Galactose Ingested with a High-Fat Beverage Increases Postprandial Lipemia Compared with Glucose but Not Fructose Ingestion in Healthy Men.

BACKGROUND: Fructose ingestion with a high-fat beverage increases postprandial lipemia when compared with glucose. It is unknown whether other sugars, such as galactose, also increase postprandial lipemia. OBJECTIVES: The objective was to assess whether galactose ingestion within a high-fat beverage increases postprandial lipemia relative to glucose or fructose. METHODS: Two experiments were conducted, which contrasted different test drinks under otherwise standardized conditions. In Experiment 1, 10 nonobese men (age: 22 ± 1 y; BMI, 23.5 ± 2.2 kg/2) ingested either galactose or glucose (0.75 g supplemented carbohydrate per⋅kilogram body mass) within a high-fat test drink (0.94 g fat per kilogram body mass). In Experiment 2, a separate group of 9 nonobese men (age: 26 ± 6 y; BMI: 23.5 ± 2.6 kg/m2) ingested either galactose or fructose (identical doses as those in Experiment 1) within the same high-fat test drink. Capillary blood was sampled before and at frequent intervals after ingestion of the test drinks for a 300-min period to determine plasma triacylglycerol, glucose, lactate, nonesterified fatty acid, and insulin concentrations. Paired t tests and 2-way, repeated-measures ANOVA were used to compare conditions within each experiment. RESULTS: The incremental AUC for triacylglycerol was greater following galactose ingestion compared with glucose (127 ± 59 compared with 80 ± 48 mmol⋅L-1 × 300 min, respectively; P = 0.04) but not compared with fructose (136 ± 74 compared with 133 ± 63 mmol⋅L-1 ×300 min, respectively; P = 0.91). Plasma lactate concentrations also increased to a greater extent with galactose compared with glucose ingestion (time-condition interaction: P < 0.001) but not fructose ingestion (time-condition interaction: P = 0.17). CONCLUSIONS: Galactose ingestion within a high-fat beverage exacerbates postprandial lipemia and plasma lactate concentrations compared with glucose but not fructose in nonobese men. These data suggest that galactose metabolism may be more similar to fructose than to glucose, providing a rationale to reassess the metabolic fate of galactose ingestion in humans. This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT03439878

Block and thread intercultural narratives and positioning: conversations with newly arrived postgraduate students

This paper considers how, in the process of positioning that is implicit in every interaction, all of us employ multiple and often competing narratives when we talk about cultural identity and our relationships with new cultural environments. In interviews with newly arrived postgraduate students about their experience of travelling to study abroad, the students employ competing block and thread narratives. Block narratives represent an essentialist discourse of culture. As such, they are easily converted into cultural prejudice by blocking the possibility for understanding and sharing at the point of tolerating an Other who can never be like ‘us’. These are default narratives because of the way in which we are brought up in our societies within a global positioning and politics. Thread narratives instead support a critical cosmopolitan discourse of cultural travel and shared meanings across structural boundaries that act against cultural prejudice. Threads need to be nurtured as alternative forms of engagement. Therefore, there is a place for the researchers to intervene with their own thread narratives. This intervention is both allowed within and supported by an understanding that researchers join with their participants in the creative intercultural events of the interview

PhD students, interculturality, reflexivity, community and internationalisation

Interviews with a small group of doctoral students at a British university indicate that the students feel that the programme provides an environment within which they develop interculturality through reflexive engagement with the PhD community and in some cases with the participants in their research. Significant here is that they are interpretivist, constructivist qualitative researchers within a larger university community of qualitative researchers where there is a shared reflexivity that is at the core of interculturality. They also bring with them existing cultural complexity with which to engage, build on, make reflexive sense of and resolve in this experience. This complexity which they all share make it difficult to consider them differently as 'international' or 'home' students, which are revealed as inappropriately divisive labels within an intercultural community. Where there are apparent issues with English as a second or other language among some of the students, it is realised that this represents a broader struggle, shared with all students, regarding self-expression in writing. These findings demand cultural belief in whatever backgrounds the students come from. This belief impacts on how we understand internationalisation and the nature of academic knowledge and process

The Effect of High-Fat Diet on Intramyocellular Lipid Content in Healthy Adults: A Systematic Review, Meta-Analysis, and Meta-Regression

\ua9 2024 The AuthorsFatty acids are stored within the muscle as intramyocellular lipids (IMCL). Some, but not all, studies indicate that following a high-fat diet (HFD), IMCL may accumulate and affect insulin sensitivity. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to quantify the effects of an HFD on IMCL. It also explored the potential modifying effects of HFD fat content and duration, IMCL measurement technique, physical activity status, and the associations of IMCL with insulin sensitivity. Five databases were systematically searched for studies that examined the effect of ≥3 d of HFD (&gt;35% daily energy intake from fat) on IMCL content in healthy individuals. Meta-regressions were used to investigate associations of the HFD total fat content, duration, physical activity status, IMCL measurement technique, and insulin sensitivity with IMCL responses. Changes in IMCL content and insulin sensitivity (assessed by hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamp) are presented as standardized mean difference (SMD) using a random effects model with 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs). Nineteen studies were included in the systematic review and 16 in the meta-analysis. IMCL content increased following HFD (SMD = 0.63; 95% CI: 0.31, 0.94, P = 0.001). IMCL accumulation was not influenced by total fat content (P = 0.832) or duration (P = 0.844) of HFD, physical activity status (P = 0.192), or by the IMCL measurement technique (P &gt; 0.05). Insulin sensitivity decreased following HFD (SMD = –0.34; 95% CI: –0.52, –0.16; P = 0.003), but this was not related to the increase in IMCL content following HFD (P = 0.233). Consumption of an HFD (&gt;35% daily energy intake from fat) for ≥3 d significantly increases IMCL content in healthy individuals regardless of HFD total fat content and duration of physical activity status. All IMCL measurement techniques detected the increased IMCL content following HFD. The dissociation between changes in IMCL and insulin sensitivity suggests that other factors may drive HFD-induced impairments in insulin sensitivity in healthy individuals. This trial was registered at PROSPERO as CRD42021257984

Cytogerontology since 1881: A reappraisal of August Weismann and a review of modern progress

Cytogerontology, the science of cellular ageing, originated in 1881 with the prediction by August Weismann that the somatic cells of higher animals have limited division potential. Weismann's prediction was derived by considering the role of natural selection in regulating the duration of an organism's life. For various reasons, Weismann's ideas on ageing fell into neglect following his death in 1914, and cytogerontology has only reappeared as a major research area following the demonstration by Hayflick and Moorhead in the early 1960s that diploid human fibroblasts are restricted to a finite number of divisions in vitro. In this review we give a detailed account of Weismann's theory, and we reveal that his ideas were both more extensive in their scope and more pertinent to current research than is generally recognised. We also appraise the progress which has been made over the past hundred years in investigating the causes of ageing, with particular emphasis being given to (i) the evolution of ageing, and (ii) ageing at the cellular level. We critically assess the current state of knowledge in these areas and recommend a series of points as primary targets for future research

Mental health in UK Biobank - development, implementation and results from an online questionnaire completed by 157 366 participants: a reanalysis

Background UK Biobank is a well-characterised cohort of over 500 000 participants including genetics, environmental data and imaging. An online mental health questionnaire was designed for UK Biobank participants to expand its potential. Aims Describe the development, implementation and results of this questionnaire. Method An expert working group designed the questionnaire, using established measures where possible, and consulting a patient group. Operational criteria were agreed for defining likely disorder and risk states, including lifetime depression, mania/hypomania, generalised anxiety disorder, unusual experiences and self-harm, and current post-traumatic stress and hazardous/harmful alcohol use. Results A total of 157 366 completed online questionnaires were available by August 2017. Participants were aged 45–82 (53% were ≥65 years) and 57% women. Comparison of self-reported diagnosed mental disorder with a contemporary study shows a similar prevalence, despite respondents being of higher average socioeconomic status. Lifetime depression was a common finding, with 24% (37 434) of participants meeting criteria and current hazardous/harmful alcohol use criteria were met by 21% (32 602), whereas other criteria were met by less than 8% of the participants. There was extensive comorbidity among the syndromes. Mental disorders were associated with a high neuroticism score, adverse life events and long-term illness; addiction and bipolar affective disorder in particular were associated with measures of deprivation. Conclusions The UK Biobank questionnaire represents a very large mental health survey in itself, and the results presented here show high face validity, although caution is needed because of selection bias. Built into UK Biobank, these data intersect with other health data to offer unparalleled potential for crosscutting biomedical research involving mental health

Is EC class predictable from reaction mechanism?

We thank the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance (SULSA) and the Scottish Overseas Research Student Awards Scheme of the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) for financial support.Background: We investigate the relationships between the EC (Enzyme Commission) class, the associated chemical reaction, and the reaction mechanism by building predictive models using Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF) and k-Nearest Neighbours (kNN). We consider two ways of encoding the reaction mechanism in descriptors, and also three approaches that encode only the overall chemical reaction. Both cross-validation and also an external test set are used. Results: The three descriptor sets encoding overall chemical transformation perform better than the two descriptions of mechanism. SVM and RF models perform comparably well; kNN is less successful. Oxidoreductases and hydrolases are relatively well predicted by all types of descriptor; isomerases are well predicted by overall reaction descriptors but not by mechanistic ones. Conclusions: Our results suggest that pairs of similar enzyme reactions tend to proceed by different mechanisms. Oxidoreductases, hydrolases, and to some extent isomerases and ligases, have clear chemical signatures, making them easier to predict than transferases and lyases. We find evidence that isomerases as a class are notably mechanistically diverse and that their one shared property, of substrate and product being isomers, can arise in various unrelated ways. The performance of the different machine learning algorithms is in line with many cheminformatics applications, with SVM and RF being roughly equally effective. kNN is less successful, given the role that non-local information plays in successful classification. We note also that, despite a lack of clarity in the literature, EC number prediction is not a single problem; the challenge of predicting protein function from available sequence data is quite different from assigning an EC classification from a cheminformatics representation of a reaction.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

International Public Health Research Involving Interpreters: a Case Study from Bangladesh

Background: Cross-cultural and international research are important components of public health research, but the challenges of language barriers and working with interpreters are often overlooked, particularly in the case of qualitative research. Methods: A case-study approach was used to explore experiences of working with an interpreter in Bangladesh as part of a research project investigating women's experiences of emergency obstetric care. The case study: Data from the researcher's field notes provided evidence of experiences in working with an interpreter and show how the model of interviewing was adapted over time to give a more active role to the interpreter. The advantages of a more active role were increased rapport and "flow" in interviews. The disadvantages included reduced control from the researcher's perspective. Some tensions between the researcher and interpreter remained hard to overcome, irrespective of the model used. Independent transcription and translation of the interviews also raised questions around accuracy in translation. Conclusion: The issues examined in this case study have broader implications for public health research. Further work is needed in three areas: 1) developing effective relationships with interpreters; 2) the impact of the interpreter on the research process; and 3) the accuracy of the translation and level of analysis needed in any specific public health research. Finally, this paper highlights the importance to authors of reflecting on the potential impact of translation and interpretation on the research process when disseminating their research

Discovery of TUG-770: a highly potent free fatty acid receptor 1 (FFA1/GPR40) agonist for treatment of type 2 diabetes

Free fatty acid receptor 1 (FFA1 or GPR40) enhances glucose-stimulated insulin secretion from pancreatic β-cells and currently attracts high interest as a new target for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. We here report the discovery of a highly potent FFA1 agonist with favorable physicochemical and pharmacokinetic properties. The compound efficiently normalizes glucose tolerance in diet-induced obese mice, an effect that is fully sustained after 29 days of chronic dosing