Processing of meats and cardiovascular risk: time to focus on preservatives

Dietary guidelines emphasize selecting lean (low-fat) meats to reduce saturated fat and cholesterol, but growing evidence suggests that health effects may relate to other ingredients, such as sodium, heme iron, or L-carnitine. Understanding how meats influence health, and on which nutrients this relationship depends, is essential to advise consumer choices, set guidelines, and inform food reformulations. A recent study published in BMC Medicine involving 448,568 participants in 10 European countries, provides important evidence in this regard. After multivariate adjustment, intake of unprocessed red meat was not significantly associated with total or cause-specific mortality; conversely, intake of processed meat was associated with a 30% higher rate of cardiovascular disease (CVD) (per 50 g/day, relative risk 1.30, 95% confidence interval 1.17 to 1.45) and also higher cancer mortality. These findings are consistent with our previous meta-analysis, based on smaller studies, showing strong associations of processed meats, but not unprocessed meats, with CVD. Preservatives are the notable difference; the calculated blood-pressure effects of sodium differences (around 400% higher in processed meats) explain most of the observed higher risk. Although unprocessed red meats seem to be relatively neutral for CVD, healthier choices are available, including fish, nuts, legumes, fruits, and vegetables. Public-health guidance should prioritize avoidance of processed meats, including the low-fat deli meats currently marketed as healthy choices, and the food industry should substantially reduce sodium and other preservatives in processed meats. See related research article here http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/63

Universal pensions in Mexico City : changing dynamics of citizenship and state formation in a global city

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (p. 110-116).The main topic of this study is the enactment of a non-contributory and non-means-tested Universal Pension (Pension Alimentaria Ciudadana para Adultos Mayores) program in Mexico City directed at city residents 70 years of age or older. A state-centered framework for social policy analysis is used to understand why and how was this policy implemented at the local level considering that it pertains a policy area that is normally restricted to national states. In order to show that there is a distinct local state in Mexico City, from the national state, the study explores the impulse international economic changes gave to the decentralization and democratization processes that took place in Mexico in the last few decades. As a consequence of these processes, an additional process of local state formation has taken place in the city, itself having larger consequences at the national level. To show how this process is taking place a series of political conflicts among city institutions and also national institutions in the 2000 - 2003 period are narrated. This process of local state formation prominently includes the change in the relationship between the state and society, from a relationship structured around corporatist institutions to a broader notion of citizenship through the introduction of a non-contributory universal pension.by Andrés Lajous-Loaeza.M.C.P

El Partido Nacional Revolucionario y la campaña vasconcelista

El artículo describe las circunstancias en que se desarrolló la elección presidencial de 1929 y las características de los dos candidatos que se enfrentaron en ella. Vasconcelos, quien poseía una personalidad muy atractiva, careció de organización política que lo sustentara; en cambio Pascual Ortiz Rubio contó con el apoyo de la estructura política del PNR, que lo llevó a ganar las elecciones a pesar de carecer de popularidad

Simulation-based parameter optimization for fetal brain MRI super-resolution reconstruction

Tuning the regularization hyperparameter $\alpha$ in inverse problems has been a longstanding problem. This is particularly true in the case of fetal brain magnetic resonance imaging, where an isotropic high-resolution volume is reconstructed from motion-corrupted low-resolution series of two-dimensional thick slices. Indeed, the lack of ground truth images makes challenging the adaptation of $\alpha$ to a given setting of interest in a quantitative manner. In this work, we propose a simulation-based approach to tune $\alpha$ for a given acquisition setting. We focus on the influence of the magnetic field strength and availability of input low-resolution images on the ill-posedness of the problem. Our results show that the optimal $\alpha$, chosen as the one maximizing the similarity with the simulated reference image, significantly improves the super-resolution reconstruction accuracy compared to the generally adopted default regularization values, independently of the selected pipeline. Qualitative validation on clinical data confirms the importance of tuning this parameter to the targeted clinical image setting.Comment: 11 pages. This work has been submitted to MICCAI 202

Biocolonialismo

La innovación tecnológica no siempre crea de riqueza, también puede ser un medio para la apropiación de riqueza ajena, si llega acompañada del régimen jurídico indicado. El complejo régimen de propiedad intelectual hoy vigente –resultado de la intersección entre el derecho interno de países clave, como Estados Unidos, y los acuerdos internacionales sobre los derechos de propiedad intelectual (en específico, el Acuerdo de la Organización Mundial del Comercio sobre los Aspectos de los Derechos de Propiedad Intelectual relacionados con el Comercio, en adelante AADPIC)–, produce un marco regulatorio en el que las economías desarrolladas gozan de la posibilidad de apropiarse legalmente de los recursos naturales de países biodiversos y culturalmente diversos, pero tecnológicamente pobres. El régimen jurídico de la propiedad intelectual regula la tecnología partiendo de prejuicios profundamente arraigados: el conocimiento tradicional y la innovación low-tech (como el desarrollo de nuevas variedades de comida o la identificación de nuevas fuentes de medicamento a través de la medicina tradicional o de crianza selectiva) son invisibilizados, mientras que las aplicaciones high-tech que no necesariamente crean o innovan son sobrevaloradas. Aplicado a la biodiversidad y biotecnología, especialmente al área de la genética, este régimen entorpece la innovación –o, al menos, le hace la vida más difícil a algunos de los “innovadores” más importantes. Esto se contrapone con la justificación tradicional de la existencia los derechos de propiedad intelectual: que fomentan la innovación

Use of cumulative incidence of novel influenza A/H1N1 in foreign travelers to estimate lower bounds on cumulative incidence in Mexico

Background: An accurate estimate of the total number of cases and severity of illness of an emerging infectious disease is required both to define the burden of the epidemic and to determine the severity of disease. When a novel pathogen first appears, affected individuals with severe symptoms are more likely to be diagnosed. Accordingly, the total number of cases will be underestimated and disease severity overestimated. This problem is manifest in the current epidemic of novel influenza A/H1N1. Methods and Results: We used a simple approach to leverage measures of incident influenza A/H1N1 among a relatively small and well observed group of US, UK, Spanish and Canadian travelers who had visited Mexico to estimate the incidence among a much larger and less well surveyed population of Mexican residents. We estimate that a minimum of 113,000 to 375,000 cases of novel influenza A/H1N1 have occurred in Mexicans during the month of April, 2009. Such an estimate serves as a lower bound because it does not account for underreporting of cases in travelers or for nonrandom mixing between Mexican residents and visitors, which together could increase the estimates by more than an order of magnitude. Conclusions: We find that the number of cases in Mexican residents may exceed the number of confirmed cases by two to three orders of magnitude. While the extent of disease spread is greater than previously appreciated, our estimate suggests that severe disease is uncommon since the total number of cases is likely to be much larger than those of confirmed cases

Effet maternel du gène sans cornes p sur le poids des chevrettes d'élevage

International audienc

Collider Bias Is Only a Partial Explanation for the Obesity Paradox

Background: “Obesity paradox” refers to an association between obesity and reduced mortality (contrary to an expected increased mortality). A common explanation is collider stratification bias: unmeasured confounding induced by selection bias. Here, we test this supposition through a realistic generative model. Methods: We quantify the collider stratification bias in a selected population using counterfactual causal analysis. We illustrate the bias for a range of scenarios, describing associations between exposure (obesity), outcome (mortality), mediator (in this example, diabetes) and an unmeasured confounder. Results: Collider stratification leads to biased estimation of the causal effect of exposure on outcome. However, the bias is small relative to the causal relationships between the variables. Conclusions: Collider bias can be a partial explanation of the obesity paradox, but unlikely to be the main explanation for a reverse direction of an association to a true causal relationship. Alternative explanations of the obesity paradox should be explored. See Video Abstract at http://links.lww.com/EDE/B51

Paramètres génétiques de la croissance des chevrettes saanen en station de testage

International audienc