Gambling Problems among Community Cocaine Users

Cocaine use is highly prevalent and a major public health problem. While some studies have reported frequent comorbidity problems among cocaine users, few studies have included evaluation of gambling problems. This study aimed to estimate the prevalence of gambling problems and compare those who were at-risk gamblers with non-problem gamblers in terms of mental health problems, substance use problems, and some risk factors (i.e. family antecedents, erroneous perceptions and coping strategies) among individuals who smoke or inject cocaine. METHOD: A total of 424 smoked or injected cocaine users recruited through community-based programs in Montreal, Quebec completed the questionnaire, including the Canadian Pathological Gambling Index, the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI), the CAGE, and the Severity Dependence Scale (SDS). RESULTS: Of the sample, 18.4 % were considered at-risk gamblers, of whom 7.8 % had problems gambling and 10.6 % were moderate-risk gamblers. The at-risk group was more likely to have experienced a recent phobic disorder and alcohol problems than the non-problem group. A multivariate analysis showed that, compared to those who were non-problem gamblers, the at-risk ones were more likely to have lost a large sum of money when they first started gambling, believed that their luck would turn, and gambled in reaction to painful life events. These results indicate the need to include routines for screening to identify gambling problem among cocaine user

Susceptibility of Pancreatic Beta Cells to Fatty Acids Is Regulated by LXR/PPARα-Dependent Stearoyl-Coenzyme A Desaturase

Chronically elevated levels of fatty acids-FA can cause beta cell death in vitro. Beta cells vary in their individual susceptibility to FA-toxicity. Rat beta cells were previously shown to better resist FA-toxicity in conditions that increased triglyceride formation or mitochondrial and peroxisomal FA-oxidation, possibly reducing cytoplasmic levels of toxic FA-moieties. We now show that stearoyl-CoA desaturase-SCD is involved in this cytoprotective mechanism through its ability to transfer saturated FA into monounsaturated FA that are incorporated in lipids. In purified beta cells, SCD expression was induced by LXR- and PPARα-agonists, which were found to protect rat, mouse and human beta cells against palmitate toxicity. When their SCD was inhibited or silenced, the agonist-induced protection was also suppressed. A correlation between beta cell-SCD expression and susceptibility to palmitate was also found in beta cell preparations isolated from different rodent models. In mice with LXR-deletion (LXRβ-/- and LXRαβ-/-), beta cells presented a reduced SCD-expression as well as an increased susceptibility to palmitate-toxicity, which could not be counteracted by LXR or PPARα agonists. In Zucker fatty rats and in rats treated with the LXR-agonist TO1317, beta cells show an increased SCD-expression and lower palmitate-toxicity. In the normal rat beta cell population, the subpopulation with lower metabolic responsiveness to glucose exhibits a lower SCD1 expression and a higher susceptibility to palmitate toxicity. These data demonstrate that the beta cell susceptibility to saturated fatty acids can be reduced by stearoyl-coA desaturase, which upon stimulation by LXR and PPARα agonists favors their desaturation and subsequent incorporation in neutral lipids

Preservation of organic matter in sediments promoted by iron

The biogeochemical cycles of iron and organic carbon are strongly interlinked. In oceanic waters, organic ligands have been shown to control the concentration of dissolved iron. In soils, solid iron phases shelter and preserve organic carbon, but the role of iron in the preservation of organic matter in sediments has not been clearly established. Here we use an iron reduction method previously applied to soils to determine the amount of organic carbon associated with reactive iron phases in sediments of various mineralogies collected from a wide range of depositional environments. Our findings suggest that 21.5 ± 8.6 per cent of the organic carbon in sediments is directly bound to reactive iron phases. We further estimate that a global mass of (19–45) × 1015 grams of organic carbon is preserved in surface marine sediments as a result of its association with iron. We propose that these associations between organic carbon and iron, which are formed primarily through co-precipitation and/or direct chelation, promote the preservation of organic carbon in sediments. Because reactive iron phases are metastable over geological timescales, we suggest that they serve as an efficient ‘rusty sink’ for organic carbon, acting as a key factor in the long-term storage of organic carbon and thus contributing to the global cycles of carbon, oxygen and sulphur

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Retrospective evaluation of whole exome and genome mutation calls in 746 cancer samples

Funder: NCI U24CA211006Abstract: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) curated consensus somatic mutation calls using whole exome sequencing (WES) and whole genome sequencing (WGS), respectively. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, which aggregated whole genome sequencing data from 2,658 cancers across 38 tumour types, we compare WES and WGS side-by-side from 746 TCGA samples, finding that ~80% of mutations overlap in covered exonic regions. We estimate that low variant allele fraction (VAF < 15%) and clonal heterogeneity contribute up to 68% of private WGS mutations and 71% of private WES mutations. We observe that ~30% of private WGS mutations trace to mutations identified by a single variant caller in WES consensus efforts. WGS captures both ~50% more variation in exonic regions and un-observed mutations in loci with variable GC-content. Together, our analysis highlights technological divergences between two reproducible somatic variant detection efforts

ETUDE DES PROPRIETES BIOLOGIQUES DE PNEUMOCYSTIS CARINII SP. F. HOMINIS IN VITRO

LYON1-BU Santé (693882101) / SudocPARIS-BIUM (751062103) / SudocPARIS-BIUP (751062107) / SudocSudocFranceF

La stérilisation hospitalière en marche vers la sous-traitance (mise en place de la prestation à la Fondation hôpital Saint Joseph)

PARIS-BIUP (751062107) / SudocSudocFranceF