Cognition in Rodents

Cognition is a loosely defined term with divergent meanings in different disciplines and species. In human psychology, ‘cognition’ is often used in reference to concepts such as ‘mind’ or ‘higher mental functions’. However, in more general terms, ‘cognition’ is regularly used to refer to all manner of information organization by the brain: from collection, to processing, to storage and recognition or recall. Whereas ‘cognition’ would seem to permeate all mental functions, including subjective perception and innate responses, ‘cognitive ability’ has a slightly more specific connotation – something more akin to intelligence or information-processing ability. Thus, ‘cognition’ deals with mental process structure and ‘cognitive abilities’ with natural variations impinging upon functioning at the higher end of that structure. Although the term ‘cognition’ sometimes subsumes or substitutes ‘cognitive ability’ in the literature, understanding this methodological distinction allows us to read across the two fields without the misunderstandings that classical cognitive psychologists have sometimes shown for cognitive ability research

Effect of Fibrinogen and Ca 2+ on the Thrombin-Catalyzed Proteolytic Event That Triggers Activation of Factor XIII

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75101/1/j.1749-6632.1986.tb34575.x.pd

Preventing diabetes through a lifestyle modification program that works

The Greater Green Triangle Diabetes Prevention Project was a national demonstrator program that was conducted in Hamilton, Horsham and Mount Gambier by the GGT UDRH in 2004 to 2006. The project was based on the Finnish Diabetes Prevention Study and the Good Ageing in Lahti Region Lifestyle Implementation Trial. It involved a series of group education sessions delivered to people at high risk of developing diabetes. As the positive effect of diabetes prevention programs is already well established, the aim of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of delivering a structured group-based lifestyle modification program in Australian primary care settings with modest resources. A follow-up investigation looked at whether gains achieved by the intervention were sustained longer term and whether telephone support would provide better outcomes

The potential for measuring ethnicity and health in a multicultural milieu - the case of type 2 diabetes in Australia

ObjectiveEthnicity influences health in many ways. For example, type 2&nbsp;diabetes (T2DM) is disproportionately prevalent among certain ethnic groups.&nbsp;Assessing ethnicity is difficult, and numerous proxy measures are used to&nbsp;capture its various components. Australian guidelines specify a set of&nbsp;variables for measuring ethnicity, and how such parameters should be&nbsp;categorised. Using T2DM data collections as an illustrative example, this&nbsp;study sought to examine how ethnicity is measured in Australian health&nbsp;databases and, by comparing current practice with Australia&rsquo;s existing&nbsp;benchmark recommendations, to identify potential areas for improvement of&nbsp;the health data landscape.DesignWe identified databases containing information from which ethnic&nbsp;group-specific estimates of T2DM burden may be gleaned. For each&nbsp;database, details regarding ethnicity variables were extracted, and compared&nbsp;with the Australian guidelines.&nbsp;ResultsData collection instruments for 32 relevant databases were reviewed.&nbsp;Birthplace was recorded in 27 databases (84%), but mode of birthplace&nbsp;assessment varied. Indigenous status was commonly recorded (78%, n=25), but&nbsp;only nine databases recorded other aspects of self-perceived race/ethnicity. Of&nbsp;28 survey/audit databases, 14 accommodated linguistic preferences other than&nbsp;English, and 11 either excluded non-English speakers or those for whom a&nbsp;translator was not available, or only offered questionnaires in English.ConclusionsConsiderable variation exists in the measurement of ethnicity in&nbsp;Australian health data- sets. While various markers of ethnicity provide&nbsp;complementary information about the ethnic profile within a data-set, nonuniform&nbsp;measurement renders comparison between data-sets difficult. A&nbsp;standardised approach is necessary, and identifying the ethnicity variables&nbsp;that are particularly relevant to the health sector is warranted. Including self identified&nbsp;ethnicity in Australia&rsquo;s set of recommended indicators and as a core&nbsp;component of the national census should be considered. Globalisation and&nbsp;increasing migration mean that these findings have implications internationally,&nbsp;including for multi-ethnic countries throughout North America and&nbsp;Europe.</div

Addressing evidence treatment gaps for cardiovascular disease through primary care collaboration

Aims &amp; Rationale/ObjectivesThe aim is to establish the frequency of counselling by general practitioners (GPs) and community pharmacists (CPs) for patients with uncontrolled CVD risk factors. This will identify conditions for which CPs might collaborate with GPs in addressing evidence-treatment gaps.MethodsA population survey undertaken in the Wimmera region of Victoria in 2006. 1425 adults aged 25-84 yrs were randomly selected using age/sex stratified electoral role samples. A representative 723 participants were recruited.Principal FindingsData on GP and CP visits were available for 694 participants. Overall, participants visited GPs 4.6 times and CPs 6.0 times/annum. However, one third of participants never consulted a pharmacist in 12 months compared to just 11.5% for GPs. Among obese patients (BMI ?? 30), the average number of visits/annum was 4.5 to GPs and 6.8 to CPs. The equivalent numbers were 5.6 and 8.6 respectively for those with systolic BP ?? 140 mmHg; 3.7 and 5.5 for total cholesterol &gt; 5.0 mmol/L; and, 6.7 and 14.6 for patients with random blood glucose concentrations ?? 7.0 mmol/L.ImplicationsPeople with suboptimal status for most common CVD risk factor are counselled frequently by CPs. A coordinated approach with GPs to the delivery of cardiovascular health promotion could provide valuable reinforcement of key messages and offers greater opportunity to identify at-risk individuals. Acknowledgements: KM is a pharmacist-academic at Greater Green Triangle UDRH, a position funded by the Department of Health and Ageing through the Rural and Remote Pharmacy Workforce Development Program<br /

Detection of squirrel poxvirus by nested and real-time PCR from red (Sciurus vulgaris) and grey (Sciurus carolinensis) squirrels

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Squirrel poxvirus (SQPV) is highly pathogenic to red squirrels (<it>Sciurus vulgaris</it>), and is a significant contributing factor to the local extinction of the species in most parts of England and Wales, where infection is endemic in Eastern grey squirrel (<it>Sciurus carolinensis</it>) populations. Although a nested PCR assay has been used successfully to study the epidemiology of SQPV, samples have a long processing time and the assay is not quantifiable.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>This project describes the design and optimization of a real-time PCR for SQPV. Comparison with the nested PCR showed the real-time assay to be more sensitive by one log and able to detect approximately 144 genome copies per mg of tissue.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The real-time PCR has been used to quantify viral genome load in tissues from diseased and apparently healthy red and grey squirrels, and suggests that the titre of virus in tissues from diseased red squirrels is considerably higher than that found even in a grey squirrel with cutaneous lesions.</p

An in-depth view of the microscopic dynamics of Ising spin glasses at fixed temperature

Using the dedicated computer Janus, we follow the nonequilibrium dynamics of the Ising spin glass in three dimensions for eleven orders of magnitude. The use of integral estimators for the coherence and correlation lengths allows us to study dynamic heterogeneities and the presence of a replicon mode and to obtain safe bounds on the Edwards-Anderson order parameter below the critical temperature. We obtain good agreement with experimental determinations of the temperature-dependent decay exponents for the thermoremanent magnetization. This magnitude is observed to scale with the much harder to measure coherence length, a potentially useful result for experimentalists. The exponents for energy relaxation display a linear dependence on temperature and reasonable extrapolations to the critical point. We conclude examining the time growth of the coherence length, with a comparison of critical and activated dynamics.Comment: 38 pages, 26 figure

A biophysical model of prokaryotic diversity in geothermal hot springs

Recent field investigations of photosynthetic bacteria living in geothermal hot spring environments have revealed surprisingly complex ecosystems, with an unexpected level of genetic diversity. One case of particular interest involves the distribution along hot spring thermal gradients of genetically distinct bacterial strains that differ in their preferred temperatures for reproduction and photosynthesis. In such systems, a single variable, temperature, defines the relevant environmental variation. In spite of this, each region along the thermal gradient exhibits multiple strains of photosynthetic bacteria adapted to several distinct thermal optima, rather than the expected single thermal strain adapted to the local environmental temperature. Here we analyze microbiology data from several ecological studies to show that the thermal distribution field data exhibit several universal features independent of location and specific bacterial strain. These include the distribution of optimal temperatures of different thermal strains and the functional dependence of the net population density on temperature. Further, we present a simple population dynamics model of these systems that is highly constrained by biophysical data and by physical features of the environment. This model can explain in detail the observed diversity of different strains of the photosynthetic bacteria. It also reproduces the observed thermal population distributions, as well as certain features of population dynamics observed in laboratory studies of the same organisms

Matching microscopic and macroscopic responses in glasses

We first reproduce on the Janus and Janus II computers a milestone experiment that measures the spin-glass coherence length through the lowering of free-energy barriers induced by the Zeeman effect. Secondly we determine the scaling behavior that allows a quantitative analysis of a new experiment reported in the companion Letter [S. Guchhait and R. Orbach, Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 157203 (2017)]. The value of the coherence length estimated through the analysis of microscopic correlation functions turns out to be quantitatively consistent with its measurement through macroscopic response functions. Further, non-linear susceptibilities, recently measured in glass-forming liquids, scale as powers of the same microscopic length.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure