Waist-to-height ratio and cardiometabolic risk factors in adolescence: findings from a prospective birth cohort

What is already known about this subject In adults, associations between body mass index (BMI), waist-to-height ratio (WHtR) and cardiometabolic outcomes are similar. In children and adolescents, results from cross-sectional studies examining the associations between BMI z scores, WHtR and cardiometabolic outcomes are conflicting and there is a paucity of prospective data.<p></p> What this study adds This is the first study to demonstrate the prospective association between WHtR in childhood and cardiometabolic outcomes in adolescent boys. WHtR is a simple calculation that can be used to identify children and adolescents for cardiometabolic risk without the need for reference growth charts. The WHtR cut-point of ≥0.5 was highly specific in identifying cardiometabolic risk co-occurrence but has poor sensitivity.<p></p> Objective To examine the associations between body mass index (BMI) and waist-to-height ratio (WHtR) measured in childhood and adolescence and cardiometabolic risk factors in adolescence.<p></p> Methods Secondary data analysis of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, a population based cohort. Data from 2858 adolescents aged 15.5 (standard deviation 0.4) years and 2710 of these participants as children aged 7–9 years were used in this analysis. Outcome measures were cardiometabolic risk factors, including triglycerides, low density lipoprotein cholesterol, high density lipoprotein cholesterol, insulin, glucose and blood pressure at 15 years of age.<p></p> Results Both BMI and WHtR measured at ages 7–9 years and at age 15 years were associated with cardiometabolic risk factors in adolescents. A WHtR ≥0.5 at 7–9 years increased the odds by 4.6 [95% confidence interval 2.6 to 8.1] for males and 1.6 [0.7 to 3.9] for females of having three or more cardiometabolic risk factors in adolescence. Cross-sectional analysis indicated that adolescents who had a WHtR ≥0.5, the odds ratio of having three or more cardiometabolic risk factors was 6.8 [4.4 to 10.6] for males and 3.8 [2.3 to 6.3] for females. The WHtR cut-point was highly specific in identifying cardiometabolic risk co-occurrence in male children and adolescents as well as female children (90 to 95%), but had poor sensitivity (17 to 53%). Similar associations were observed when BMI was used to define excess adiposity.<p></p> Conclusions WHtR is a simple alternative to age and sex adjusted BMI for assessing cardiometabolic risk in adolescents

Tracking early lung cancer metastatic dissemination in TRACERx using ctDNA

Circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) can be used to detect and profile residual tumour cells persisting after curative intent therapy1. The study of large patient cohorts incorporating longitudinal plasma sampling and extended follow-up is required to determine the role of ctDNA as a phylogenetic biomarker of relapse in early-stage non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Here we developed ctDNA methods tracking a median of 200 mutations identified in resected NSCLC tissue across 1,069 plasma samples collected from 197 patients enrolled in the TRACERx study2. A lack of preoperative ctDNA detection distinguished biologically indolent lung adenocarcinoma with good clinical outcome. Postoperative plasma analyses were interpreted within the context of standard-of-care radiological surveillance and administration of cytotoxic adjuvant therapy. Landmark analyses of plasma samples collected within 120 days after surgery revealed ctDNA detection in 25% of patients, including 49% of all patients who experienced clinical relapse; 3 to 6 monthly ctDNA surveillance identified impending disease relapse in an additional 20% of landmark-negative patients. We developed a bioinformatic tool (ECLIPSE) for non-invasive tracking of subclonal architecture at low ctDNA levels. ECLIPSE identified patients with polyclonal metastatic dissemination, which was associated with a poor clinical outcome. By measuring subclone cancer cell fractions in preoperative plasma, we found that subclones seeding future metastases were significantly more expanded compared with non-metastatic subclones. Our findings will support (neo)adjuvant trial advances and provide insights into the process of metastatic dissemination using low-ctDNA-level liquid biopsy

A century of trends in adult human height

Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, and higher education and earnings. We reanalysed 1472 population-based studies, with measurement of height on more than 18.6 million participants to estimate mean height for people born between 1896 and 1996 in 200 countries. The largest gain in adult height over the past century has occurred in South Korean women and Iranian men, who became 20.2 cm (95% credible interval 17.5-22.7) and 16.5 cm (13.3-19.7) taller, respectively. In contrast, there was little change in adult height in some sub-Saharan African countries and in South Asia over the century of analysis. The tallest people over these 100 years are men born in the Netherlands in the last quarter of 20th century, whose average heights surpassed 182.5 cm, and the shortest were women born in Guatemala in 1896 (140.3 cm; 135.8-144.8). The height differential between the tallest and shortest populations was 19-20 cm a century ago, and has remained the same for women and increased for men a century later despite substantial changes in the ranking of countries

Rising rural body-mass index is the main driver of the global obesity epidemic in adults

Body-mass index (BMI) has increased steadily in most countries in parallel with a rise in the proportion of the population who live in cities 1,2 . This has led to a widely reported view that urbanization is one of the most important drivers of the global rise in obesity 3�6 . Here we use 2,009 population-based studies, with measurements of height and weight in more than 112 million adults, to report national, regional and global trends in mean BMI segregated by place of residence (a rural or urban area) from 1985 to 2017. We show that, contrary to the dominant paradigm, more than 55 of the global rise in mean BMI from 1985 to 2017�and more than 80 in some low- and middle-income regions�was due to increases in BMI in rural areas. This large contribution stems from the fact that, with the exception of women in sub-Saharan Africa, BMI is increasing at the same rate or faster in rural areas than in cities in low- and middle-income regions. These trends have in turn resulted in a closing�and in some countries reversal�of the gap in BMI between urban and rural areas in low- and middle-income countries, especially for women. In high-income and industrialized countries, we noted a persistently higher rural BMI, especially for women. There is an urgent need for an integrated approach to rural nutrition that enhances financial and physical access to healthy foods, to avoid replacing the rural undernutrition disadvantage in poor countries with a more general malnutrition disadvantage that entails excessive consumption of low-quality calories. © 2019, The Author(s)

繊維素エーテルの研究

種別:卒業論文東京帝国大学工学

Comparative Structural Survey Election Management Bodies EMS (version 1, European and International Data, February 2019)

The Electoral Management Survey (EMS) was conducted between July 2016 and October 2017. It consists of two parts: a structural survey filled out by one senior EMB official in each EMB surveyed, and a personnel survey sent to EMB employees. The EMS initially focused on Europe, while a sister survey implemented by the Electoral Integrity Project, ELECT, was disseminated to non-European countries (Norris et al., 2016). In the first half of 2017, the countries that had not responded to either the EMS or the ELECT survey were contacted again. Effort was made to contact all bodies that perform any of the major functions of EMBs, as defined by the International IDEA Handbook on Electoral Management Design (Wall et al., 2006). In total, 177 countries that held elections between 2012 and 2017, and that were not micro-states (population < 100,000), were identified. EMB contact information was missing for 21 countries. A total of 156 countries were contacted, and 72 countries responded to either EMS or ELECT, resulting in a response rate of 46%. For more on the Electoral Management Network, see: www.electoralmanagement.com. More detailed description and discussion of these data can be found in: James, S., Garnett, H., Loeber, L. and van Ham, C. 2019. Improving Electoral Management: the Organizational Determinants of Electoral Integrity. Special issue on Improving Electoral Management, in International Political Science Review, 40(3): 298-312. Please note that these data can be merged with structural EMB data from the ELECT survey, available on Harvard Dataverse

Three adenovirus E3 proteins cooperate to evade apoptosis by tumor necrosis factor-related apoptosis-inducing ligand receptor-1 and -2.

Adenovirus encodes multiple gene products that regulate proapoptotic cellular responses to viral infection mediated by both the innate and adaptive immune systems. The E3-10.4K and 14.5K gene products are known to modulate the death receptor Fas. In this study, we demonstrate that an additional viral E3 protein, 6.7K, functions in the specific modulation of the two death receptors for tumor necrosis factor-related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL). The 6.7K protein is expressed on the cell surface and forms a complex with the 10.4K and 14.5K proteins, and this complex is sufficient to induce down-modulation of TRAIL receptor-1 and -2 from the cell surface and reverse the sensitivity of infected cells to TRAIL-mediated apoptosis. Down-modulation of TRAIL-R2 by the E3 complex is dependent on the cytoplasmic tail of the receptor, but the death domain alone is not sufficient. These results identify a mechanism for viral modulation of TRAIL receptor-mediated apoptosis and suggest the E3 protein complex has evolved to regulate the signaling of selected cytokine receptors