Dietary fructose in relation to blood pressure and serum uric acid in adolescent boys and girls

Evidence that fructose intake may modify blood pressure is generally limited to adult populations. This study examined cross-sectional associations between dietary intake of fructose, serum uric acid and blood pressure in 814 adolescents aged 13–15 years participating in the Western Australian Pregnancy Cohort (Raine) Study. Energy-adjusted fructose intake was derived from 3-day food records, serum uric acid concentration was assessed using fasting blood and resting blood pressure was determined using repeated oscillometric readings. In multivariate linear regression models, we did not see a significant association between fructose and blood pressure in boys or girls. In boys, fructose intake was independently associated with serum uric acid (P<0.01), and serum uric acid was independently associated with systolic blood pressure (P<0.01) and mean arterial pressure (P<0.001). Although there are independent associations, there is no direct relationship between fructose intake and blood pressure. Our data suggest that gender may influence these relationships in adolescence, with significant associations observed more frequently in boys than girls

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

Effects of various polyolefin copolymers on the interfacial interaction, microstructure and physical properties of cyclic olefin copolymer(COC)/graphite composites

In this study, effects of various types of functional polyolefin copolymers (FPOCs), poly(isobutylene-alt-maleic anhydride), poly(maleic anhydride-alt-1-octadecene) and poly(ethylene-graft-maleic anhydride), on the microstructure formation, interfacial interaction and physical properties of cyclic olefin copolymer (COC)/graphite composites were investigated. The COC/graphite composites were prepared in a lab. scale twin screw extruder. Microstructural features of samples were studied in a field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM). Viscoelastic properties of samples, obtained from the rheology tests in melt state and the dynamic mechanical analysis in solid state were used to quantify interfacial interactions between the COC and graphite depending on the types of FPOC. The average aspect ratio (A(f)) values of graphite flakes in the COC phase were determined about 40-65 by SEM observation and image analysis study on the samples prepared with different types of FPOC. Based on the gas permeability measurements, tortuous diffusion model suggested that the A(f) values of graphite flakes varied between 40 and 80 depending on the amount of graphite. It was shown that the poly(isobutylene-alt-maleic anhydride) copolymer provided relatively higher interfacial interaction between the COC and graphite flakes than the other FPOCs