Development of Alcohol and Drug Use in Youth With Manic Symptoms

This analysis examined alcohol and drug use over a six-year follow-up of children in the Longitudinal Assessment of Manic Symptoms (LAMS) study

Identification and validation of genetic variants predictive of gait in standardbred horses

Several horse breeds have been specifically selected for the ability to exhibit alternative patterns of locomotion, or gaits. A premature stop codon in the gene DMRT3 is permissive for “gaitedness” across breeds. However, this mutation is nearly fixed in both American Standardbred trotters and pacers, which perform a diagonal and lateral gait, respectively, during harness racing. This suggests that modifying alleles must influence the preferred gait at racing speeds in these populations. A genome-wide association analysis for the ability to pace was performed in 542 Standardbred horses (n = 176 pacers, n = 366 trotters) with genotype data imputed to ~74,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Nineteen SNPs on nine chromosomes (ECA1, 2, 6, 9, 17, 19, 23, 25, 31) reached genome-wide significance (p < 1.44 x 10−6). Variant discovery in regions of interest was carried out via whole-genome sequencing. A set of 303 variants from 22 chromosomes with putative modifying effects on gait was genotyped in 659 Standardbreds (n = 231 pacers, n = 428 trotters) using a high-throughput assay. Random forest classification analysis resulted in an out-of-box error rate of 0.61%. A conditional inference tree algorithm containing seven SNPs predicted status as a pacer or trotter with 99.1% accuracy and subsequently performed with 99.4% accuracy in an independently sampled population of 166 Standardbreds (n = 83 pacers, n = 83 trotters). This highly accurate algorithm could be used by owners/trainers to identify Standardbred horses with the potential to race as pacers or as trotters, according to the genotype identified, prior to initiating training and would enable fine-tuning of breeding programs with designed matings. Additional work is needed to determine both the algorithm’s utility in other gaited breeds and whether any of the predictive SNPs play a physiologically functional role in the tendency to pace or tag true functional alleles

Factors Influencing Mental Health Service Utilization by Children with Serious Emotional and Behavioral Disturbance: Results from the LAMS Study

The official published article is available online at http://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.62.6.650.OBJECTIVE: To describe service utilization of a cohort of children with emotional and behavioral disorders who visited outpatient mental health clinics in four Midwest cities. METHOD: Data come from the Longitudinal Assessment of Manic Symptoms (LAMS) Study. 707 youth (ages 6–12 years) and their parents completed diagnostic assessments, demographic information and an assessment of mental health service utilization. Analyses examined the relationship of demographics, diagnoses, impairment, and comorbidity to the type and level of services utilized. RESULTS: Service utilization is multimodal with half of the youth receiving both outpatient and school services during their lifetime. Non-need factors including age, sex, race, and insurance, were related to types of services used. Youth diagnosed with a bipolar spectrum disorder had higher utilization of inpatient services and two or more services at one time compared to youth diagnosed with depressive or disruptive disorders. More than half of youth diagnosed with bipolar or depressive disorders had received both medication and therapy during their lifetime whereas for youth diagnosed with a disruptive disorder therapy only was more common. Impairment and comorbidity were not related to service utilization. CONCLUSIONS: Use of mental health services for children begins at a very young age and occurs in multiple service sectors. Type of service use is related to insurance and race/ethnicity, underscoring the need for research on treatment disparities. Contrary to findings from results based on administrative data, medication alone was infrequent. However, the reasonably low use of combination therapy suggests that clinicians and families need to be educated on the effectiveness of multimodal treatment

Framework Report: The AIDS Accountability Workplace Scorecard, September 2011

The aim of the AIDS Accountability Workplace Scorecard is to improve HIV and AIDS workplace programmes in the countries and sectors most affected by the disease, and improve the health of employees, their families and communities. Through this initiative we will: / 1. Provide tools for HIV and AIDS workplace programme monitoring and evaluation AAI has developed scorecard tools for small, medium and large workplaces, which can be used to assess a global, regional or national HIV and AIDS programme or interventions at a specific workplace site. The scorecards can serve as both internal monitoring and evaluation tools and as assessments to present to stakeholders within and outside the organization. / 2. Publish annual Rankings of HIV and AIDS Workplace Programmes Scorecard users who wish to receive a ranking analysis and recommendations for how to improve their programmes can submit their scorecards to AAI. AAI ‘s ranking analysis will allow users to compare their performance with others and over time also measure their own progress. Respondents will be encouraged to publish their ranking in AAI’s yearly Ranking Reports. / 3. Share good practice The knowledge and good practices generated through the published rankings will be used to stimulate improved HIV and AIDS Workplace Programmes worldwide. Large networks of companies, trade union confederations, and national and international organizations can use the scorecard as a common framework for monitoring and evaluation of workplace programmes

Epidemiology of Exertional Rhabdomyolysis Susceptibility in Standardbred Horses Reveals Associated Risk Factors and Underlying Enhanced Performance

BACKGROUND: Exertional rhabdomyolysis syndrome is recognised in many athletic horse breeds and in recent years specific forms of the syndrome have been identified. However, although Standardbred horses are used worldwide for racing, there is a paucity of information about the epidemiological and performance-related aspects of the syndrome in this breed. The objectives of this study therefore were to determine the incidence, risk factors and performance effects of exertional rhabdomyolysis syndrome in Standardbred trotters and to compare the epidemiology and genetics of the syndrome with that in other breeds. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: A questionnaire-based case-control study (with analysis of online race records) was conducted following identification of horses that were determined susceptible to exertional rhabdomyolysis (based on serum biochemistry) from a total of 683 horses in 22 yards. Thirty six exertional rhabdomyolysis-susceptible horses were subsequently genotyped for the skeletal muscle glycogen synthase (GYS1) mutation responsible for type 1 polysaccharide storage myopathy. A total of 44 susceptible horses was reported, resulting in an annual incidence of 6.4 (95% CI 4.6-8.2%) per 100 horses. Female horses were at significantly greater risk than males (odds ratio 7.1; 95% CI 2.1-23.4; p = 0.001) and nervous horses were at a greater risk than horses with calm or average temperaments (odds ratio 7.9; 95% CI 2.3-27.0; p = 0.001). Rhabdomyolysis-susceptible cases performed better from standstill starts (p = 0.04) than controls and had a higher percentage of wins (p = 0.006). All exertional rhabdomyolysis-susceptible horses tested were negative for the R309H GYS1 mutation. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Exertional rhabdomyolysis syndrome in Standardbred horses has a similar incidence and risk factors to the syndrome in Thoroughbred horses. If the disorder has a genetic basis in Standardbreds, improved performance in susceptible animals may be responsible for maintenance of the disorder in the population

Degradation of Spacesuit Fabrics in Low Earth Orbit

Six samples of pristine and dust-abraded outer layer spacesuit fabrics were included in the Materials International Space Station Experiment-7, in which they were exposed to the wake-side low Earth orbit environment on the International Space Station (ISS) for 18 months in order to determine whether abrasion by lunar dust increases radiation degradation. The fabric samples were characterized using optical microscopy, optical spectroscopy, field emission scanning electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy, and tensile testing before and after exposure on the ISS. Comparison of pre- and post-flight characterizations showed that the environment darkened and reddened all six fabrics, increasing their integrated solar absorptance by 7 to 38 percent. There was a decrease in the ultimate tensile strength and elongation to failure of lunar dust abraded Apollo spacesuit fibers by a factor of four and an increase in the elastic modulus by a factor of two

Targeted use of growth mixture modeling: a learning perspective: Targeted use of growth mixture modeling: a learning perspective

From the statistical learning perspective, this paper shows a new direction for the use of growth mixture modeling (GMM), a method of identifying latent subpopulations that manifest heterogeneous outcome trajectories. In the proposed approach, we utilize the benefits of the conventional use of GMM for the purpose of generating potential candidate models based on empirical model fitting, which can be viewed as unsupervised learning. We then evaluate candidate GMM models on the basis of a direct measure of success; how well the trajectory types are predicted by clinically and demographically relevant baseline features, which can be viewed as supervised learning. We examine the proposed approach focusing on a particular utility of latent trajectory classes, as outcomes that can be used as valid prediction targets in clinical prognostic models. Our approach is illustrated using data from the Longitudinal Assessment of Manic Symptoms (LAMS) study

Wide-Scale Analysis of Human Functional Transcription Factor Binding Reveals a Strong Bias towards the Transcription Start Site

We introduce a novel method to screen the promoters of a set of genes with shared biological function, against a precompiled library of motifs, and find those motifs which are statistically over-represented in the gene set. The gene sets were obtained from the functional Gene Ontology (GO) classification; for each set and motif we optimized the sequence similarity score threshold, independently for every location window (measured with respect to the TSS), taking into account the location dependent nucleotide heterogeneity along the promoters of the target genes. We performed a high throughput analysis, searching the promoters (from 200bp downstream to 1000bp upstream the TSS), of more than 8000 human and 23,000 mouse genes, for 134 functional Gene Ontology classes and for 412 known DNA motifs. When combined with binding site and location conservation between human and mouse, the method identifies with high probability functional binding sites that regulate groups of biologically related genes. We found many location-sensitive functional binding events and showed that they clustered close to the TSS. Our method and findings were put to several experimental tests. By allowing a "flexible" threshold and combining our functional class and location specific search method with conservation between human and mouse, we are able to identify reliably functional TF binding sites. This is an essential step towards constructing regulatory networks and elucidating the design principles that govern transcriptional regulation of expression. The promoter region proximal to the TSS appears to be of central importance for regulation of transcription in human and mouse, just as it is in bacteria and yeast.Comment: 31 pages, including Supplementary Information and figure