of the endocrine control of food intake in this species. Recent data suggest that ghrelin has an important role in the control of insulin secretion and vice versa, but this role has never been demonstrated in cats. Here we aimed to improve our understanding about the relationship between insulin, amylin and ghrelin secretion in response to a nutrient load in overweight cats. After a 16h fast, weekly, six overweight male cats underwent randomly one of the four testing sessions: saline, glucose, arginine and TAG. All solutions were isoenergetic and isovolumic, and were injected intravenously as a bolus. Glucose, insulin, acylated ghrelin (AG), amylin and prolactin were assayed in plasma before and 10, 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100min after the nutrient load. A linear mixed-effects model was used to assess the effect of bolus and time on the parameters. A parenteral bolus of glucose or arginine increased insulin and ghrelin concentrations in cats. Except for with the TAG bolus, no suppression of ghrelin was observed. The absence of AG suppression after the intravenous load of arginine and glucose may suggest: (1) that some nutrients do not promote satiation in overweight cats; or that (2) AG may be involved in non-homeostatic consumption mechanisms. However, the role of ghrelin in food reward remains to be assessed in cat

Interval Arithmetic in CUDA

International audienceEvery now and then some headlines question the confidence we may have in results obtained from computers. In the past, failures to deliver an accurate result were caused by exceptions (division by zero for example [6]) or situations that are now characterized as catastrophic (cancellation) [1], illposed or ill-conditioned [7]. Peak performance of GPUs typically counts in teraflops, and they are used in peta-scale systems. Most applications running on such systems can be considered as ill-conditioned, and no catastrophic or exceptional event may be blamed for computed results that fall too far from their target. One solution is to spend some of the impressive computing power offered by GPUs to compute a validated range for the results instead of the uncontrolled estimation delivered by regular floating-point arithmetic. Interval arithmetic (IA) accounts for uncertainties in data at operator level and returns reliable bounds that include the correct result of an expression [8]. The basic principle of IA is to replace approximate floating-point numbers by intervals enclosing the results. Expressions and programs are then evaluated on intervals instead of points

Graphic processors to speed-up simulations for the design of high performance solar receptors

International audienceGraphics Processing Units (GPUs) are now powerful and flexible systems adapted and used for other purposes than graphics calculations (General Purpose computation on GPU --- GPGPU). We present here a prototype to be integrated into simulation codes that estimate temperature, velocity and pressure to design next generations of solar receptors. Such codes will delegate to our contribution on GPUs the computation of heat transfers due to radiations. We use Monte-Carlo line-by-line ray-tracing through finite volumes. This means data-parallel arithmetic transformations on large data structures. Our prototype is inspired on the source code of GPUBench. Our performances on two recent graphics cards (Nvidia 7800GTX and ATI RX1800XL) show some speed-up higher than 400 compared to CPU implementations leaving most of CPU computing resources available. As there were some questions pending about the accuracy of the operators implemented in GPUs, we start this report with a survey and some contributed tests on the various floating point units available on GPUs

Fonctions élémentaires sur GPU exploitant la localité de valeurs

National audienceLes processeurs graphiques sont de puissants coprocesseurs SIMD dédiés au traitement du parallélisme de donnée issue d'application multimédia ou du domaine du calcul généraliste sur processeur graphique (GPGPU). Ces processeurs intègrent différentes unités spécialisées dupliquées de nombreuses fois. Parmi ces unités spécialisées, on retrouve les unités d'évaluation de fonctions de base (inverse, inverse de la racine carrée, exponentielle, fonctions trigonométriques. . . ). L'objectif de cet article est de proposer une modification architecturale destinée à réduire la surface totale occupée par ces unités tout en conservant des performances comparables. Cette modification exploite la localité de valeurs dans un contexte d'exécution SIMD pour partager les tables nécessaires. Deux versions sont proposées et testées : Un partage de table limité à chaque bloc SIMD et un partage global d'une table unique avec des caches partagés au niveau des blocs SIMD. Les tests sont menés à la fois sur les benchmarks classiques qui représentent le travail de développeurs experts et sur des simulations dans le domaine du développement durable qui représentent le travail d'utilisateurs d'outils intégrés. Les traces d'exécution de ces derniers codes sont isponibles auprès des auteurs

Comment l'arthrose et les enthésopathies nous renseignent sur l'activité physique suivant les "niveaux sociaux" dans une population médiévale monastique de Belgique

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Development of a practical test of insulin resistance in obese Beagle dogs and effects of sc FOS

peer reviewe

Method assessment and observer variation in age estimation: a comparative analysis of the Suchey-Brooks and the İşcan methods on an archaeological medieval population

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

De bevolkingsstructuur op de begraafplaats van de abdij Ten Duinen in Koksijde (12de-16de eeuw).

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Acute hormonal response to glucose, lipids and arginine infusion in overweight cats

In cats, the incidence of obesity and diabetes is increasing, and little is known about specific aspects of the endocrine control of food intake in this species. Recent data suggest that ghrelin has an important role in the control of insulin secretion and vice versa, but this role has never been demonstrated in cats. Here we aimed to improve our understanding about the relationship between insulin, amylin and ghrelin secretion in response to a nutrient load in overweight cats. After a 16 h fast, weekly, six overweight male cats underwent randomly one of the four testing sessions: saline, glucose, arginine and TAG. All solutions were isoenergetic and isovolumic, and were injected intravenously as a bolus. Glucose, insulin, acylated ghrelin (AG), amylin and prolactin were assayed in plasma before and 10, 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100 min after the nutrient load. A linear mixed-effects model was used to assess the effect of bolus and time on the parameters. A parenteral bolus of glucose or arginine increased insulin and ghrelin concentrations in cats. Except for with the TAG bolus, no suppression of ghrelin was observed. The absence of AG suppression after the intravenous load of arginine and glucose may suggest: (1) that some nutrients do not promote satiation in overweight cats; or that (2) AG may be involved in non-homeostatic consumption mechanisms. However, the role of ghrelin in food reward remains to be assessed in cats