Motor development of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Objective: To compare both global and specific domains of motor development of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) with that of typically developing children. Methods: Two hundred children (50 children with clinical diagnoses of ADHD, according to the DSM-IV-TR and 150 typically developing controls), aged 5 to 10 years, participated in this crosssectional study. The Motor Development Scale was used to assess fine and global motricity, balance, body schema, and spatial and temporal organization. Results: Between-group testing revealed statistically significant differences between the ADHD and control groups for all domains. The results also revealed a deficit of nearly two years in the motor development of children with ADHD compared with the normative sample. Conclusion: The current study shows that ADHD is associated with a delay in motor development when compared to typically developing children. The results also suggested difficulties in certain motor areas for those with ADHD. These results may point to plausible mechanisms underlying the relationship between ADHD and motor difficulties

Blood Magnesium, and the Interaction with Calcium, on the Risk of High-Grade Prostate Cancer

Ionized calcium (Ca) and magnesium (Mg) compete as essential messengers to regulate cell proliferation and inflammation. We hypothesized that inadequate Mg levels, perhaps relative to Ca levels (e.g. a high Ca/Mg ratio) are associated with greater prostate cancer risk.In this biomarker sub-study of the Nashville Men's Health Study (NMHS), we included 494 NMHS participants, consisting of 98 high-grade (Gleason≥7) and 100 low-grade cancer cases, 133 prostate intraepithelial neoplasia (PIN) cases, and 163 controls without cancer or PIN at biopsy. Linear and logistic regression were used to determine associations between blood Ca, Mg, and the Ca/Mg ratio across controls and case groups while adjusting for potential confounding factors.Serum Mg levels were significantly lower, while the Ca/Mg ratio was significantly higher, among high-grade cases vs. controls (p = 0.04, p = 0.01, respectively). Elevated Mg was significantly associated with a lower risk of high-grade prostate cancer (OR = 0.26 (0.09, 0.85)). An elevated Ca/Mg ratio was also associated with an increased risk of high-grade prostate cancer (OR = 2.81 (1.24, 6.36) adjusted for serum Ca and Mg). In contrast, blood Ca levels were not significantly associated with prostate cancer or PIN.Mg, Ca, or Ca/Mg levels were not associated with low-grade cancer, PIN, PSA levels, prostate volume, or BPH treatment.Low blood Mg levels and a high Ca/Mg ratio were significantly associated with high-grade prostate cancer. These findings suggest Mg affects prostate cancer risk perhaps through interacting with Ca

Folate Decorated Dual Drug Loaded Nanoparticle: Role of Curcumin in Enhancing Therapeutic Potential of Nutlin-3a by Reversing Multidrug Resistance

Retinoblastoma is the most common intraocular tumor in children. Malfunctioning of many signaling pathways regulating cell survival or apoptosis, make the disease more vulnerable. Notably, resistance to chemotherapy mediated by MRP-1, lung-resistance protein (LRP) is the most challenging aspect to treat this disease. Presently, much attention has been given to the recently developed anticancer drug nutlin-3a because of its non-genotoxic nature and potency to activate tumor suppressor protein p53. However, being a substrate of multidrug resistance protein MRP1 and Pgp its application has become limited. Currently, research has step towards reversing Multi drug resistance (MDR) by using curcumin, however its clinical relevance is restricted by plasma instability and poor bioavailability. In the present investigation we tried to encapsulate nutlin-3a and curcumin in PLGA nanoparticle (NPs) surface functionalized with folate to enhance therapeutic potential of nutlin-3a by modulating MDR. We document that curcumin can inhibit the expression of MRP-1 and LRP gene/protein in a concentration dependent manner in Y79 cells. In vitro cellular cytotoxicity, cell cycle analysis and apoptosis studies were done to compare the effectiveness of native drugs (single or combined) and single or dual drug loaded nanoparticles (unconjugated/folate conjugated). The result demonstrated an augmented therapeutic efficacy of targeted dual drug loaded NPs (Fol-Nut-Cur-NPs) over other formulation. Enhanced expression or down regulation of proapoptotic/antiapoptotic proteins respectively and down-regulation of bcl2 and NFκB gene/protein by Fol-Nut-Cur-NPs substantiate the above findings. This is the first investigation exploring the role of curcumin as MDR modulator to enhance the therapeutic potentiality of nutlin-3a, which may opens new direction for targeting cancer with multidrug resistance phenotype

Supply chain sustainability performance measurement of small and medium sized enterprises using structural equation modeling

Sustainability of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) is significant as SMEs contribute to GDP substantially in every economy. This research develops an innovative sustainable supply chain performance measurement model for SMEs. Prior researches predominantly use balanced score card (BSC) approach that presume causal relationship of criteria and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), which derive efficiency of units from a few input and output criteria. While DEA is effective for policymakers, BSC is more suitable for individual SME. The proposed method that uses structural equation modeling (SEM) approach to derive the relationship of criteria and criteria weights formulates regression-type models for a specific region as well as for specific SME. The SEM-based supply chain sustainability performance measurement model is beneficial to policymakers as they can determine means for improvement at a regional level. The proposed method could also facilitate managers/owners of individual SMEs with measures for improving their supply chain sustainability performance. The method has been applied to three varied geographical locations in the UK, France and India in order to demonstrate its effectiveness

From Cleanroom to Desktop: Emerging Micro-Nanofabrication Technology for Biomedical Applications

This review is motivated by the growing demand for low-cost, easy-to-use, compact-size yet powerful micro-nanofabrication technology to address emerging challenges of fundamental biology and translational medicine in regular laboratory settings. Recent advancements in the field benefit considerably from rapidly expanding material selections, ranging from inorganics to organics and from nanoparticles to self-assembled molecules. Meanwhile a great number of novel methodologies, employing off-the-shelf consumer electronics, intriguing interfacial phenomena, bottom-up self-assembly principles, etc., have been implemented to transit micro-nanofabrication from a cleanroom environment to a desktop setup. Furthermore, the latest application of micro-nanofabrication to emerging biomedical research will be presented in detail, which includes point-of-care diagnostics, on-chip cell culture as well as bio-manipulation. While significant progresses have been made in the rapidly growing field, both apparent and unrevealed roadblocks will need to be addressed in the future. We conclude this review by offering our perspectives on the current technical challenges and future research opportunities

Necdin, a p53-Target Gene, Is an Inhibitor of p53-Mediated Growth Arrest

In vitro, cellular immortalization and transformation define a model for multistep carcinogenesis and current ongoing challenges include the identification of specific molecular events associated with steps along this oncogenic pathway. Here, using NIH3T3 cells, we identified transcriptionally related events associated with the expression of Polyomavirus Large-T antigen (PyLT), a potent viral oncogene. We propose that a subset of these alterations in gene expression may be related to the early events that contribute to carcinogenesis. The proposed tumor suppressor Necdin, known to be regulated by p53, was within a group of genes that was consistently upregulated in the presence of PyLT. While Necdin is induced following p53 activation with different genotoxic stresses, Necdin induction by PyLT did not involve p53 activation or the Rb-binding site of PyLT. Necdin depletion by shRNA conferred a proliferative advantage to NIH3T3 and PyLT-expressing NIH3T3 (NIHLT) cells. In contrast, our results demonstrate that although overexpression of Necdin induced a growth arrest in NIH3T3 and NIHLT cells, a growing population rapidly emerged from these arrested cells. This population no longer showed significant proliferation defects despite high Necdin expression. Moreover, we established that Necdin is a negative regulator of p53-mediated growth arrest induced by nutlin-3, suggesting that Necdin upregulation could contribute to the bypass of a p53-response in p53 wild type tumors. To support this, we characterized Necdin expression in low malignant potential ovarian cancer (LMP) where p53 mutations rarely occur. Elevated levels of Necdin expression were observed in LMP when compared to aggressive serous ovarian cancers. We propose that in some contexts, the constitutive expression of Necdin could contribute to cancer promotion by delaying appropriate p53 responses and potentially promote genomic instability

Large-scale unit commitment under uncertainty: an updated literature survey

The Unit Commitment problem in energy management aims at finding the optimal production schedule of a set of generation units, while meeting various system-wide constraints. It has always been a large-scale, non-convex, difficult problem, especially in view of the fact that, due to operational requirements, it has to be solved in an unreasonably small time for its size. Recently, growing renewable energy shares have strongly increased the level of uncertainty in the system, making the (ideal) Unit Commitment model a large-scale, non-convex and uncertain (stochastic, robust, chance-constrained) program. We provide a survey of the literature on methods for the Uncertain Unit Commitment problem, in all its variants. We start with a review of the main contributions on solution methods for the deterministic versions of the problem, focussing on those based on mathematical programming techniques that are more relevant for the uncertain versions of the problem. We then present and categorize the approaches to the latter, while providing entry points to the relevant literature on optimization under uncertainty. This is an updated version of the paper "Large-scale Unit Commitment under uncertainty: a literature survey" that appeared in 4OR 13(2), 115--171 (2015); this version has over 170 more citations, most of which appeared in the last three years, proving how fast the literature on uncertain Unit Commitment evolves, and therefore the interest in this subject

A922 Sequential measurement of 1 hour creatinine clearance (1-CRCL) in critically ill patients at risk of acute kidney injury (AKI)

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