Indirect calorimetry in obese female subjects: Factors influencing the resting metabolic rate.

AIM: To evaluate selected factors influencing resting energy expenditure (REE) in obese female subjects. METHODS: Seventy seven 61 obese Caucasian women [mean age of 52.93 ± 13.45 years, and mean body mass index (BMI) of 41.78 ± 11.54 kg/m2] were enrolled; measurements of resting metabolic rate (RMR) by a ventilated, open-circuit system, indirect calorimeter were performed after an overnight fast. Body composition as well as medications, physical parameters, blood samples, disease pattern, and smoking were considered. RESULTS: RMR was significantly associated with body weight (r = 0.732, P < 0.001), body height (r = 0.401, P = 0.008), BMI (r = 0.504, P < 0.001), waist circumference (r = 0.602, P < 0.001), mid-upper arm circumference (r = 0.417, P = 0.006), mid-upper arm muscle circumference (r = 0.344, P = 0.028), total body water (r = 0.339, P = 0.035), body temperature (r = 0.409, P = 0.007), smoking (P = 0.031), serum T4 levels (r = 0.331, P = 0.036), obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome (OSAS; P = 0.023), impaired glucose tolerance (IGT; P = 0.017) and impaired glycaemic status, including hyperinsulinism, IGT and diabetes mellitus (P = 0.003). CONCLUSION: Future research should be prompted to optimize the procedure of indirect calorimetry to achieve clinical benefits in obese subjects

Modulating Tone in the Early English Slaughter of the Innocents Plays : Between Grief, Vengeance, and Humour

This article was written with the generous support of the Swiss National Science Foundation, who funded an eighteen-month research sabbatical at the University of Edinburgh. It offers a different strategy as to how a critic might approach the question of humour in the early English Slaughter of the Innocents plays. Without trying to delimit the moments in which humour is identifiable, I suggest that paying attention to the use of emotion in the plays, and how it relates to rapid changes in action and tone, goes some way to thinking about how humour might work within the dramatic shape of the six surviving episodes. The complexity of the emotional responses that I argue are demanded from an audience works with rather than against the sacred content, even when such responses include laughter, and requires paradigms of investigation that move beyond Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque