Interpersonal violence: an important risk factor for disease and injury in South Africa

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Burden of disease estimates for South Africa have highlighted the particularly high rates of injuries related to interpersonal violence compared with other regions of the world, but these figures tell only part of the story. In addition to direct physical injury, violence survivors are at an increased risk of a wide range of psychological and behavioral problems. This study aimed to comprehensively quantify the excess disease burden attributable to exposure to interpersonal violence as a risk factor for disease and injury in South Africa.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The World Health Organization framework of interpersonal violence was adapted. Physical injury mortality and disability were categorically attributed to interpersonal violence. In addition, exposure to child sexual abuse and intimate partner violence, subcategories of interpersonal violence, were treated as risk factors for disease and injury using counterfactual estimation and comparative risk assessment methods. Adjustments were made to account for the combined exposure state of having experienced both child sexual abuse and intimate partner violence.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Of the 17 risk factors included in the South African Comparative Risk Assessment study, interpersonal violence was the second leading cause of healthy years of life lost, after unsafe sex, accounting for 1.7 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) or 10.5% of all DALYs (95% uncertainty interval: 8.5%-12.5%) in 2000. In women, intimate partner violence accounted for 50% and child sexual abuse for 32% of the total attributable DALYs.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The implications of our findings are that estimates that include only the direct injury burden seriously underrepresent the full health impact of interpersonal violence. Violence is an important direct and indirect cause of health loss and should be recognized as a priority health problem as well as a human rights and social issue. This study highlights the difficulties in measuring the disease burden from interpersonal violence as a risk factor and the need to improve the epidemiological data on the prevalence and risks for the different forms of interpersonal violence to complete the picture. Given the extent of the burden, it is essential that innovative research be supported to identify social policy and other interventions that address both the individual and societal aspects of violence.</p

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

Frequency and Types of Partner Violence Among Mexican American College Women

OBJECTIVE AND PARTICIPANTS: The authors studied the prevalence of partner violence, by type, among Mexican American college women aged 18 to 35 years (N = 149; response rate = 85%). RESULTS: Twelve percent of women who reported a dating partner in the past year were physically or sexually assaulted, 12.1% were stalked, and 9.1% scored as psychologically abused. Among those experiencing partner violence, almost half experienced stalking and 89% reported psychological abuse. Few women (25%) who experienced physical violence believed violence was a problem in their relationship. CONCLUSIONS: Partner violence was prevalent in this population, and participants experienced many forms of violence. Because few women experiencing physical violence report that violence is a problem in their relationship, interventions must address perceptions of violence and its impact on women\u27s mental and physical health in college populations

Memory, metamemory and their dissociation in temporal lobe epilepsy

Patients with temporal-lobe epilepsy (TLE) present with memory difficulties. The aim of the current study was to determine to what extent these difficulties could be related to a metamemory impairment. Fifteen patients with TLE and 15 matched healthy controls carried out a paired-associates learning task. Memory recall was measured at intervals of 30 min and 4 weeks. We employed a combined Judgement-of-Learning (JOL) and Feeling-of-Knowing (FOK) task to investigate whether participants could monitor their memory successfully at both the item-by-item level and the global level. The results revealed a clear deficit of episodic memory in patients with epilepsy compared with controls, but metamemory in TLE patients was intact. Patients were able to monitor their memory successfully at the item-by-item level, and tended to be even more accurate than controls when making global judgements. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Predictors Of Competitive Success Of National-Level Powerlifters: A Multilevel Analysis

Powerlifting is a sport consisting of the squat, bench press, and deadlift. The overall winner is determined using the Wilks formula to make comparisons across weight classes. To date, literature evaluating competitive performance in powerlifting is scarce. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the role of body mass and the number of successful attempts for each lift in determining competitive success. Individual and group level data were taken from the online USA Powerlifting Nationals database for the years 2015–2017. The analysis consisted of 2,532 individual cases taken from 2,021 individual male and female athletes nested within 17 weight classes. The number of successful attempts for squat (SQ), bench press (BP) and deadlift (DL), as well as body mass, were entered as individual level predictors. Multi-level analysis revealed that increased body mass within a weight class resulted in significantly increased Wilks points. Additionally, the number of successful squats and bench presses were significant, positive predictors of Wilks points. However, the number of successful deadlifts was not associated with greater competitive success. The results of this study suggest that competitive success in powerlifting may be aided by better competitive strategies regarding body mass manipulation and attempt selection

Syntaxin 4 heteozygous knock-out mice develop muscle insulin resistance

To investigate the physiological function of syntaxin 4 in the regulation of GLUT4 vesicle trafficking, we used homologous recombination to generate syntaxin 4-knockout mice. Homozygotic disruption of the syntaxin 4 gene results in early embryonic lethality, whereas heterozygous knockout mice, Syn4+/-, had normal viability with no significant impairment in growth, development, or reproduction. However, the Syn4+/- mice manifested impaired glucose tolerance with a 50% reduction in whole-body glucose uptake. This defect was attributed to a 50% reduction in skeletal muscle glucose transport determined by 2-deoxyglucose uptake during hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamp procedures. In parallel, insulin-stimulated GLUT4 translocation in skeletal muscle was also significantly reduced in these mice. In contrast, Syn4+/- mice displayed normal insulin-stimulated glucose uptake and metabolism in adipose tissue and liver. Together, these data demonstrate that syntaxin 4 plays a critical physiological role in insulin-stimulated glucose uptake in skeletal muscle. Furthermore, reduction in syntaxin 4 protein levels in this tissue can account for the impairment in whole-body insulin-stimulated glucose metabolism in this animal model