Telling the Story of Stepfamily Beginnings: The Relationship between Young-adult Stepchildren’s Stepfamily Origin Stories and their Satisfaction with the Stepfamily

The current study adopts a narrative perspective in examining the content of 80 stepchildren’s stepfamily origin stories. Results reveal five types of stepfamily origin stories: Sudden, Dark-sided, Ambivalent, Idealized, and Incremental. Results support the hypothesis that story type would predict differences in family satisfaction; stepchildren who described their stepfamily origins as Idealized were more satisfied than those whose origins were Dark-sided or Sudden. Overall, participants framed their stepfamily identity more positively when their stepfamily beginnings were characterized by closeness, friendship, and even expected ups and downs, rather than when they were left out of the process of negotiating or forming the stepfamily and when the beginnings were tainted by issues they considered to be dark. Stepparents or practitioners may benefit from these findings by examining the means by which stepparents may involve stepchildren in the process of stepfamily courtship, facilitate closeness, and set up realistic expectations for negotiating stepfamily life

Developmental trajectories of cerebral blood flow and oxidative metabolism at baseline and during working memory tasks

The neurobiological interpretation of developmental BOLD fMRI findings remains difficult due to the confounding issues of potentially varied baseline of brain function and varied strength of neurovascular coupling across age groups. The central theme of the present research is to study the development of brain function and neuronal activity through in vivo assessments of cerebral blood flow (CBF), oxygen extraction fraction (OEF) and cerebral metabolic rate of oxygen (CMRO2) both at baseline and during the performance of a working memory task in a cohort of typically developing children aged 7 to 18years. Using a suite of 4 emerging MRI technologies including MR blood oximetry, phase-contrast MRI, pseudo-continuous arterial spin labeling (pCASL) perfusion MRI and concurrent CBF/BOLD fMRI, we found: 1) At baseline, both global CBF and CMRO2 showed an age related decline while global OEF was stable across the age group; 2) During the working memory task, neither BOLD nor CBF responses showed significant variations with age in the activated fronto-parietal brain regions. Nevertheless, detailed voxel-wise analyses revealed sub-regions within the activated fronto-parietal regions that show significant decline of fractional CMRO2 responses with age. These findings suggest that the brain may become more "energy efficient" with age during development

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Pseudoaneurysm of the profunda femoris artery following a long anterograde intramedullary nail for an unstable intertrochanteric hip fracture: A case report and review of the literature

The incidence of hip fracture has been on the increase and projected to be higher than 6 million cases by the year 2050. Complications due to surgical fixation of hip fractures include, but are not limited to, infection, mal or nonunion, avascular necrosis, hardware failure, neurovascular injuries, and death. Vascular complications after surgical hip fracture fixation are very rare. We report a patient who developed Pseudoaneurysm of the profunda femoris artery following an anterograde trochanteric entry long intramedullary nail for an unstable hip fracture. This patient presented 2 weeks postoperatively with weakness, dizziness, and loss of strength. Her hematocrit on presentation was 19.7, and the arterial duplex showed a 6 × 7 cm pseudoaneurysm in the profunda femoris artery. Vascular coil embolization was performed, and the patient fully recovered. Discussion of this particular case and complication along with a full literature review on the topic of pseudoaneurysm after fracture fixation is presented

Developmental trajectories of cerebral blood flow and oxidative metabolism at baseline and during working memory tasks.

The neurobiological interpretation of developmental BOLD fMRI findings remains difficult due to the confounding issues of potentially varied baseline of brain function and varied strength of neurovascular coupling across age groups. The central theme of the present research is to study the development of brain function and neuronal activity through in vivo assessments of cerebral blood flow (CBF), oxygen extraction fraction (OEF) and cerebral metabolic rate of oxygen (CMRO2) both at baseline and during the performance of a working memory task in a cohort of typically developing children aged 7 to 18years. Using a suite of 4 emerging MRI technologies including MR blood oximetry, phase-contrast MRI, pseudo-continuous arterial spin labeling (pCASL) perfusion MRI and concurrent CBF/BOLD fMRI, we found: 1) At baseline, both global CBF and CMRO2 showed an age related decline while global OEF was stable across the age group; 2) During the working memory task, neither BOLD nor CBF responses showed significant variations with age in the activated fronto-parietal brain regions. Nevertheless, detailed voxel-wise analyses revealed sub-regions within the activated fronto-parietal regions that show significant decline of fractional CMRO2 responses with age. These findings suggest that the brain may become more "energy efficient" with age during development

Developmental trajectories of cerebral blood flow and oxidative metabolism at baseline and during working memory tasks.

The neurobiological interpretation of developmental BOLD fMRI findings remains difficult due to the confounding issues of potentially varied baseline of brain function and varied strength of neurovascular coupling across age groups. The central theme of the present research is to study the development of brain function and neuronal activity through in vivo assessments of cerebral blood flow (CBF), oxygen extraction fraction (OEF) and cerebral metabolic rate of oxygen (CMRO2) both at baseline and during the performance of a working memory task in a cohort of typically developing children aged 7 to 18years. Using a suite of 4 emerging MRI technologies including MR blood oximetry, phase-contrast MRI, pseudo-continuous arterial spin labeling (pCASL) perfusion MRI and concurrent CBF/BOLD fMRI, we found: 1) At baseline, both global CBF and CMRO2 showed an age related decline while global OEF was stable across the age group; 2) During the working memory task, neither BOLD nor CBF responses showed significant variations with age in the activated fronto-parietal brain regions. Nevertheless, detailed voxel-wise analyses revealed sub-regions within the activated fronto-parietal regions that show significant decline of fractional CMRO2 responses with age. These findings suggest that the brain may become more "energy efficient" with age during development

Consecutive Spray Drying to Produce Coated Dry Powder Vaccines Suitable for Oral Administration

Current global vaccination programs are challenged by costs associated with vaccine cold chain storage and administration. A solid, thermally stable oral dosage form for vaccines would alleviate these costs but is difficult to produce due to general vaccine instability and the complication of bypassing the gastric barrier. We developed a novel consecutive spray drying method that is suitable for use with biologics and employs Eudragit L100 polymer as the enteric coating. More specifically, in step 1, recombinant replication deficient human type-5 adenovirus and vesicular stomatitis virus were encapsulated by spray drying with sugars from a water solution, and in step 2, the microparticles from step 1 were suspended in ethanol with Eudragit and spray dried again. Up to 25% of the starting material was fully encapsulated within the enteric coating, and encapsulation efficiency was largely dependent on spray gas flow rate and the solids concentration in the feed. After step 2, the coated vaccine–sugar particles maintained their thermostability and were slightly larger in size with a rugous surface morphology compared to the particles produced in step 1. The coated particles retained viral vector activity in vitro after 15 min incubation in 1 M HCl (simulating the stomach environment) and anhydrous ethanol (to dissolve the Eudragit outer shell). The production of dry, orally administered vaccine particles from consecutive spray drying offers the potential to remedy a number of vaccine storage, transportation, and administration limitations

Empty Ritual: Young-Adult Stepchildren’s Perceptions of the Remarriage Ceremony

This qualitative study investigated 80 young-adult stepchildren’s talk about one of their parents’ remarriage ceremony. The remarriage event was celebrated in six types of ritual enactments, five of which celebrated the couple’s marriage and one of which was family-centered in its celebration of the beginning of the new stepfamily. Three factors led stepchildren to find the remarriage ceremony empty: (i) a ritual form that was too traditional or not traditional enough; (ii) a ritual enactment that failed to pay homage to either the stepchild’s family of origin or the stepfamily as a unit; and (iii) a ritual enactment that failed to involve the stepchild prior to and during the ceremony. Results support the characteristics of empty rituals posited in ritual theory