No association between the intake of marine n-3 PUFA during the second trimester of pregnancy and factors associated with cardiometabolic risk in the 20-year-old offspring.

To access publisher's full text version of this article click on the hyperlink at the bottom of the pageThe intake of marine n-3 PUFA has been shown to decrease the risk of CVD in a number of studies. Since the development of CVD is often a lifelong process, marine n-3 PUFA intake early in life may also affect the development of later CVD. The aim of the present study was to investigate the association between maternal intake of marine n-3 PUFA during the second trimester of pregnancy and factors associated with cardiometabolic risk in the 20-year-old offspring. The study was based on the follow-up of the offspring of a Danish pregnancy cohort who participated in a study conducted from 1988 to 1989. A total of 965 pregnant women were originally included in the cohort and detailed information about the intake of marine n-3 PUFA during the second trimester was collected. In 2008-9, the offspring were invited to participate in a clinical examination including anthropometric, blood pressure (BP) and short-term heart rate variability measurements. Also, a fasting venous blood sample was drawn from them. Multiple linear regression modelling, using the lowest quintile of marine n-3 PUFA intake as the reference, was used to estimate the association with all outcomes. A total of 443 offspring participated in the clinical examination. No association between the intake of marine n-3 PUFA during the second trimester of pregnancy and offspring adiposity, glucose metabolism, BP or lipid profile was found. In conclusion, no association between the intake of marine n-3 PUFA during the second trimester of pregnancy and the factors associated with cardiometabolic risk in the 20-year-old offspring could be detected.Danish Council for Strategic Research 09-067124 2101-07-0025 2101-06-000

Genetic variability in the absorption of dietary sterols affects the risk of coronary artery disease.

To access publisher's full text version of this article, please click on the hyperlink in Additional Links field or click on the hyperlink at the top of the page marked DownloadAims: To explore whether variability in dietary cholesterol and phytosterol absorption impacts the risk of coronary artery disease (CAD) using as instruments sequence variants in the ABCG5/8 genes, key regulators of intestinal absorption of dietary sterols. Methods and results: We examined the effects of ABCG5/8 variants on non-high-density lipoprotein (non-HDL) cholesterol (N up to 610 532) and phytosterol levels (N = 3039) and the risk of CAD in Iceland, Denmark, and the UK Biobank (105 490 cases and 844 025 controls). We used genetic scores for non-HDL cholesterol to determine whether ABCG5/8 variants confer greater risk of CAD than predicted by their effect on non-HDL cholesterol. We identified nine rare ABCG5/8 coding variants with substantial impact on non-HDL cholesterol. Carriers have elevated phytosterol levels and are at increased risk of CAD. Consistent with impact on ABCG5/8 transporter function in hepatocytes, eight rare ABCG5/8 variants associate with gallstones. A genetic score of ABCG5/8 variants predicting 1 mmol/L increase in non-HDL cholesterol associates with two-fold increase in CAD risk [odds ratio (OR) = 2.01, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.75-2.31, P = 9.8 × 10-23] compared with a 54% increase in CAD risk (OR = 1.54, 95% CI 1.49-1.59, P = 1.1 × 10-154) associated with a score of other non-HDL cholesterol variants predicting the same increase in non-HDL cholesterol (P for difference in effects = 2.4 × 10-4). Conclusions: Genetic variation in cholesterol absorption affects levels of circulating non-HDL cholesterol and risk of CAD. Our results indicate that both dietary cholesterol and phytosterols contribute directly to atherogenesis. Keywords: ABCG5/8; Absorption; Dietary cholesterol; Genetics; Phytosterols.Novo Nordisk Foundation University College London Hospital National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centr

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

Averting biodiversity collapse in tropical forest protected areas

The rapid disruption of tropical forests probably imperils global biodiversity more than any other contemporary phenomenon¹⁻³. With deforestation advancing quickly, protected areas are increasingly becoming final refuges for threatened species and natural ecosystem processes. However, many protected areas in the tropics are themselves vulnerable to human encroachment and other environmental stresses⁴⁻⁹. As pressures mount, it is vital to know whether existing reserves can sustain their biodiversity. A critical constraint in addressing this question has been that data describing a broad array of biodiversity groups have been unavailable for a sufficiently large and representative sample of reserves. Here we present a uniquely comprehensive data set on changes over the past 20 to 30 years in 31 functional groups of species and 21 potential drivers of environmental change, for 60 protected areas stratified across the world’s major tropical regions. Our analysis reveals great variation in reserve ‘health’: about half of all reserves have been effective or performed passably, but the rest are experiencing an erosion of biodiversity that is often alarmingly widespread taxonomically and functionally. Habitat disruption, hunting and forest-product exploitation were the strongest predictors of declining reserve health. Crucially, environmental changes immediately outside reserves seemed nearly as important as those inside in determining their ecological fate, with changes inside reserves strongly mirroring those occurring around them. These findings suggest that tropical protected areas are often intimately linked ecologically to their surrounding habitats, and that a failure to stem broad-scale loss and degradation of such habitats could sharply increase the likelihood of serious biodiversity declines.Keywords: Ecology, Environmental scienc

Hva er hovedutfordringene med rekruttering av interne ledere i maskinentreprenørbedriften Taraldsvik AS med datterselskap? Hvilke hovedutfordring har Taraldsvik AS med hensyn til kompetanse og rekruttering av mellomledere

I et stadig skiftende marked er det avgjørende å inneha rett kompetanse i organisasjonene for å være konkurransedyktige. Rekruttering av medarbeidere er en svært viktig oppgave for alle organisasjoner og det kan være et omfattende arbeid å finne rett kompetanse til å utføre en bestemt oppgave (Innbjør og Kleveland, 2007). For at medarbeiderne skal gjøre en tilfredsstillende jobb er det viktig at mellomlederne har evne til å motivere, skape trygghet og gi annerkjennelse. I denne sammenheng er det viktig og nødvendig at organisasjoner rekrutterer mellomledere som innehar disse kvalitetene. Problemstillingen er som følge: Hva er hovedutfordringene med rekruttering av interne ledere i maskinentreprenørbedriften Taraldsvik AS med datterselskap? For å besvare på problemstillingen har vi tatt utgangspunkt i litteratur som belyser organisasjonsteori, ledelse, ledelse av menneskelige ressurser og personaladministrasjon. Vi har i tillegg benyttet oss av en kvalitativ studie fra 2015 av arbeidsmiljøet i sammen konsern. Videre har vi sett på kompetansen og hvilke kompetansekrav som stilles til mellomledere i organisasjonen, for å finne hovedutfordringene med rekrutteringen. Vi gjennomførte i januar 2017 en kvantitativ studie som involverte mellomlederne i konsernet Taraldsvik AS. Administrerende direktør er den som foretar rekruttering av mellomledelsen i konsernet. Det ble gjennomført en spørreundersøkelse hvor 11 av 20 respondenter valgte å svare. I forkant av spørreundersøkelsen utarbeidet vi en intervjuguide med ulike tema til respondentene. Det er videre benyttet et utvalg av litteratur for å analysere spørsmålsstillingene. Gjennom arbeidet med masteroppgaven fremkommer det at mellomledere har et uavklart kompetanse gap. Det ble i undersøkelsen avdekket stor bredde i mellomledernes utdanningsnivå og disse bestod av sivilingeniører, ingeniører, teknisk fagskole og yrkesutdanning med fagbrev. Det var en gjennomgående tendens fra spørreundersøkelsen at mellomlederne ønsket kurs og utdanning for kompetanseheving