Incidence and mortality of alcohol-related dementia and Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome: A nationwide register study

Peer reviewe

Grön offentlig upphandling i transportsektorn

Många kommuner i Sverige ställer krav på miljöbilar i upphandlingen av kommunala tjänstebilar, och en del ställer även specifika krav på elbilar. Detta projekt har utvärderat offentlig upphandling för att svara på frågor om vilken potential upphandling har för att främja förnybara drivmedel, vilka de praktiska erfarenheterna är, huruvida offentlig upphandling används strategiskt och hur styrmedlet kan vidareutvecklas.Metoden som använts är komparativa fallstudier av kommunerna Malmö och Östersund, samt regionerna Skåne och Jämtland. Det empiriska underlaget för studierna består av en kombination av dokumentstudier och semistrukturerade kvalitativa intervjuer som genomförts med upphandlare, miljöstrateger, kollektivtrafikstrateger, politiker och representanter från privata trans­portoperatörer.Det övergripande syftet är att öka förståelsen för utmaningarna med grön offentlig upphandling och hur dessa bemötts i några utvalda fall. Även om det råder skillnader i de olika orternas och regionernas politiska, geografiska och infrastrukturella förutsättningar samt i sättet på vilket kraven i upphandling utformats som följd av detta, så har studien kunnat peka på några generella policyimplikationer som rör lagstiftning och reglering, kostnader, politiska mål och samverkan mellan aktörer. Resultaten från projektet bidrar därmed till kunskapen om hur användningen av offentlig upphandling kan förbättras och utvecklas

A fast and intuitive method for calculating dynamic network reconfiguration and node flexibility

Dynamic interactions between brain regions, either during rest or performance of cognitive tasks, have been studied extensively using a wide variance of methods. Although some of these methods allow elegant mathematical interpretations of the data, they can easily become computationally expensive or difficult to interpret and compare between subjects or groups. Here, we propose an intuitive and computationally efficient method to measure dynamic reconfiguration of brain regions, also termed flexibility. Our flexibility measure is defined in relation to an a-priori set of biologically plausible brain modules (or networks) and does not rely on a stochastic data-driven module estimation, which, in turn, minimizes computational burden. The change of affiliation of brain regions over time with respect to these a-priori template modules is used as an indicator of brain network flexibility. We demonstrate that our proposed method yields highly similar patterns of whole-brain network reconfiguration (i.e., flexibility) during a working memory task as compared to a previous study that uses a data-driven, but computationally more expensive method. This result illustrates that the use of a fixed modular framework allows for valid, yet more efficient estimation of whole-brain flexibility, while the method additionally supports more fine-grained (e.g. node and group of nodes scale) flexibility analyses restricted to biologically plausible brain networks

Insufficient insulin administration to diabetic rats increases substrate utilization and maintains lactate production in the kidney

Good glycemic control is crucial to prevent the onset and progression of late diabetic complications, but insulin treatment often fails to achieve normalization of glycemic control to the level seen in healthy controls. In fact, recent experimental studies indicate that insufficient treatment with insulin, resulting in poor glycemic control, has an additional effect on progression of late diabetic complications, than poor glycemic control on its own. We therefore compared renal metabolic alterations during conditions of poor glycemic control with and without suboptimal insulin administration, which did not restore glycemic control, to streptozotocin (STZ)‐diabetic rats using noninvasive hyperpolarized (13)C‐pyruvate magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and blood oxygenation level–dependent (BOLD) (1)H‐MRI to determine renal metabolic flux and oxygen availability, respectively. Suboptimal insulin administration increased pyruvate utilization and metabolic flux via both anaerobic and aerobic pathways in diabetic rats even though insulin did not affect kidney oxygen availability, HbA(1c), or oxidative stress. These results imply direct effects of insulin in the regulation of cellular substrate utilization and metabolic fluxes during conditions of poor glycemic control. The study demonstrates that poor glycemic control in combination with suboptimal insulin administration accelerates metabolic alterations by increasing both anaerobic and aerobic metabolism resulting in increased utilization of energy substrates. The results demonstrate the importance of tight glycemic control in insulinopenic diabetes, and that insulin, when administered insufficiently, adds an additional burden on top of poor glycemic control