Asthma symptoms associated with depression and lower quality of life: a population survey

The document attached has been archived with permission from the editor of the Medical Journal of Australia. An external link to the publisher’s copy is included.Objective: To identify any association between asthma and depression and quality of life. Design and setting: A face-to-face Health Omnibus Survey of a random and representative sample of the South Australian population in August 1998. Participants: 3010 randomly selected participants aged 15 years and over. Main outcome measures: Prevalence of doctor-diagnosed asthma, and scores for depression (measured by PRIME-MD instrument) and quality of life (measured by SF-36) in affected participants. Results: The prevalence of asthma was 9.9%. The prevalence of major depression was significantly higher for those who experienced dyspnoea, wakening at night with asthma, and morning symptoms of asthma. Quality-of-life scores were also lower for the same groups. Conclusions: Depression is a serious but potentially remediable comorbidity with asthma that may affect appropriate diagnosis and outcome.Robert D Goldney, Richard Ruffin, Laura J Fisher and David H Wilso

Trichotillometry: the reliability and practicality of hair pluckability as a method of nutritional assessment

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>A nutritional assessment method that is quick and easy to conduct would be extremely useful in a complex emergency, where currently there is no agreed practical and acceptable method. Hair pluckability has been suggested to be a useful method of assessing protein nutritional status. The aim was to investigate the reliability of the trichotillometer and to explore the effects of patient characteristics on hair epilation force.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Three observers plucked hair from twelve participants to investigate the within- and between-observer reliability. To investigate the effect of patient characteristics on hair pluckability, 12 black African and 12 white volunteers were recruited. Participants completed a short questionnaire to provide basic information on their characteristics and hair.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Mean hair pluckability measurements for the 12 participants obtained by the three observers (39.5 g, 41.2 g and 32.7 g) were significantly different (p < 0.001). Significant variation between patients was also found (p < 0.001). None of the patient characteristics significantly affected hair pluckability, with the exception of age, although this relationship was not consistent.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Due to significant variation in measurements, hair pluckability does not appear to be a reliable method for assessing adult nutritional status. Hair pluckability could be a useful method of nutritional assessment in complex humanitarian emergencies but only if the reliability was improved.</p

The genome sequence of <i>Trypanosoma brucei gambiense</i>, causative agent of chronic Human African Trypanosomiasis

&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Background:&lt;/b&gt; &lt;i&gt;Trypanosoma brucei gambiense&lt;/i&gt; is the causative agent of chronic Human African Trypanosomiasis or sleeping sickness, a disease endemic across often poor and rural areas of Western and Central Africa. We have previously published the genome sequence of a &lt;i&gt;T. b. brucei&lt;/i&gt; isolate, and have now employed a comparative genomics approach to understand the scale of genomic variation between &lt;i&gt;T. b. gambiense&lt;/i&gt; and the reference genome. We sought to identify features that were uniquely associated with &lt;i&gt;T. b. gambiense&lt;/i&gt; and its ability to infect humans.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Methods and findings:&lt;/b&gt; An improved high-quality draft genome sequence for the group 1 &lt;i&gt;T. b. gambiense&lt;/i&gt; DAL 972 isolate was produced using a whole-genome shotgun strategy. Comparison with &lt;i&gt;T. b. brucei&lt;/i&gt; showed that sequence identity averages 99.2% in coding regions, and gene order is largely collinear. However, variation associated with segmental duplications and tandem gene arrays suggests some reduction of functional repertoire in &lt;i&gt;T. b. gambiense&lt;/i&gt; DAL 972. A comparison of the variant surface glycoproteins (VSG) in &lt;i&gt;T. b. brucei&lt;/i&gt; with all &lt;i&gt;T. b. gambiense&lt;/i&gt; sequence reads showed that the essential structural repertoire of VSG domains is conserved across &lt;i&gt;T. brucei&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Conclusions:&lt;/b&gt; This study provides the first estimate of intraspecific genomic variation within &lt;i&gt;T. brucei&lt;/i&gt;, and so has important consequences for future population genomics studies. We have shown that the &lt;i&gt;T. b. gambiense&lt;/i&gt; genome corresponds closely with the reference, which should therefore be an effective scaffold for any &lt;i&gt;T. brucei&lt;/i&gt; genome sequence data. As VSG repertoire is also well conserved, it may be feasible to describe the total diversity of variant antigens. While we describe several as yet uncharacterized gene families with predicted cell surface roles that were expanded in number in &lt;i&gt;T. b. brucei&lt;/i&gt;, no &lt;i&gt;T. b. gambiense&lt;/i&gt;-specific gene was identified outside of the subtelomeres that could explain the ability to infect humans.&lt;/p&gt

Cross-modal visuo-haptic mental rotation: comparing objects between senses

The simple experience of a coherent percept while looking and touching an object conceals an intriguing issue: different senses encode and compare information in different modality-specific reference frames. We addressed this problem in a cross-modal visuo-haptic mental rotation task. Two objects in various orientations were presented at the same spatial location, one visually and one haptically. Participants had to identify the objects as same or different. The relative angle between viewing direction and hand orientation was manipulated (Aligned versus Orthogonal). In an additional condition (Delay), a temporal delay was introduced between haptic and visual explorations while the viewing direction and the hand orientation were orthogonal to each other. Whereas the phase shift of the response time function was close to 0° in the Aligned condition, we observed a consistent phase shift in the hand’s direction in the Orthogonal condition. A phase shift, although reduced, was also found in the Delay condition. Counterintuitively, these results mean that seen and touched objects do not need to be physically aligned for optimal performance to occur. The present results suggest that the information about an object is acquired in separate visual and hand-centered reference frames, which directly influence each other and which combine in a time-dependent manner

Widespread forest vertebrate extinctions induced by a mega hydroelectric dam in lowland Amazonia

Mega hydropower projects in tropical forests pose a major emergent threat to terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity worldwide. Despite the unprecedented number of existing, underconstruction and planned hydroelectric dams in lowland tropical forests, long-term effects on biodiversity have yet to be evaluated. We examine how medium and large-bodied assemblages of terrestrial and arboreal vertebrates (including 35 mammal, bird and tortoise species) responded to the drastic 26-year post-isolation history of archipelagic alteration in landscape structure and habitat quality in a major hydroelectric reservoir of Central Amazonia. The Balbina Hydroelectric Dam inundated 3,129 km2 of primary forests, simultaneously isolating 3,546 land-bridge islands. We conducted intensive biodiversity surveys at 37 of those islands and three adjacent continuous forests using a combination of four survey techniques, and detected strong forest habitat area effects in explaining patterns of vertebrate extinction. Beyond clear area effects, edge-mediated surface fire disturbance was the most important additional driver of species loss, particularly in islands smaller than 10 ha. Based on species-area models, we predict that only 0.7% of all islands now harbor a species-rich vertebrate assemblage consisting of ≥80% of all species. We highlight the colossal erosion in vertebrate diversity driven by a man-made dam and show that the biodiversity impacts of mega dams in lowland tropical forest regions have been severely overlooked. The geopolitical strategy to deploy many more large hydropower infrastructure projects in regions like lowland Amazonia should be urgently reassessed, and we strongly advise that long-term biodiversity impacts should be explicitly included in pre-approval environmental impact assessments

Entrepreneurial sons, patriarchy and the Colonels' experiment in Thessaly, rural Greece

Existing studies within the field of institutional entrepreneurship explore how entrepreneurs influence change in economic institutions. This paper turns the attention of scholarly inquiry on the antecedents of deinstitutionalization and more specifically, the influence of entrepreneurship in shaping social institutions such as patriarchy. The paper draws from the findings of ethnographic work in two Greek lowland village communities during the military Dictatorship (1967–1974). Paradoxically this era associated with the spread of mechanization, cheap credit, revaluation of labour and clear means-ends relations, signalled entrepreneurial sons’ individuated dissent and activism who were now able to question the Patriarch’s authority, recognize opportunities and act as unintentional agents of deinstitutionalization. A ‘different’ model of institutional change is presented here, where politics intersects with entrepreneurs, in changing social institutions. This model discusses the external drivers of institutional atrophy and how handling dissensus (and its varieties over historical time) is instrumental in enabling institutional entrepreneurship

Public Goods and Public Policy: what is Public Good, and who and what Decides?

Higher education is usually seen as serving the public good, especially when funded directly by the state, and because of the ‘social benefit efficiency gains and potential equity effects on opportunity and reduced inequality’ (McMahon, 2009, p. 255). Calhoun (2006, p. 19) argues that public support for higher education is only given and maintained according to its capacity, capability, and willingness, to ‘educate citizens in general, to share knowledge, to distribute it as widely as possible in accord with publically articulated purposes’