Nutrition Strategies for Triathlon

Contemporary sports nutrition guidelines recommend that each athlete develop a personalised, periodised and practical approach to eating that allows him or her to train hard, recover and adapt optimally, stay free of illness and injury and compete at their best at peak races. Competitive triathletes undertake a heavy training programme to prepare for three different sports while undertaking races varying in duration from 20 min to 10 h. The everyday diet should be adequate in energy availability, provide CHO in varying amounts and timing around workouts according to the benefits of training with low or high CHO availability and spread high-quality protein over the day to maximise the adaptive response to each session. Race nutrition requires a targeted and well-practised plan that maintains fuel and hydration goals over the duration of the specific event, according to the opportunities provided by the race and other challenges, such as a hot environment. Supplements and sports foods can make a small contribution to a sports nutrition plan, when medical supplements are used under supervision to prevent/treat nutrient deficiencies (e.g. iron or vitamin D) or when sports foods provide a convenient source of nutrients when it is impractical to eat whole foods. Finally, a few evidence-based performance supplements may contribute to optimal race performance when used according to best practice protocols to suit the triathlete’s goals and individual responsiveness

Grand Challenges: Improving HIV Treatment Outcomes by Integrating Interventions for Co-Morbid Mental Illness.

In the fourth article of a five-part series providing a global perspective on integrating mental health, Sylvia Kaaya and colleagues discuss the importance of integrating mental health interventions into HIV prevention and treatment platforms. Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary

Agent based modelling helps in understanding the rules by which fibroblasts support keratinocyte colony formation

Background: Autologous keratincoytes are routinely expanded using irradiated mouse fibroblasts and bovine serum for clinical use. With growing concerns about the safety of these xenobiotic materials, it is desirable to culture keratinocytes in media without animal derived products. An improved understanding of epithelial/mesenchymal interactions could assist in this. Methodology/Principal Findings: A keratincyte/fibroblast o-culture model was developed by extending an agent-based keratinocyte colony formation model to include the response of keratinocytes to both fibroblasts and serum. The model was validated by comparison of the in virtuo and in vitro multicellular behaviour of keratinocytes and fibroblasts in single and co-culture in Greens medium. To test the robustness of the model, several properties of the fibroblasts were changed to investigate their influence on the multicellular morphogenesis of keratinocyes and fibroblasts. The model was then used to generate hypotheses to explore the interactions of both proliferative and growth arrested fibroblasts with keratinocytes. The key predictions arising from the model which were confirmed by in vitro experiments were that 1) the ratio of fibroblasts to keratinocytes would critically influence keratinocyte colony expansion, 2) this ratio needed to be optimum at the beginning of the co-culture, 3) proliferative fibroblasts would be more effective than irradiated cells in expanding keratinocytes and 4) in the presence of an adequate number of fibroblasts, keratinocyte expansion would be independent of serum. Conclusions: A closely associated computational and biological approach is a powerful tool for understanding complex biological systems such as the interactions between keratinocytes and fibroblasts. The key outcome of this study is the finding that the early addition of a critical ratio of proliferative fibroblasts can give rapid keratinocyte expansion without the use of irradiated mouse fibroblasts and bovine serum

Routine pattern discovery and anomaly detection in individual travel behavior

Discovering patterns and detecting anomalies in individual travel behavior is a crucial problem in both research and practice. In this paper, we address this problem by building a probabilistic framework to model individual spatiotemporal travel behavior data (e.g., trip records and trajectory data). We develop a two-dimensional latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model to characterize the generative mechanism of spatiotemporal trip records of each traveler. This model introduces two separate factor matrices for the spatial dimension and the temporal dimension, respectively, and use a two-dimensional core structure at the individual level to effectively model the joint interactions and complex dependencies. This model can efficiently summarize travel behavior patterns on both spatial and temporal dimensions from very sparse trip sequences in an unsupervised way. In this way, complex travel behavior can be modeled as a mixture of representative and interpretable spatiotemporal patterns. By applying the trained model on future/unseen spatiotemporal records of a traveler, we can detect her behavior anomalies by scoring those observations using perplexity. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modeling framework on a real-world license plate recognition (LPR) data set. The results confirm the advantage of statistical learning methods in modeling sparse individual travel behavior data. This type of pattern discovery and anomaly detection applications can provide useful insights for traffic monitoring, law enforcement, and individual travel behavior profiling

Clinical, Biological and Genetic Analysis of Prepubertal Isolated Ovarian Cyst in 11 Girls

BACKGROUND: The cause of isolated gonadotropin-independent precocious puberty (PP) with an ovarian cyst is unknown in the majority of cases. Here, we describe 11 new cases of peripheral PP and, based on phenotypes observed in mouse models, we tested the hypothesis that mutations in the GNAS1, NR5A1, LHCGR, FSHR, NR5A1, StAR, DMRT4 and NOBOX may be associated with this phenotype. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: 11 girls with gonadotropin-independent PP were included in this study. Three girls were seen for a history of prenatal ovarian cyst, 6 girls for breast development, and 2 girls for vaginal bleeding. With one exception, all girls were seen before 8 years of age. In 8 cases, an ovarian cyst was detected, and in one case, suspected. One other case has polycystic ovaries, and the remaining case was referred for vaginal bleeding. Four patients had a familial history of ovarian anomalies and/or infertility. Mutations in the coding sequences of the candidate genes GNAS1, NR5A1, LHCGR, FSHR, NR5A1, StAR, DMRT4 and NOBOX were not observed. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Ovarian PP shows markedly different clinical features from central PP. Our data suggest that mutations in the GNAS1, NR5A1, LHCGR, FSHR StAR, DMRT4 and NOBOX genes are not responsible for ovarian PP. Further research, including the identification of familial cases, is needed to understand the etiology of ovarian PP

Enhanced Temporal but Not Attentional Processing in Expert Tennis Players

In tennis, as in many disciplines of sport, fine spatio-temporal resolution is required to reach optimal performance. While many studies on tennis have focused on anticipatory skills or decision making, fewer have investigated the underlying visual perception abilities. In this study, we used a battery of seven visual tests that allowed us to assess which kind of visual information processing is performed better by tennis players than other athletes (triathletes) and non-athletes. We found that certain time-related skills, such as speed discrimination, are superior in tennis players compared to non-athletes and triathletes. Such tasks might be used to improve tennis performance in the future