The association between number of children and weight loss outcomes among individuals undergoing bariatric surgery

BACKGROUND: Existing research demonstrates that parity is associated with risk for obesity. The majority of those who undergo bariatric surgery are women, yet little is known about whether having children before bariatric surgery is associated with pre- and postsurgical weight outcomes. OBJECTIVES: We aim to evaluate presurgical body mass index (BMI) and postsurgical weight loss among a racially diverse sample of women with and without children. SETTING: Metropolitan hospital system. METHODS: Women (n = 246) who underwent bariatric surgery were included in this study. Participants self-reported their number of children. Presurgical BMI and postsurgical weight outcomes at 1 year, including change in BMI (ΔBMI), percentage excess weight loss (%EWL), and percentage total weight loss (%TWL) were calculated from measured height and weight. RESULTS: Those with children had a lower presurgical BMI (P = .01) and had a smaller ΔBMI (P = .01) at 1 year after surgery than those without children, although %EWL and %TWL at 1 year did not differ by child status or number of children. After controlling for age, race, and surgery type, the number of children a woman had was related to smaller ΔBMI at 1 year post surgery (P = .01). CONCLUSIONS: Although women with children had lower reductions in BMI than those without children, both women with and without children achieved successful postsurgical weight loss. Providers should assess for number of children and be cautious not to deter women with children from having bariatric surgery

Predictors of Alcohol Use after Bariatric Surgery

Patients undergoing bariatric surgery are at risk for devloping an alcohol use disorder (AUD). The purpose of this study was to investigate pre-surgical psychosocial risk factors for post-surgical alcohol consumption and hazardous drinking. Participants (N = 567) who underwent bariatric surgery between 2014 and 2017 reported their post-surgical alcohol use. Information was collected from the pre-surgical evaluation including history of alcohol use, psychiatric symptoms, and maladaptive eating behaviors (i.e., binge eating, purging, and emotional eating). Younger age and pre-surgical alcohol use predicted post-surgical alcohol use and hazardous drinking. In addition, higher levels of depressive symptoms and maladaptive eating patterns predicted post-surgical binge drinking. Clinicians conducting pre-surgical psychosocial evaluations should be aware of the multiple risk factors related to post-surgical problematic alcohol use. Future research should evaluate whether preventive interventions for high-risk patients decrease risk for post-surgical alcohol misuse

Amygdala-prefrontal coupling underlies individual differences in emotion regulation

Despite growing evidence on the neural bases of emotion regulation, little is known about the mechanisms underlying individual differences in cognitive regulation of negative emotion, and few studies have used objective measures to quantify regulatory success. Using a trait-like psychophysiological measure of emotion regulation, corrugator electromyography, we obtained an objective index of the ability to cognitively reappraise negative emotion in 56 healthy men (session 1), who returned 1.3 years later to perform the same regulation task using fMRI (session 2). Results indicated that the corrugator measure of regulatory skill predicted amygdala-prefrontal functional connectivity. Individuals with greater ability to down-regulate negative emotion as indexed by corrugator at session 1 showed not only greater amygdala attenuation but also greater inverse connectivity between the amygdala and several sectors of the prefrontal cortex while down-regulating negative emotion at session 2. Our results demonstrate that individual differences in emotion regulation are stable over time and underscore the important role of amygdala-prefrontal coupling for successful regulation of negative emotion

Revisiting cosmological bounds on sterile neutrinos

We employ state-of-the art cosmological observables including supernova surveys and BAO information to provide constraints on the mass and mixing angle of a non-resonantly produced sterile neutrino species, showing that cosmology can effectively rule out sterile neutrinos which decay between BBN and the present day. The decoupling of an additional heavy neutrino species can modify the time dependence of the Universe's expansion between BBN and recombination and, in extreme cases, lead to an additional matter-dominated period; while this could naively lead to a younger Universe with a larger Hubble parameter, it could later be compensated by the extra radiation expected in the form of neutrinos from sterile decay. However, recombination-era observables including the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the shift parameter R-CMB and the sound horizon r(s) from Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) severely constrain this scenario. We self-consistently include the full time-evolution of the coupled sterile neutrino and standard model sectors in an MCMC, showing that if decay occurs after BBN, the sterile neutrino is essentially bounded by the constraint sin(2) theta less than or similar to 0.026(m(s)/eV)(-2)

The Lick AGN Monitoring Project 2016 : dynamical modeling of velocity-resolved Hβ lags in luminous Seyfert galaxies

K.H. acknowledges support from STFC grant ST/R000824/1.We have modeled the velocity-resolved reverberation response of the Hβ broad emission line in nine Seyfert 1 galaxies from the Lick Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) Monitoring Project 2016 sample, drawing inferences on the geometry and structure of the low-ionization broad-line region (BLR) and the mass of the central supermassive black hole. Overall, we find that the Hβ BLR is generally a thick disk viewed at low to moderate inclination angles. We combine our sample with prior studies and investigate line-profile shape dependence, such as log10(FWHM/σ), on BLR structure and kinematics and search for any BLR luminosity-dependent trends. We find marginal evidence for an anticorrelation between the profile shape of the broad Hβ emission line and the Eddington ratio, when using the rms spectrum. However, we do not find any luminosity-dependent trends, and conclude that AGNs have diverse BLR structure and kinematics, consistent with the hypothesis of transient AGN/BLR conditions rather than systematic trends.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The Lick AGN Monitoring Project 2016: Dynamical Modeling of Velocity-Resolved H\b{eta} Lags in Luminous Seyfert Galaxies

We have modeled the velocity-resolved reverberation response of the H\b{eta} broad emission line in nine Seyfert 1 galaxies from the Lick Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) Monitioring Project 2016 sample, drawing inferences on the geometry and structure of the low-ionization broad-line region (BLR) and the mass of the central supermassive black hole. Overall, we find that the H\b{eta} BLR is generally a thick disk viewed at low to moderate inclination angles. We combine our sample with prior studies and investigate line-profile shape dependence, such as log10(FWHM/{\sigma}), on BLR structure and kinematics and search for any BLR luminosity-dependent trends. We find marginal evidence for an anticorrelation between the profile shape of the broad H\b{eta} emission line and the Eddington ratio, when using the root-mean-square spectrum. However, we do not find any luminosity-dependent trends, and conclude that AGNs have diverse BLR structure and kinematics, consistent with the hypothesis of transient AGN/BLR conditions rather than systematic trends

The Lick AGN Monitoring Project 2016 : velocity-resolved Hβ lags in luminous Seyfert galaxies

Funding: K.H. acknowledges support from STFC grant ST/R000824/1.We carried out spectroscopic monitoring of 21 low-redshift Seyfert 1 galaxies using the Kast double spectrograph on the 3 m Shane telescope at Lick Observatory from April 2016 to May 2017. Targetingactive galactic nuclei (AGN) with luminosities of λLλ(5100 Å) ≈ 1044 erg s−1 and predicted Hβ lags of∼ 20–30 days or black hole masses of 107–108.5 M⊙, our campaign probes luminosity-dependent trends in broad-line region (BLR) structure and dynamics as well as to improve calibrations for single-epoch estimates of quasar black hole masses. Here we present the first results from the campaign, including Hβ emission-line light curves, integrated Hβ lag times (8–30 days) measured against V -band continuum light curves, velocity-resolved reverberation lags, line widths of the broad Hβ components, and virial black hole mass estimates (107.1–108.1 M⊙). Our results add significantly to the number of existing velocity-resolved lag measurements and reveal a diversity of BLR gas kinematics at moderately high AGN luminosities. AGN continuum luminosity appears not to be correlated with the type of kinematics that its BLR gas may exhibit. Follow-up direct modeling of this dataset will elucidate the detailed kinematics and provide robust dynamical black hole masses for several objects in this sample.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Spectropolarimetry of high-redshift obscured and red quasars

Spectropolarimetry is a powerful technique that has provided critical support for the geometric unification model of local active galactic nuclei. In this paper, we present optical (rest-frame UV) Keck spectropolarimetry of five luminous obscured (Type 2) and extremely red quasars (ERQs) at z~2.5. Three objects reach polarization fractions of >10% in the continuum. We propose a model in which dust scattering is the dominant scattering and polarization mechanism in our targets, though electron scattering cannot be completely excluded. Emission lines are polarized at a lower level than is the continuum. This suggests that the emission-line region exists on similar spatial scales as the scattering region. In three objects we detect an intriguing 90 degree swing in the polarization position angle as a function of line-of-sight velocity in the emission lines of Ly-alpha, CIV and NV. We interpret this phenomenon in the framework of a geometric model with an equatorial dusty scattering region in which the material is outflowing at several thousand km/sec. Emission lines may also be scattered by dust or resonantly. This model explains several salient features of observations by scattering on scales of a few tens of pc. Our observations provide a tantalizing view of the inner region geometry and kinematics of high-redshift obscured and extremely red quasars. Our data and modeling lend strong support for toroidal obscuration and powerful outflows on the scales of the UV emission-line region, in addition to the larger scale outflows inferred previously from the optical emission-line kinematics.Comment: 26 pages, MNRAS, in pres

The L 98-59 System: Three Transiting, Terrestrial-size Planets Orbiting a Nearby M Dwarf

We report the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) discovery of three terrestrial-size planets transiting L 98-59 (TOI-175, TIC 307210830)—a bright M dwarf at a distance of 10.6 pc. Using the Gaia-measured distance and broadband photometry, we find that the host star is an M3 dwarf. Combined with the TESS transits from three sectors, the corresponding stellar parameters yield planet radii ranging from 0.8 R ⊕ to 1.6 R ⊕. All three planets have short orbital periods, ranging from 2.25 to 7.45 days with the outer pair just wide of a 2:1 period resonance. Diagnostic tests produced by the TESS Data Validation Report and the vetting package DAVE rule out common false-positive sources. These analyses, along with dedicated follow-up and the multiplicity of the system, lend confidence that the observed signals are caused by planets transiting L 98-59 and are not associated with other sources in the field. The L 98-59 system is interesting for a number of reasons: the host star is bright (V = 11.7 mag, K = 7.1 mag) and the planets are prime targets for further follow-up observations including precision radial-velocity mass measurements and future transit spectroscopy with the James Webb Space Telescope; the near-resonant configuration makes the system a laboratory to study planetary system dynamical evolution; and three planets of relatively similar size in the same system present an opportunity to study terrestrial planets where other variables (age, metallicity, etc.) can be held constant. L 98-59 will be observed in four more TESS sectors, which will provide a wealth of information on the three currently known planets and have the potential to reveal additional planets in the system