Measuring activities in tobacco control across the EU. The MAToC

BACKGROUND: Objectives of this study are (a) to develop a comprehensive and economic tool to estimate tobacco control (TC) activities in single EU member states, (b) to compare TC activities between member states of the EU. This article provides the questionnaire and gives a benchmark of EU member states according to their perceived TC activities. Methods: An international workshop was specifically initiated to develop the questionnaire "Measuring Activities in Tobacco Control (MATOC)". TC experts from 8 European countries participated and chose 40 items to cover 11 general topics of TC. At the World Conference of Tobacco or Health in Helsinki 2003 participants were asked to fill out the questionnaire. N = 142 participants from EU-member states returned questionnaires. RESULTS: Subjects from the tobacco field in Finland gave the highest TC values to their country, followed by Sweden, Ireland, the UK and the Netherlands. The least active countries in TC were Greece and Germany, behind Austria, Spain, Belgium and Portugal. Italy, France and Denmark constituted the middle field. CONCLUSION: The MATOC provides a profile of TC across European countries and delivers results that are plausible and fit into the existing findings. The data presented here fulfils the purpose to illustrate what is possible with the MATOC and underlines the value of such an approach in delivering information for policy makers and TC advocates how TC is perceived in each country. Yet, further validity testing is necessary, the number of experts per country differs and is partly rather small. Further research with the MATOC should encounter these limitations. The procedure though could serve as model of practice for alcohol and legal drug policy as well

Long-term trends in diatom diversity and palaeoproductivity: a 16 000-year multidecadal record from Lake Baikal, southern Siberia

Biological diversity is inextricably linked to community stability and ecosystem functioning, but our understanding of these relationships in freshwater ecosystems is largely based on short-term observational, experimental, and modelling approaches. Using a multidecadal diatom record for the past ca. 16 000 years from Lake Baikal, we investigate how diversity and palaeoproductivity have responded to climate change during periods of both rapid climate fluctuation and relative climate stability. We show dynamic changes in diatom communities during the past 16 000 years, with decadal shifts in species dominance punctuating millennial-scale seasonal trends. We describe for the first time in Lake Baikal a gradual shift from spring to autumnal diatom communities that started during the Younger Dryas and peaked during the Late Holocene, which likely represents orbitally driven ecosystem responses to long-term changes in seasonality. Using a multivariate classification tree, we show that trends in planktonic and tychoplanktonic diatoms broadly reflect both long-term climatic changes associated with the demise of Northern Hemisphere ice sheets and abrupt climatic changes associated with, for example, the Younger Dryas stadial. Indeed, diatom communities are most different before and after the boundary between the Early and Middle Holocene periods of ca. 8.2 cal kyr BP, associated with the presence and demise of Northern Hemisphere ice sheets respectively. Diatom richness and diversity, estimated using Hill's species numbers, are also shown to be very responsive to periods characterized by abrupt climate change, and using knowledge of diatom autecologies in Lake Baikal, diversity trends are interpreted in terms of resource availability. Using diatom biovolume accumulation rates (BVARs; µm3 cm−2 yr−1), we show that spring diatom crops dominate palaeoproductivity for nearly all of our record, apart from a short period during the Late Holocene, when autumnal productivity dominated between 1.8–1.4 cal kyr BP. Palaeoproductivity was especially unstable during the Younger Dryas, reaching peak rates of 18.3 × 103 µm3 cm−2 yr−1 at ca. 12.3 cal kyr BP. Generalized additive models (GAMs), which explore productivity–diversity relationships (PDRs) during pre-defined climate periods, reveal complex relationships. The strongest statistical evidence for GAMs were found during the Younger Dryas, the Early Holocene, and the Late Holocene, i.e. periods of rapid climate change. We account for these differences in terms of climate-mediated resource availability, and the ability of endemic diatom species in Lake Baikal to adapt to extreme forms of living in this unique ecosystem. Our analyses offer insight into how productivity–diversity relationships may develop in the future under a warming climate

Impact of metabolic comorbidity on the association between body mass index and heatlh-related quality of life: a Scotland-wide cross-sectional study of 5,608 participants

<p/>Background: The prevalence of obesity is rising in Scotland and globally. Overall, obesity is associated with increased morbidity, mortality and reduced health-related quality of life. Studies suggest that "healthy obesity" (obesity without metabolic comorbidity) may not be associated with morbidity or mortality. Its impact on health-related quality of life is unknown. <p/>Methods: We extracted data from the Scottish Health Survey on self-reported health-related quality of life, body mass index (BMI), demographic information and comorbidity. SF-12 responses were converted into an overall health utility score. Linear regression analyses were used to explore the association between BMI and health utility, stratified by the presence or absence of metabolic comorbidity (diabetes, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia or cardiovascular disease), and adjusted for potential confounders (age, sex and deprivation quintile). <p/>Results: Of the 5,608 individuals, 3,744 (66.8%) were either overweight or obese and 921 (16.4%) had metabolic comorbidity. There was an inverted U-shaped relationship whereby health utility was highest among overweight individuals and fell with increasing BMI. There was a significant interaction with metabolic comorbidity (p = 0.007). Individuals with metabolic comorbidty had lower utility scores and a steeper decline in utility with increasing BMI (morbidly obese, adjusted coefficient: -0.064, 95% CI -0.115, -0.012, p = 0.015 for metabolic comorbidity versus -0.042, 95% CI -0.067, -0.018, p = 0.001 for no metabolic comorbidity). <p/>Conclusions: The adverse impact of obesity on health-related quality of life is greater among individuals with metabolic comorbidity. However, increased BMI is associated with reduced health-related quality of life even in the absence of metabolic comorbidity, casting doubt on the notion of "healthy obesity"

Odour-mediated orientation of beetles is influenced by age, sex and morph

The behaviour of insects is dictated by a combination of factors and may vary considerably between individuals, but small insects are often considered en masse and thus these differences can be overlooked. For example, the cowpea bruchid Callosobruchus maculatus F. exists naturally in two adult forms: the active (flight) form for dispersal, and the inactive (flightless), more fecund but shorter-lived form. Given that these morphs show dissimilar biology, it is possible that they differ in odour-mediated orientation and yet studies of this species frequently neglect to distinguish morph type, or are carried out only on the inactive morph. Along with sex and age of individual, adult morph could be an important variable determining the biology of this and similar species, informing studies on evolution, ecology and pest management. We used an olfactometer with motion-tracking to investigate whether the olfactory behaviour and orientation of C. maculatus towards infested and uninfested cowpeas and a plant-derived repellent compound, methyl salicylate, differed between morphs or sexes. We found significant differences between the behaviour of male and female beetles and beetles of different ages, as well as interactive effects of sex, morph and age, in response to both host and repellent odours. This study demonstrates that behavioural experiments on insects should control for sex and age, while also considering differences between adult morphs where present in insect species. This finding has broad implications for fundamental entomological research, particularly when exploring the relationships between physiology, behaviour and evolutionary biology, and the application of crop protection strategies

Phenotypic Plasticity of the Drosophila Transcriptome

Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of a single genotype to produce different phenotypes in response to changing environments. We assessed variation in genome-wide gene expression and four fitness-related phenotypes of an outbred Drosophila melanogaster population under 20 different physiological, social, nutritional, chemical, and physical environments; and we compared the phenotypically plastic transcripts to genetically variable transcripts in a single environment. The environmentally sensitive transcriptome consists of two transcript categories, which comprise ∼15% of expressed transcripts. Class I transcripts are genetically variable and associated with detoxification, metabolism, proteolysis, heat shock proteins, and transcriptional regulation. Class II transcripts have low genetic variance and show sexually dimorphic expression enriched for reproductive functions. Clustering analysis of Class I transcripts reveals a fragmented modular organization and distinct environmentally responsive transcriptional signatures for the four fitness-related traits. Our analysis suggests that a restricted environmentally responsive segment of the transcriptome preserves the balance between phenotypic plasticity and environmental canalization

Emotion Modulation of Visual Attention: Categorical and Temporal Characteristics

Background: Experimental research has shown that emotional stimuli can either enhance or impair attentional performance. However, the relative effects of specific emotional stimuli and the specific time course of these differential effects are unclear. Methodology/Principal Findings: In the present study, participants (n = 50) searched for a single target within a rapid serial visual presentation of images. Irrelevant fear, disgust, erotic or neutral images preceded the target by two, four, six, or eight items. At lag 2, erotic images induced the greatest deficits in subsequent target processing compared to other images, consistent with a large emotional attentional blink. Fear and disgust images also produced a larger attentional blinks at lag 2 than neutral images. Erotic, fear, and disgust images continued to induce greater deficits than neutral images at lag 4 and 6. However, target processing deficits induced by erotic, fear, and disgust images at intermediate lags (lag 4 and 6) did not consistently differ from each other. In contrast to performance at lag 2, 4, and 6, enhancement in target processing for emotional stimuli was observed in comparison to neutral stimuli at lag 8. Conclusions/Significance: These findings suggest that task-irrelevant emotion information, particularly erotica, impairs intentional allocation of attention at early temporal stages, but at later temporal stages, emotional stimuli can have an enhancing effect on directed attention. These data suggest that the effects of emotional stimuli on attention can be bot

Self versus Environment Motion in Postural Control

To stabilize our position in space we use visual information as well as non-visual physical motion cues. However, visual cues can be ambiguous: visually perceived motion may be caused by self-movement, movement of the environment, or both. The nervous system must combine the ambiguous visual cues with noisy physical motion cues to resolve this ambiguity and control our body posture. Here we have developed a Bayesian model that formalizes how the nervous system could solve this problem. In this model, the nervous system combines the sensory cues to estimate the movement of the body. We analytically demonstrate that, as long as visual stimulation is fast in comparison to the uncertainty in our perception of body movement, the optimal strategy is to weight visually perceived movement velocities proportional to a power law. We find that this model accounts for the nonlinear influence of experimentally induced visual motion on human postural behavior both in our data and in previously published results

Highly Tissue Specific Expression of Sphinx Supports Its Male Courtship Related Role in Drosophila melanogaster

Sphinx is a lineage-specific non-coding RNA gene involved in regulating courtship behavior in Drosophila melanogaster. The 5′ flanking region of the gene is conserved across Drosophila species, with the proximal 300 bp being conserved out to D. virilis and a further 600 bp region being conserved amongst the melanogaster subgroup (D. melanogaster, D. simulans, D. sechellia, D. yakuba, and D. erecta). Using a green fluorescence protein transformation system, we demonstrated that a 253 bp region of the highly conserved segment was sufficient to drive sphinx expression in male accessory gland. GFP signals were also observed in brain, wing hairs and leg bristles. An additional ∼800 bp upstream region was able to enhance expression specifically in proboscis, suggesting the existence of enhancer elements. Using anti-GFP staining, we identified putative sphinx expression signal in the brain antennal lobe and inner antennocerebral tract, suggesting that sphinx might be involved in olfactory neuron mediated regulation of male courtship behavior. Whole genome expression profiling of the sphinx knockout mutation identified significant up-regulated gene categories related to accessory gland protein function and odor perception, suggesting sphinx might be a negative regulator of its target genes

MRI texture analysis of subchondral bone at the tibial plateau

OBJECTIVES: To determine the feasibility of MRI texture analysis as a method of quantifying subchondral bone architecture in knee osteoarthritis (OA).   METHODS: Asymptomatic subjects aged 20-30 (group 1, n = 10), symptomatic patients aged 40-50 (group 2, n = 10) and patients scheduled for knee replacement aged 55-85 (group 3, n = 10) underwent high spatial resolution T1-weighted coronal 3T knee MRI. Regions of interest were created in the medial (MT) and lateral (LT) tibial subchondral bone from which 20 texture parameters were calculated. T2 mapping of the tibial cartilage was performed in groups 1 and 2. Mean parameter values were compared between groups using ANOVA. Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) was used to evaluate the ability of texture analysis to classify subjects correctly.   RESULTS: Significant differences in 18/20 and 12/20 subchondral bone texture parameters were demonstrated between groups at the MT and LT respectively. There was no significant difference in mean MT or LT cartilage T2 values between group 1 and group 2. LDA demonstrated subject classification accuracy of 97 % (95 % CI 91-100 %).   CONCLUSION: MRI texture analysis of tibial subchondral bone may allow detection of alteration in subchondral bone architecture in OA. This has potential applications in understanding OA pathogenesis and assessing response to treatment.   KEY POINTS: • Improved techniques to monitor OA disease progression and treatment response are desirable • Subchondral bone (SB) may play significant role in the development of OA • MRI texture analysis is a method of quantifying changes in SB architecture • Pilot study showed that this technique is feasible and reliable • Significant differences in SB texture were demonstrated between individuals with/without OA