Common Genetic Variant Association with Altered HLA Expression, Synergy with Pyrethroid Exposure, and Risk for Parkinson's Disease: An Observational and Case-Control Study.

Background/objectivesThe common non-coding single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs3129882 in HLA-DRA is associated with risk for idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD). The location of the SNP in the major histocompatibility complex class II (MHC-II) locus implicates regulation of antigen presentation as a potential mechanism by which immune responses link genetic susceptibility to environmental factors in conferring lifetime risk for PD.MethodsFor immunophenotyping, blood cells from 81 subjects were analyzed by qRT-PCR and flow cytometry. A case-control study was performed on a separate cohort of 962 subjects to determine association of pesticide exposure and the SNP with risk of PD.ResultsHomozygosity for G at this SNP was associated with heightened baseline expression and inducibility of MHC class II molecules in B cells and monocytes from peripheral blood of healthy controls and PD patients. In addition, exposure to a commonly used class of insecticide, pyrethroids, synergized with the risk conferred by this SNP (OR = 2.48, p = 0.007), thereby identifying a novel gene-environment interaction that promotes risk for PD via alterations in immune responses.ConclusionsIn sum, these novel findings suggest that the MHC-II locus may increase susceptibility to PD through presentation of pathogenic, immunodominant antigens and/or a shift toward a more pro-inflammatory CD4+ T cell response in response to specific environmental exposures, such as pyrethroid exposure through genetic or epigenetic mechanisms that modulate MHC-II gene expression

Argyres-Douglas Loci, Singularity Structures and Wall-Crossings in Pure N=2 Gauge Theories with Classical Gauge Groups

N=2 Seiberg-Witten theories allow an interesting interplay between the Argyres-Douglas loci, singularity structures and wall-crossing formulae. In this paper we investigate this connection by first studying the singularity structures of hyper-elliptic Seiberg-Witten curves for pure N=2 gauge theories with SU(r+1) and Sp(2r) gauge groups, and propose new methods to locate the Argyres-Douglas loci in the moduli space, where multiple mutually non-local BPS states become massless. In a region of the moduli space, we compute dyon charges for all 2r+2 and 2r+1 massless dyons for SU(r+1) and Sp(2r) gauge groups respectively for rank r>1. From here we elucidate the connection to the wall-crossing phenomena for pure Sp(4) Seiberg-Witten theory near the Argyres-Douglas loci, despite our emphasis being only at the massless sector of the BPS spectra. We also present 2r-1 candidates for the maximal Argyres-Douglas points for pure SO(2r+1) Seiberg-Witten theory.Comment: 81 pages, 41 figures, LaTeX; v2: Minor cosmetic changes and correction of a typographical error in acknowledgement. Final version to appear in JHE

Transport coefficients, membrane couplings and universality at extremality

We present an efficient method for computing the zero frequency limit of transport coefficients in strongly coupled field theories described holographically by higher derivative gravity theories. Hydrodynamic parameters such as shear viscosity and conductivity can be obtained by computing residues of poles of the off-shell lagrangian density. We clarify in which sense these coefficients can be thought of as effective couplings at the horizon, and present analytic, Wald-like formulae for the shear viscosity and conductivity in a large class of general higher derivative lagrangians. We show how to apply our methods to systems at zero temperature but finite chemical potential. Our results imply that such theories satisfy $\eta/s=1/4\pi$ universally in the Einstein-Maxwell sector. Likewise, the zero frequency limit of the real part of the conductivity for such systems is shown to be universally zero, and we conjecture that higher derivative corrections in this sector do not modify this result to all orders in perturbation theory.Comment: 29 pages, v2: Small text changes for clarity, typos correcte

Psychological interventions in asthma

Asthma is a multifactorial chronic respiratory disease characterised by recurrent episodes of airway obstruction. The current management of asthma focuses principally on pharmacological treatments, which have a strong evidence base underlying their use. However, in clinical practice, poor symptom control remains a common problem for patients with asthma. Living with asthma has been linked with psychological co-morbidity including anxiety, depression, panic attacks and behavioural factors such as poor adherence and suboptimal self-management. Psychological disorders have a higher-than-expected prevalence in patients with difficult-to-control asthma. As psychological considerations play an important role in the management of people with asthma, it is not surprising that many psychological therapies have been applied in the management of asthma. There are case reports which support their use as an adjunct to pharmacological therapy in selected individuals, and in some clinical trials, benefit is demonstrated, but the evidence is not consistent. When findings are quantitatively synthesised in meta-analyses, no firm conclusions are able to be drawn and no guidelines recommend psychological interventions. These inconsistencies in findings may in part be due to poor study design, the combining of results of studies using different interventions and the diversity of ways patient benefit is assessed. Despite this weak evidence base, the rationale for psychological therapies is plausible, and this therapeutic modality is appealing to both patients and their clinicians as an adjunct to conventional pharmacological treatments. What are urgently required are rigorous evaluations of psychological therapies in asthma, on a par to the quality of pharmaceutical trials. From this evidence base, we can then determine which interventions are beneficial for our patients with asthma management and more specifically which psychological therapy is best suited for each patient

Holographic fermions in charged Gauss-Bonnet black hole

We study the properties of the Green's functions of the fermions in charged Gauss-Bonnet black hole. What we want to do is to investigate how the presence of Gauss-Bonnet coupling constant $\alpha$ affects the dispersion relation, which is a characteristic of Fermi or non-Fermi liquid, as well as what properties such a system has, for instance, the Particle-hole (a)symmetry. One important result of this research is that we find for $q=1$, the behavior of this system is different from that of the Landau Fermi liquid and so the system can be candidates for holographic dual of generalized non-Fermi liquids. More importantly, the behavior of this system increasingly similar to that of the Landau Fermi liquid when $\alpha$ is approaching its lower bound. Also we find that this system possesses the Particle-hole asymmetry when $q\neq 0$, another important characteristic of this system. In addition, we also investigate briefly the cases of the charge dependence.Comment: 22 pages, 6 figures; version published in JHE

Pregnant women with bronchial asthma benefit from progressive muscle relaxation: A randomized, prospective, controlled trial

Background: Asthma is a serious medical problem in pregnancy and is often associated with stress, anger and poor quality of life. The aim of this study was to determine the efficacy of progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) on change in blood pressure, lung parameters, heart rate, anger and health-related quality of life in pregnant women with bronchial asthma. Methods: We treated a sample of 64 pregnant women with bronchial asthma from the local population in an 8-week randomized, prospective, controlled trial. Thirty-two were selected for PMR, and 32 received a placebo intervention. The systolic blood pressure, forced expiratory volume in the first second, peak expiratory flow and heart rate were tested, and the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory and Health Survey (SF-36) were employed. Results: According to the intend-to-treat principle, a significant reduction in systolic blood pressure and a significant increase in both forced expiratory volume in the first second and peak expiratory flow were observed after PMR. The heart rate showed a significant increase in the coefficient of variation, root mean square of successive differences and high frequency ranges, in addition to a significant reduction in low and middle frequency ranges. A significant reduction on three of five State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory scales, and a significant increase on seven of eight SF-36 scales were observed. Conclusions: PMR appears to be an effective method to improve blood pressure, lung parameters and heart rate, and to decrease anger levels, thus enhancing health-related quality of life in pregnant women with bronchial asthma. Copyright (c) 2006 S. Karger AG, Basel

Holographic current correlators at finite coupling and scattering off a supersymmetric plasma

By studying the effect of the order(\alpha'^3) string theory corrections to type IIB supergravity, including those corrections involving the Ramond-Ramond five-form field strength, we obtain the corrected equations of motion of an Abelian perturbation of the AdS_5-Schwarzschild black hole. We then use the gauge theory/string theory duality to examine the coupling-constant dependence of vector current correlators associated to a gauged U(1) sub-group of the global R-symmetry group of strongly-coupled N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory at finite temperature. The corrections induce a set of higher-derivative operators for the U(1) gauge field, but their effect is highly suppressed. We thus find that the order(\alpha'^3) corrections affect the vector correlators only indirectly, through the corrected metric. We apply our results to investigate scattering off a supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma at low and high energy. In the latter regime, where Deep Inelastic Scattering is expected to occur, we find an enhancement of the plasma structure functions in comparison with the infinite 't Hooft coupling result.Comment: 38 pages, 6 figures, minor clarifications added, typos corrected, references adde

Multiscale photosynthetic exciton transfer

Photosynthetic light harvesting provides a natural blueprint for bioengineered and biomimetic solar energy and light detection technologies. Recent evidence suggests some individual light harvesting protein complexes (LHCs) and LHC subunits efficiently transfer excitons towards chemical reaction centers (RCs) via an interplay between excitonic quantum coherence, resonant protein vibrations, and thermal decoherence. The role of coherence in vivo is unclear however, where excitons are transferred through multi-LHC/RC aggregates over distances typically large compared with intra-LHC scales. Here we assess the possibility of long-range coherent transfer in a simple chromophore network with disordered site and transfer coupling energies. Through renormalization we find that, surprisingly, decoherence is diminished at larger scales, and long-range coherence is facilitated by chromophoric clustering. Conversely, static disorder in the site energies grows with length scale, forcing localization. Our results suggest sustained coherent exciton transfer may be possible over distances large compared with nearest-neighbour (n-n) chromophore separations, at physiological temperatures, in a clustered network with small static disorder. This may support findings suggesting long-range coherence in algal chloroplasts, and provides a framework for engineering large chromophore or quantum dot high-temperature exciton transfer networks.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures. A significantly updated version is now published online by Nature Physics (2012

Plasma photoemission from string theory

Leading 't Hooft coupling corrections to the photoemission rate of the planar limit of a strongly-coupled {\cal {N}}=4 SYM plasma are investigated using the gauge/string duality. We consider the full order \alpha'^3 type IIB string theory corrections to the supergravity action, including higher order terms with the Ramond-Ramond five-form field strength. We extend our previous results presented in arXiv:1110.0526. Photoemission rates depend on the 't Hooft coupling, and their curves suggest an interpolating behaviour from strong towards weak coupling regimes. Their slopes at zero light-like momentum give the electrical conductivity as a function of the 't Hooft coupling, in full agreement with our previous results of arXiv:1108.6306. Furthermore, we also study the effect of corrections beyond the large N limit.Comment: 36 pages, 5 figures, paragraph added in the conclusions, references added, typos correcte