Maternal Particulate Matter Exposure Impairs Lung Health and Is Associated with Mitochondrial Damage.

Relatively little is known about the transgenerational effects of chronic maternal exposure to low-level traffic-related air pollution (TRAP) on the offspring lung health, nor are the effects of removing such exposure before pregnancy. Female BALB/c mice were exposed to PM2.5 (PM2.5, 5 µg/day) for 6 weeks before mating and during gestation and lactation; in a subgroup, PM was removed when mating started to model mothers moving to cleaner areas during pregnancy to protect their unborn child (Pre-exposure). Lung pathology was characterised in both dams and offspring. A subcohort of female offspring was also exposed to ovalbumin to model allergic airways disease. PM2.5 and Pre-exposure dams exhibited airways hyper-responsiveness (AHR) with mucus hypersecretion, increased mitochondrial reactive oxygen species (ROS) and mitochondrial dysfunction in the lungs. Female offspring from PM2.5 and Pre-exposure dams displayed AHR with increased lung inflammation and mitochondrial ROS production, while males only displayed increased lung inflammation. After the ovalbumin challenge, AHR was increased in female offspring from PM2.5 dams compared with those from control dams. Using an in vitro model, the mitochondria-targeted antioxidant MitoQ reversed mitochondrial dysfunction by PM stimulation, suggesting that the lung pathology in offspring is driven by dysfunctional mitochondria. In conclusion, chronic exposure to low doses of PM2.5 exerted transgenerational impairment on lung health

Evaluating the quality of interaction between medical students and nurses in a large teaching hospital

BACKGROUND: Effective health care depends on multidisciplinary collaboration and teamwork, yet little is known about how well medical students and nurses interact in the hospital environment, where physicians-in-training acquire their first experiences as members of the health care team. The objective of this study was to evaluate the quality of interaction between third-year medical students and nurses during clinical rotations. METHODS: We surveyed 268 Indiana University medical students and 175 nurses who worked at Indiana University Hospital, the School's chief clinical training site. The students had just completed their third year of training. The survey instrument consisted of 7 items that measured "relational coordination" among members of the health care team, and 9 items that measured psychological distress. RESULTS: Sixty-eight medical students (25.4%) and 99 nurses (56.6%) completed the survey. The relational coordination score (ranked 1 to 5, low to high), which provides an overall measure of interaction quality, showed that medical students interacted with residents the best (4.16) and with nurses the worst (2.98; p < 0.01). Conversely, nurses interacted with other nurses the best (4.36) and with medical students the worst (2.68; p < 0.01). Regarding measures of psychological distress (ranked 0 to 4, low to high), the interpersonal sensitivity score of medical students (1.56) was significantly greater than that of nurses (1.03; p < 0.01), whereas the hostility score of nurses (0.59) was significantly greater than that of medical students (0.39; p < 0.01). CONCLUSION: The quality of interaction between medical students and nurses during third-year clinical rotations is poor, which suggests that medical students are not receiving the sorts of educational experiences that promote optimal physician-nurse collaboration. Medical students and nurses experience different levels of psychological distress, which may adversely impact the quality of their interaction

Conventionally assessed voluntary activation does not represent relative voluntary torque production

The ability to voluntarily activate a muscle is commonly assessed by some variant of the twitch interpolation technique (ITT), which assumes that the stimulated force increment decreases linearly as voluntary force increases. In the present study, subjects (n = 7) with exceptional ability for maximal voluntary activation (VA) of the knee extensors were used to study the relationship between superimposed and voluntary torque. This includes very high contraction intensities (90–100%VA), which are difficult to consistently obtain in regular healthy subjects (VA of ∼90%). Subjects were tested at 30, 60, and 90° knee angles on two experimental days. At each angle, isometric knee extensions were performed with supramaximal superimposed nerve stimulation (triplet: three pulses at 300 Hz). Surface EMG signals were obtained from rectus femoris, vastus lateralis, and medialis muscles. Maximal VA was similar and very high across knee angles: 97 ± 2.3% (mean ± SD). At high contraction intensities, the increase in voluntary torque was far greater than would be expected based on the decrement of superimposed torque. When voluntary torque increased from 79.6 ± 6.1 to 100%MVC, superimposed torque decreased from 8.5 ± 2.6 to 2.8 ± 2.3% of resting triplet. Therefore, an increase in VA of 5.7% (from 91.5 ± 2.6 to 97 ± 2.3%) coincided with a much larger increase in voluntary torque (20.4 ± 6.1%MVC) and EMG (33.9 ± 6.6%max). Moreover, a conventionally assessed VA of 91.5 ± 2.6% represented a voluntary torque of only 79.6 ± 6.1%MVC. In conclusion, when maximal VA is calculated to be ∼90% (as in regular healthy subjects), this probably represents a considerable overestimation of the subjects’ ability to maximally drive their quadriceps muscles

Finding Semantically Related Videos in Closed Collections

Modern newsroom tools offer advanced functionality for automatic and semi-automatic content collection from the web and social media sources to accompany news stories. However, the content collected in this way often tends to be unstructured and may include irrelevant items. An important step in the verification process is to organize this content, both with respect to what it shows, and with respect to its origin. This chapter presents our efforts in this direction, which resulted in two components. One aims to detect semantic concepts in video shots, to help annotation and organization of content collections. We implement a system based on deep learning, featuring a number of advances and adaptations of existing algorithms to increase performance for the task. The other component aims to detect logos in videos in order to identify their provenance. We present our progress from a keypoint-based detection system to a system based on deep learning

“Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence

The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organisations, from art history to zoology. But does “excellence” actually mean anything? Does this pervasive narrative of “excellence” do any good? Drawing on a range of sources we interrogate “excellence” as a concept and find that it has no intrinsic meaning in academia. Rather it functions as a linguistic interchange mechanism. To investigate whether this linguistic function is useful we examine how the rhetoric of excellence combines with narratives of scarcity and competition to show that the hypercompetition that arises from the performance of “excellence” is completely at odds with the qualities of good research. We trace the roots of issues in reproducibility, fraud, and homophily to this rhetoric. But we also show that this rhetoric is an internal, and not primarily an external, imposition. We conclude by proposing an alternative rhetoric based on soundness and capacity-building. In the final analysis, it turns out that that “excellence” is not excellent. Used in its current unqualified form it is a pernicious and dangerous rhetoric that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship

Prognosis of acute low back pain: design of a prospective inception cohort study

BACKGROUND: Clinical guidelines generally portray acute low back pain as a benign and self-limiting condition. However, evidence about the clinical course of acute low back pain is contradictory and the risk of subsequently developing chronic low back pain remains uncertain. There are few high quality prognosis studies and none that have measured pain, disability and return to work over a 12 month period. This study aims to provide the first estimates of the one year prognosis of acute low back pain (pain of less than 2 weeks duration) in patients consulting primary care practitioners. A secondary aim is to identify factors that are associated with the prognosis of low back pain. METHODS/DESIGN: The study is a prospective inception cohort study. Consecutive patients consulting general medical practitioners, physiotherapists and chiropractors in the Sydney metropolitan region will complete a baseline questionnaire regarding their back pain. Subsequently these patients will be followed up by telephone 6 weeks, 3 months and 12 months after the initial consultation. Patients will be considered to have recovered from the episode of back pain if they have no pain and no limitation of activity, and have returned to pre-injury work status. Life tables will be generated to determine the one year prognosis of acute low back pain. Prognostic factors will be assessed using Cox regression. DISCUSSION: This study will provide the first estimates of the one year prognosis of acute low back pain in a representative sample of primary care patients

Prognosis of chronic low back pain: design of an inception cohort study

BACKGROUND: Although clinical guidelines generally portray chronic low back pain as a condition with a poor prognosis this portrayal is based on studies of potentially unrepresentative survival cohorts. The aim of this study is to describe the prognosis of an inception cohort of people with chronic low back pain presenting for primary care. METHODS/DESIGN: The study will be an inception cohort study with one year follow-up. Participants are drawn from a cohort of consecutive patients presenting with acute low back pain (less than 2 weeks duration) to primary care clinics in Sydney, Australia. Those patients who continue to experience pain at three months, and are therefore classified as having chronic back pain, are invited to participate in the current study. The cohort will be followed up by telephone at baseline, 9 months and 12 months after being diagnosed with chronic low back pain. Recovery from low back pain will be measured by sampling three different outcomes: pain intensity, interference with function due to pain, and work status. Life tables will be generated to determine the one year prognosis of chronic low back pain. Prognostic factors will be assessed using Cox regression. DISCUSSION: This study will determine the prognosis of chronic non-specific low back pain in a representative cohort of patients sourced from primary care. The results of this study will improve understanding of chronic low back pain, allowing clinicians to provide more accurate prognostic information to their patients

Chronic non-specific low back pain - sub-groups or a single mechanism?

Copyright 2008 Wand and O'Connell; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Background: Low back pain is a substantial health problem and has subsequently attracted a considerable amount of research. Clinical trials evaluating the efficacy of a variety of interventions for chronic non-specific low back pain indicate limited effectiveness for most commonly applied interventions and approaches. Discussion: Many clinicians challenge the results of clinical trials as they feel that this lack of effectiveness is at odds with their clinical experience of managing patients with back pain. A common explanation for this discrepancy is the perceived heterogeneity of patients with chronic non-specific low back pain. It is felt that the effects of treatment may be diluted by the application of a single intervention to a complex, heterogeneous group with diverse treatment needs. This argument presupposes that current treatment is effective when applied to the correct patient. An alternative perspective is that the clinical trials are correct and current treatments have limited efficacy. Preoccupation with sub-grouping may stifle engagement with this view and it is important that the sub-grouping paradigm is closely examined. This paper argues that there are numerous problems with the sub-grouping approach and that it may not be an important reason for the disappointing results of clinical trials. We propose instead that current treatment may be ineffective because it has been misdirected. Recent evidence that demonstrates changes within the brain in chronic low back pain sufferers raises the possibility that persistent back pain may be a problem of cortical reorganisation and degeneration. This perspective offers interesting insights into the chronic low back pain experience and suggests alternative models of intervention. Summary: The disappointing results of clinical research are commonly explained by the failure of researchers to adequately attend to sub-grouping of the chronic non-specific low back pain population. Alternatively, current approaches may be ineffective and clinicians and researchers may need to radically rethink the nature of the problem and how it should best be managed

Thomas Graham Brown (1882–1965): Behind the Scenes at the Cardiff Institute of Physiology

Thomas Graham Brown undertook seminal experiments on the neural control of locomotion between 1910 and 1915. Although elected to the Royal Society in 1927, his locomotion research was largely ignored until the 1960s when it was championed and extended by the distinguished neuroscientist, Anders Lundberg. Puzzlingly, Graham Brown's published research stopped in the 1920s and he became renowned as a mountaineer. In this article, we review his life and multifaceted career, including his active neurological service in WWI. We outline events behind the scenes during his tenure at Cardiff's Institute of Physiology in Wales, UK, including an interview with his technician, Terrence J. Surman, who worked in this institute for over half a century

ANS: Aberrant Neurodevelopment of the Social Cognition Network in Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Background: Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by aberrant neurodevelopment. Although the ASD brain undergoes precocious growth followed by decelerated maturation during early postnatal period of childhood, the neuroimaging approach has not been empirically applied to investigate how the ASD brain develops during adolescence. Methodology/Principal Findings: We enrolled 25 male adolescents with high functioning ASD and 25 typically developing controls for voxel-based morphometric analysis of structural magnetic resonance image. Results indicate that there is an imbalance of regional gray matter volumes and concentrations along with no global brain enlargement in adolescents with high functioning ASD relative to controls. Notably, the right inferior parietal lobule, a role in social cognition, have a significant interaction of age by groups as indicated by absence of an age-related gain of regional gray matter volume and concentration for neurodevelopmental maturation during adolescence. Conclusions/Significance: The findings indicate the neural correlates of social cognition exhibits aberrant neurodevelopment during adolescence in ASD, which may cast some light on the brain growth dysregulation hypothesis. The period of abnormal brain growth during adolescence may be characteristic of ASD. Age effects must be taken into account while measures of structural neuroimaging have been clinically put forward as potential phenotypes for ASD