Metabolic biomarkers of appetite control in Parkinson\u27s disease patients with and without cognitive impairment

\ua9 2024 The Author(s)Background: Appetite dysregulation in Parkinson\u27s Disease (PD) appears to be linked to physical and cognitive deterioration. PD patients with and without cognitive impairment (CI) were compared to an age-matched control group to explore predictors of appetite control in fasting and post-prandial conditions. Methods: Fifty-five patients were recruited and divided into three groups: twenty controls (age: 74 y, BMI: 25.8 kg/m2), nineteen PD patients without CI (72.5 y, 25.1 kg/m2) and sixteen PD patients with CI (74.3 y, 24.0 kg/m2). Self-reported appetite perception and circulating blood metabolic biomarkers were measured in fasting and over a 3-h post-prandial period. Biomarkers included glucose, insulin, tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α), leptin, acyl-ghrelin, total ghrelin, peptide YY (PYY), glucagon like peptide 1 (GLP-1), insulin growth factor 1 (IGF-1), growth factor (GF) and triglycerides. Patients were then provided with a mixed meal to eat ad libitum with the aim to evaluate links between metabolic biomarkers and control of energy intake. Results: PD patients with CI had a significant lower protein intake (7.4 \ub1 2.5 g, p = 0.01) compared to controls (21.9 \ub1 3.1 g) and PD patients without CI (14.3 \ub1 3.0 g). Post-prandial plasma GLP-1 concentrations were associated with decreased hunger perception (B\ub1SE, −5.3 \ub1 2.4 mm\ub7h−1, p = 0.04). PYY concentrations were significantly associated with GLP-1 in fasting (r = 0.40, p = 0.005) and post-prandial (r = 0.46, p < 0.001) conditions. In a multivariate model, post-prandial PYY concentrations were a significant predictor of ad libitum energy intake in all subjects (B\ub1SE, −87.5 \ub1 34.9 kcal, p = 0.01) and in patients with PD (B\ub1SE, −106.8 \ub1 44.9 kcal, p = 0.04). Conclusions: PYY and GLP-1 appeared to influence appetite control in PD patients and their roles merit further investigation

The influence of organizational culture and climate on entrepreneurial intentions among research scientists

Over the past decades, universities have increasingly become involved in entrepreneurial activities. Despite efforts to embrace their ‘third mission’, universities still demonstrate great heterogeneity in terms of their involvement in academic entrepreneurship. This papers adopts an institutional perspective to understand how organizational characteristics affect research scientists’ entrepreneurial intentions. Specifically, we study the impact of university culture and climate on entrepreneurial intentions, including intentions to spin off a company, to engage in patenting or licensing and to interact with industry through contract research or consulting. Using a sample of 437 research scientists from Swedish and German universities, our results reveal that the extent to which universities articulate entrepreneurship as a fundamental element of their mission fosters research scientists’ intentions to engage in spin-off creation and intellectual property rights, but not industry-science interaction. Furthermore, the presence of university role models positively affects research scientists’ propensity to engage in entrepreneurial activities, both directly and indirectly through entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Finally, research scientists working at universities which explicitly reward people for ‘third mission’ related output show higher levels of spin-off and patenting or licensing intentions. This study has implications for both academics and practitioners, including university managers and policy makers

Corporate Entrepreneurship:From Structures to Mindset

Corporate entrepreneurship dispersed throughout an organization and leveraging the entrepreneurial potential of all its employees bears significant benefits for those organizations that embrace it. However, it appears more difficult to instill and requires strong investment in the development of human capital and entrepreneurial mindset among the employees and across the organization. In this chapter, we discuss the essence of corporate entrepreneurship mindset and show that across an organization, there might be different entrepreneurial mindsets that correspond to different people, opportunities, and contexts. Although different, they all lead to enactment of entrepreneurial projects. This chapter, thus, contributes to the discussion regarding the nature of corporate entrepreneurial mindsets, and their development and stimulation within an organization, from both academic and practical view

The PRIMED Consortium: Reducing disparities in polygenic risk assessment.

By improving disease risk prediction, polygenic risk scores (PRSs) could have a significant impact on health promotion and disease prevention. Due to the historical oversampling of populations with European ancestry for genome-wide association studies, PRSs perform less well in other, understudied populations, leading to concerns that clinical use in their current forms could widen health care disparities. The PRIMED Consortium was established to develop methods to improve the performance of PRSs in global populations and individuals of diverse genetic ancestry. To this end, PRIMED is aggregating and harmonizing multiple phenotype and genotype datasets on AnVIL, an interoperable secure cloud-based platform, to perform individual- and summary-level analyses using population and statistical genetics approaches. Study sites, the coordinating center, and representatives from the NIH work alongside other NHGRI and global consortia to achieve these goals. PRIMED is also evaluating ethical and social implications of PRS implementation and investigating the joint modeling of social determinants of health and PRS in computing disease risk. The phenotypes of interest are primarily cardiometabolic diseases and cancer, the leading causes of death and disability worldwide. Early deliverables of the consortium include methods for data sharing on AnVIL, development of a common data model to harmonize phenotype and genotype data from cohort studies as well as electronic health records, adaptation of recent guidelines for population descriptors to global cohorts, and sharing of PRS methods/tools. As a multisite collaboration, PRIMED aims to foster equity in the development and use of polygenic risk assessment

A dimensional summation account of polymorphous category learning

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via the DOI in this record.Data and code availaibility: The data and code for all analyses for all experiments are available at the OSF addresses given in each Results section. The stimuli are available at the same locations.Polymorphous concepts are hard to learn, and this is perhaps surprising because they, like many natural concepts, have an overall similarity structure. However, the dimensional summation hypothesis (Milton & Wills, 2004) predicts this difficulty. It also makes a number of other predictions about polymorphous concept formation, which are tested here. In Experiment 1 we confirm the theory’s prediction that polymorphous concept formation should be facilitated by deterministic pretraining on the constituent features of the stimulus. This facilitation is relative to an equivalent amount of training on the polymorphous concept itself. In Experiments 2–4, the dimensional summation account of this single feature pretraining effect is contrasted with some other accounts, including a more general strategic account (Experiment 2), seriality of training and stimulus decomposition accounts (Experiment 3), and the role of errors (Experiment 4). The dimensional summation hypothesis provides the best account of these data. In Experiment 5, a further prediction is confirmed — the single feature pretraining effect is eliminated by a concurrent counting task. The current experiments suggest the hypothesis that natural concepts might be acquired by the deliberate serial summation of evidence. This idea has testable implications for classroom learning.Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC

Complexity absorption : A processual strategic approach to corporate entrepreneurship strategy

The author Haina Zhang acknowledges the support of research grant received from the Lancaster University Research Committee (award reference: SGS21/33). The author is also grateful to Professor David Brown for his suggestions on earlier version of this paper.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Entrepreneurial orientation and the business performance of SMEs: a quantitative study from the Netherlands

Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) is often mentioned as an antecedent of growth, competitive advantage and superior performance, and prior empirical research has often shown a positive relationship between EO and performance appears to exist. However, an important question that remains unanswered is what effect EO might have on firm performance during periods of economic crisis, and the severe environmental turbulence that accompany such crises. This research is a first investigation towards the effects of EO on the performance of small and medium sized firms during the current global economic crisis. In this study we use the multidimensional model of EO and test a series of hypotheses pertaining to its performance effects using survey data gathered from 164 Dutch SMEs. The present research shows that proactive firm behavior positively contributes to SME performance during the economic crisis. We further show that innovative SMEs do perform better in turbulent environments, but those innovative SMEs should minimize the level of risk and should take action to avoid projects that are too risky

The impact of viral mutations on recognition by SARS-CoV-2 specific T cells.

We identify amino acid variants within dominant SARS-CoV-2 T cell epitopes by interrogating global sequence data. Several variants within nucleocapsid and ORF3a epitopes have arisen independently in multiple lineages and result in loss of recognition by epitope-specific T cells assessed by IFN-γ and cytotoxic killing assays. Complete loss of T cell responsiveness was seen due to Q213K in the A∗01:01-restricted CD8+ ORF3a epitope FTSDYYQLY207-215; due to P13L, P13S, and P13T in the B∗27:05-restricted CD8+ nucleocapsid epitope QRNAPRITF9-17; and due to T362I and P365S in the A∗03:01/A∗11:01-restricted CD8+ nucleocapsid epitope KTFPPTEPK361-369. CD8+ T cell lines unable to recognize variant epitopes have diverse T cell receptor repertoires. These data demonstrate the potential for T cell evasion and highlight the need for ongoing surveillance for variants capable of escaping T cell as well as humoral immunity.This work is supported by the UK Medical Research Council (MRC); Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences(CAMS) Innovation Fund for Medical Sciences (CIFMS), China; National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)Oxford Biomedical Research Centre, and UK Researchand Innovation (UKRI)/NIHR through the UK Coro-navirus Immunology Consortium (UK-CIC). Sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 samples and collation of data wasundertaken by the COG-UK CONSORTIUM. COG-UK is supported by funding from the Medical ResearchCouncil (MRC) part of UK Research & Innovation (UKRI),the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR),and Genome Research Limited, operating as the Wellcome Sanger Institute. T.I.d.S. is supported by a Well-come Trust Intermediate Clinical Fellowship (110058/Z/15/Z). L.T. is supported by the Wellcome Trust(grant number 205228/Z/16/Z) and by theUniversity of Liverpool Centre for Excellence in Infectious DiseaseResearch (CEIDR). S.D. is funded by an NIHR GlobalResearch Professorship (NIHR300791). L.T. and S.C.M.are also supported by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Medical Countermeasures Initiative contract75F40120C00085 and the National Institute for Health Research Health Protection Research Unit (HPRU) inEmerging and Zoonotic Infections (NIHR200907) at University of Liverpool inpartnership with Public HealthEngland (PHE), in collaboration with Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and the University of Oxford.L.T. is based at the University of Liverpool. M.D.P. is funded by the NIHR Sheffield Biomedical ResearchCentre (BRC – IS-BRC-1215-20017). ISARIC4C is supported by the MRC (grant no MC_PC_19059). J.C.K.is a Wellcome Investigator (WT204969/Z/16/Z) and supported by NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centreand CIFMS. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NIHR or MRC