Nutrition education to improve dietary intake and micronutrient nutriture among children in less-resourced areas: a randomised controlled intervention in Kabarole district, western Uganda

Objective: To determine whether nutrition education targeting the child-feeding practices of low-income rural caregivers will reduce anaemiaand improve vitamin A nutriture of the young children in their care.Design: A controlled intervention trial, based on experiential learning theory. Forty-six women completed a nine-session nutrition educationprogramme, while controls (n = 43) concurrently engaged in sewing classes.Setting: Two rural farming communities in the Kabarole district, western Uganda.Subjects: Less literate, low-income rural female caregivers and the children in their care (6-48 months).Outcome measures: Caregivers’ child-feeding practices and the children’s nutritional status were assessed at baseline, one month afterintervention (Follow-up 1) and one year from baseline (Follow-up 2).Results: Caregivers in the intervention group reported improved child snacking patterns, food-selection practices, meal adequacy, and foodvariety. Children in the intervention group recorded lower haemoglobin levels at baseline (9.86 vs. 10.70 g/dl) and caught up with controlsat Follow-up 1 (10.06 vs. 10.78 g/dl). However, changes were not sustained. Mean retinol-binding protein improved from 0.68 ìmol/l (95%CI: 0.57-0.78) to 0.91 ìmol/l (95% CI: 0.78-1.03) among intervention children, but remained approximately the same in controls. Vitamin Anutriture was influenced by infections.Conclusion: Nutrition education significantly improved feeding practices and children’s nutritional status. The effectiveness and sustainabilityof this programme can be enhanced if nutrition education is integrated into other food-production and public health programme

Interactions and potential implications of Plasmodium falciparum-hookworm coinfection in different age groups in south-central Côte d'Ivoire

BACKGROUND: Given the widespread distribution of Plasmodium and helminth infections, and similarities of ecological requirements for disease transmission, coinfection is a common phenomenon in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere in the tropics. Interactions of Plasmodium falciparum and soil-transmitted helminths, including immunological responses and clinical outcomes of the host, need further scientific inquiry. Understanding the complex interactions between these parasitic infections is of public health relevance considering that control measures targeting malaria and helminthiases are going to scale.METHODOLOGY: A cross-sectional survey was carried out in April 2010 in infants, young school-aged children, and young non-pregnant women in south-central Côte d'Ivoire. Stool, urine, and blood samples were collected and subjected to standardized, quality-controlled methods. Soil-transmitted helminth infections were identified and quantified in stool. Finger-prick blood samples were used to determine Plasmodium spp. infection, parasitemia, and hemoglobin concentrations. Iron, vitamin A, riboflavin, and inflammation status were measured in venous blood samples.PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Multivariate regression analysis revealed specific association between infection and demographic, socioeconomic, host inflammatory and nutritional factors. Non-pregnant women infected with P. falciparum had significantly lower odds of hookworm infection, whilst a significant positive association was found between both parasitic infections in 6- to 8-year-old children. Coinfected children had lower odds of anemia and iron deficiency than their counterparts infected with P. falciparum alone.CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Our findings suggest that interaction between P. falciparum and light-intensity hookworm infections vary with age and, in school-aged children, may benefit the host through preventing iron deficiency anemia. This observation warrants additional investigation to elucidate the mechanisms and consequences of coinfections, as this information could have important implications when implementing integrated control measures against malaria and helminthiases

Micronutrient status in lactating mothers before and after introduction of fortified flour: cross-sectional surveys in Maela refugee camp

Background Deficiency of micronutrients is common in refugee populations. Objectives Identify deficiencies and whether provided supplements and wheat flour fortified with 10 micronutrients impacts upon status among breast-feeding women from Maela refugee camp. Methods Two sequential cross-sectional studies were conducted in different groups of lactating mothers at 12 weeks postpartum. The first survey was before and the second 4-5 months after micronutrient fortified flour (MFF) had been provided to the camp (in addition to the regular food basket). Iron status and micronutrients were measured in serum, whole blood, and in breast milk samples. Results Iron and zinc deficiency and anemia were highly prevalent while low serum retinol and thiamine deficiency were rarely detected. Iron and zinc deficiency were associated with anemia, and their proportions were significantly lower after the introduction of MFF (21 vs. 35% with soluble transferrin receptor (sTfR)>8.5 mg/L, P = 0.042, and 50 vs. 73% with serum zinc<0.66 mg/L, P = 0.001). Serum sTfR, whole-blood thiamine diphosphate (TDP) and serum β-carotene were significant predictors (P<0.001) of milk iron, thiamine and β-carotene, respectively. Lower prevalence of iron deficiency in the MFF group was associated with significantly higher iron and thiamine in breast milk. Conclusions High whole-blood TDP and breast milk thiamine reflected good compliance to provided thiamine; high prevalence of iron deficiency suggested insufficient dietary iron and low acceptance to ferrous sulfate supplements. MFF as an additional food ration in Maela refugee camp seemed to have an effect in reducing both iron and zinc deficiency postpartum. © Springer-Verlag 2012

Vitamin A, carotenoid and vitamin E plasma concentrations in children from Laos in relation to sex and growth failure

BACKGROUND: Deficiencies of vitamin A and its precursors, the carotenoids are common problems in developing countries. Plasma levels of these components are used as biomarkers of their availability. The study was conducted to evaluate whether blood plasma obtained from capillaries can be compared with plasma obtained from venous blood with regard to its levels of retinol, carotenoids and α-tocopherol and secondly to apply this technique to evaluate the levels of these components in children in a region with possible deficiencies. METHODS: The survey was conducted in a region of Laos in 81 children (age 35 to 59 months). Dietary intake was assessed by a questionnaire. Retinol, carotenoids and α-tocopherol were determined by HPLC. Blood plasma was obtained either from capillary blood collected into microcapillaries and for reasons of methodological comparison in 14 adults from venous blood. RESULTS: The comparison between capillary and venous blood revealed that all components except zeaxanthin were 9 – 23 % higher in plasma obtained from capillary blood. Results in Laotian children showed that all investigated components except retinol were significantly lower (P < 0.01) compared to European children of slightly older age. Contrary to children in Europe, most components were significantly lower in boys compared to girls. In children from Laos, lutein was the dominant carotenoid, while in children in Europe, β-carotene was dominant. Within the Laotian children only a few differences were observed between stunted and non-stunted children and between children from lowland areas and high land areas. CONCLUSIONS: Results show that in consideration of slightly lower levels than in venous blood, capillary blood can be used to evaluate retinol, carotenoids and α-tocopherol as biomarkers of intake or status and to evaluate the possible effect of diet on absolute and relative carotenoid composition in children from Europe and Laos. Observed sex related differences might not be related to diet and would need further investigation

Extracting causal relations on HIV drug resistance from literature

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In HIV treatment it is critical to have up-to-date resistance data of applicable drugs since HIV has a very high rate of mutation. These data are made available through scientific publications and must be extracted manually by experts in order to be used by virologists and medical doctors. Therefore there is an urgent need for a tool that partially automates this process and is able to retrieve relations between drugs and virus mutations from literature.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this work we present a novel method to extract and combine relationships between HIV drugs and mutations in viral genomes. Our extraction method is based on natural language processing (NLP) which produces grammatical relations and applies a set of rules to these relations. We applied our method to a relevant set of PubMed abstracts and obtained 2,434 extracted relations with an estimated performance of 84% for F-score. We then combined the extracted relations using logistic regression to generate resistance values for each <drug, mutation> pair. The results of this relation combination show more than 85% agreement with the Stanford HIVDB for the ten most frequently occurring mutations. The system is used in 5 hospitals from the Virolab project <url>http://www.virolab.org</url> to preselect the most relevant novel resistance data from literature and present those to virologists and medical doctors for further evaluation.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The proposed relation extraction and combination method has a good performance on extracting HIV drug resistance data. It can be used in large-scale relation extraction experiments. The developed methods can also be applied to extract other type of relations such as gene-protein, gene-disease, and disease-mutation.</p

A Common Missense Variant in the ATP Receptor P2X7 Is Associated with Reduced Risk of Cardiovascular Events

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Extracellular adenosine triphosphate (ATP) regulates inflammatory cells by activation of the P2X(7) receptor. We hypothesized that polymorphisms in P2RX7 influence the risk of ischemic heart disease (IHD), ischemic stroke (IS) and cardiovascular risk factors and tested this hypothesis using genetic association studies. METHODS: Two loss-of-function SNPs in P2RX7 were genotyped in 1244 IHD cases and 2488 controls as well as 5969 individuals with cardiovascular risk factors. Eleven SNPs in a 250 kb region on chromosome 12 spanning P2RX7 as well as neighboring genes OASL, P2RX4 and CAMKK2 were genotyped in 4138 individuals with IS and 2528 controls. Association was examined using linear and logistic regression models with an additive genetic model. RESULTS: The common loss-of-function variant rs3751143 was significantly associated with a decreased risk of IHD in smokers (P = 0.03) as well as decreased risk of IS (OR 0.89; 95% CI = 0.81-0.97; P = 0.012). In addition, an intronic SNP in CAMKK2, rs2686342, were associated with a decreased risk of IS (OR 0.89; 95% CI = 0.82-0.97; P = 0.011). In subgroup analyses, both SNPs were associated with decreased risk of IS in individuals with hypertension (P = 0.045 and 0.015, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: A common loss-of-function missense variant in the gene encoding the P2X(7) receptor is associated with reduced risk of IS and with IHD in smokers. These findings might implicate a role of purinergic signaling in atherogenesis or atherothrombosis

Review of Matrix Metalloproteinases’ Effect on the Hybrid Dentin Bond Layer Stability and Chlorhexidine Clinical Use to Prevent Bond Failure

This review describes the relationship between dentin collagen hybrid bond layer degradation and the Matrix Metalloproteinases (MMPs) after their release by acid etch and rinse adhesives and self etching bonding adhesives that can reduce the bond stability over time. MMP-2, MMP-8 and MMP-9 are indicated as the active proteases that breakdown the collagen fibrils in the hybrid bond layer. Phosphoric acid in the acid etch and rinse bonding process and acid primers in the self etch process are implicated in the release of these proteases and their activation by several non-collagen proteins also released from dentin by the etching. MMPs are released in saliva by salivary glands, by cells in the gingival crevices to crevicular fluid and by pulpal odontoblasts cells to the dentinal fluids. These sources may affect the hybrid layer also. Evidence of the bond strength deterioration over time and the ability of Chlorhexidine to prevent bond deterioration by inhibiting MMP action are discussed. Dentin Bonding procedure utilizing Chlorhexidine for different application times and concentrations are being developed. The application of 2% Chlorhexidine to the phosphoric acid etch surface after rinsing off the acid is the only procedure that has been clinically tested for a longer period of time and shown to prevent bond strength degradation so far. The adoption of this procedure is recommended as means of improving bond stability at this time

Transcriptome Analysis of the Hippocampal CA1 Pyramidal Cell Region after Kainic Acid-Induced Status Epilepticus in Juvenile Rats

Molecular mechanisms involved in epileptogenesis in the developing brain remain poorly understood. The gene array approach could reveal some of the factors involved by allowing the identification of a broad scale of genes altered by seizures. In this study we used microarray analysis to reveal the gene expression profile of the laser microdissected hippocampal CA1 subregion one week after kainic acid (KA)-induced status epilepticus (SE) in 21-day-old rats, which are developmentally roughly comparable to juvenile children. The gene expression analysis with the Chipster software generated a total of 1592 differently expressed genes in the CA1 subregion of KA-treated rats compared to control rats. The KEGG database revealed that the identified genes were involved in pathways such as oxidative phosporylation (26 genes changed), and long-term potentiation (LTP; 18 genes changed). Also genes involved in Ca2+ homeostasis, gliosis, inflammation, and GABAergic transmission were altered. To validate the microarray results we further examined the protein expression for a subset of selected genes, glial fibrillary protein (GFAP), apolipoprotein E (apo E), cannabinoid type 1 receptor (CB1), Purkinje cell protein 4 (PEP-19), and interleukin 8 receptor (CXCR1), with immunohistochemistry, which confirmed the transcriptome results. Our results showed that SE resulted in no obvious CA1 neuronal loss, and alterations in the expression pattern of several genes during the early epileptogenic phase were comparable to previous gene expression studies of the adult hippocampus of both experimental epileptic animals and patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). However, some changes seem to occur after SE specifically in the juvenile rat hippocampus. Insight of the SE-induced alterations in gene expression and their related pathways could give us hints for the development of new target-specific antiepileptic drugs that interfere with the progression of the disease in the juvenile age group