Associations between lifestyle factors and breast cancer in healthy women and breast cancer survivors and need for ehealth support

Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related mortality amongst women and its’ incidence is highest in Western-Europe. Contributing factors are higher levels of obesity and alcohol consumption, and lower levels of physical activity. Literature suggests a poor compliance to health recommendations in both breast cancer survivors and women without history of breast cancer. In the light of breast cancer prevention it is of great importance to improve this adherence and to integrate health education. Ehealth counselling might be a useful medium to obtain this goal. To gain an insight in women’s needs and requirements regarding an eHealth programme, this study used a qualitative research design based on the iChange Model

NMR Constraints Analyser: a web-server for the graphical analysis of NMR experimental constraints

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy together with X-ray crystallography, are the main techniques used for the determination of high-resolution 3D structures of biological molecules. The output of an NMR experiment includes a set of lower and upper limits for the distances (constraints) between pairs of atoms. If the number of constraints is high enough, there will be a finite number of possible conformations (models) of the macromolecule satisfying the data. Thus, the more constraints are measured, the better defined these structures will be. The availability of a user-friendly tool able to help in the analysis and interpretation of the number of experimental constraints per residue, is thus of valuable importance when assessing the levels of structure definition of NMR solved biological macromolecules, in particular, when high-quality structures are needed in techniques such as, computational biology approaches, site-directed mutagenesis experiments and/or drug design. Here, we present a free publicly available web-server, i.e. NMR Constraints Analyser, which is aimed at providing an automatic graphical analysis of the NMR experimental constraints atom by atom. The NMR Constraints Analyser server is available from the web-page http://molsim.sci.univr.it/constrain

Te oud voor het servet, te jong voor het tafellaken

Criminal Justice: Legitimacy, accountability, and effectivit

Externalizing psychopathology and persistence of offending in childhood first-time arrestees

This study aims to investigate the predictive validity of externalizing psychopathology for persistence in delinquent behavior when controlling for socio-demographic and first arrest characteristics in childhood first-time arrestees. A sample of first-time arrestees aged under 12 (n = 192) was assessed using the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children (DISC-IV) parent-version on attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and conduct disorder (CD). Based on child and parent reports of offending as obtained at arrest and at 2-year follow-up, three groups of offenders were differentiated: (1) persistent high (n = 48), (2) occasional (n = 62), and (3) persistent low offenders (n = 82). Over one-third of the sample (33.9%) was diagnosed with an externalizing disorder, and 13.5% with both ADHD and ODD or CD. Higher levels of externalizing psychopathology distinguished persistent high offenders from occasional (comorbid ADHD and ODD/CD: OR 8.2, CI 2.6–25.5) and persistent low offenders (comorbid ADHD and ODD/CD: OR 18.2, CI 4.6–72.3; ADHD: OR 4.1, CI 1.3–13.0), over and above socio-demographic and first offense characteristics. Living with both biological parents distinguished the persistent low offenders from the occasional offenders (OR 2.5, CI 1.2–5.0). Since the prevalence of externalizing disorders was high and predicted re-offending, mental health screening and intervention initiatives, aiming at these conditions, should be investigated for this high-risk sample

Determinants of Persistence in Collective Violence Offending

This study explores individual characteristics linked to an increased risk of persistence in collective violence. A sample of collective violence offenders (n = 438) was identified based on individuals' involvement in a collective violence incident in 2011/2012 or due to them being recorded in a police database of 'known' football hooligans. For the current analyses, persistence was defined as recidivism to collective violence assessed over a 4- to 5-year time span. Criminal career data were obtained from the police (register data). Individual characteristics concerned criminal career measures, behavioral indicators of personality traits and childhood problematic behavior. Due to a lack of other available data sources, behavioral indicator data were largely obtained from police and probation service information. The results of this study indicate that offender characteristics can be linked to persistence in collective violence. Results contrast currently dominant theoretical perspectives on the etiology of collective violence. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.</p

The NMR restraints grid at BMRB for 5,266 protein and nucleic acid PDB entries

Several pilot experiments have indicated that improvements in older NMR structures can be expected by applying modern software and new protocols (Nabuurs et al. in Proteins 55:483–186, 2004; Nederveen et al. in Proteins 59:662–672, 2005; Saccenti and Rosato in J Biomol NMR 40:251–261, 2008). A recent large scale X-ray study also has shown that modern software can significantly improve the quality of X-ray structures that were deposited more than a few years ago (Joosten et al. in J. Appl Crystallogr 42:376–384, 2009; Sanderson in Nature 459:1038–1039, 2009). Recalculation of three-dimensional coordinates requires that the original experimental data are available and complete, and are semantically and syntactically correct, or are at least correct enough to be reconstructed. For multiple reasons, including a lack of standards, the heterogeneity of the experimental data and the many NMR experiment types, it has not been practical to parse a large proportion of the originally deposited NMR experimental data files related to protein NMR structures. This has made impractical the automatic recalculation, and thus improvement, of the three dimensional coordinates of these structures. We here describe a large-scale international collaborative effort to make all deposited experimental NMR data semantically and syntactically homogeneous, and thus useful for further research. A total of 4,014 out of 5,266 entries were ‘cleaned’ in this process. For 1,387 entries, human intervention was needed. Continuous efforts in automating the parsing of both old, and newly deposited files is steadily decreasing this fraction. The cleaned data files are available from the NMR restraints grid at http://restraintsgrid.bmrb.wisc.edu

Contact replacement for NMR resonance assignment

Motivation: Complementing its traditional role in structural studies of proteins, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is playing an increasingly important role in functional studies. NMR dynamics experiments characterize motions involved in target recognition, ligand binding, etc., while NMR chemical shift perturbation experiments identify and localize protein–protein and protein–ligand interactions. The key bottleneck in these studies is to determine the backbone resonance assignment, which allows spectral peaks to be mapped to specific atoms. This article develops a novel approach to address that bottleneck, exploiting an available X-ray structure or homology model to assign the entire backbone from a set of relatively fast and cheap NMR experiments