Ethnic discordance in serum anti-Müllerian hormone in healthy women: a population study from China and Europe

Research question: Chinese women are known to have an earlier age of natural menopause than their European counterparts, but whether they also have a lower functional ovarian reserve is unknown. This study was designed to assess whether there are ethnic differences in anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) concentrations in women of reproductive age. Design: Women in China and Europe with regular menstrual cycles, not on hormonal contraception and with no medical history of note, were recruited to provide a day 2–5 early follicular phase sample. AMH concentration was determined using the Roche Elecsys assay. Decline in AMH was modelled with linear, quadratic and quadratic with interaction on age equations to assess the impact of ethnicity. Results: A total of 887 European and 461 Chinese women participated in the study. Despite the Chinese population being slightly younger (34.1 ± 8.4 years) than their European counterparts (34.8±8.9 years), their median AMH was lower, at 1.87 ng/ml (interquartile range [IQR] 0.28–3.64) compared with 2.11 ng/ml (IQR 0.73–3.96), with evidence of increasing discordance from age 25 years. In all regression models of the age-related decline in AMH, there was evidence of a difference between Chinese and European women. Although AMH was 28.1% (95% confidence interval [CI] 18.2–36.7%) lower in the Chinese population at age 30, this decline increased to 79.4% (95% CI 75.4– 82.9%) at age 45. Conclusions: There were independent effects of age and ethnicity on serum AMH concentrations, with Chinese women having a substantially lower AMH in adult life than their European counterparts from age 25 onwards

High-throughput gene discovery in the rat

The rat is an important animal model for human diseases and is widely used in physiology. In this article we present a new strategy for gene discovery based on the production of ESTs from serially subtracted and normalized cDNA libraries, and we describe its application for the development of a comprehensive nonredundant collection of rat ESTs. Our new strategy appears to yield substantially more EST clusters per ESTs sequenced than do previous approaches that did not use serial subtraction. However, multiple rounds of library subtraction resulted in high frequencies of otherwise rare internally primed cDNAs, defining the limits of this powerful approach. To date, we have generated >200,000 3′ ESTs from >100 cDNA libraries representing a wide range of tissues and developmental stages of the laboratory rat. Most importantly, we have contributed to ∼50,000 rat UniGene clusters. We have identified, arrayed, and derived 5′ ESTs from >30,000 unique rat cDNA clones. Complete information, including radiation hybrid mapping data, is also maintained locally at http://genome.uiowa.edu/clcg.html. All of the sequences described in this article have been submitted to the dbEST division of the NCBI

Content analysis of online personal advertisements : attributes desired and offered

The evolutionary perspective has often been used in the study of mate preferences. Guided by an evolutionary-based theory called Sexual Strategies Theory (Buss, 1994), the current research examined the effect of the type of relationship sought, represented by an intimate encounter, a date, and a relationship, on attributes desired and offered by online dating ad placers. Online personal advertisements (N = 120) from a Canadian dating web site were content analyzed for the following attributes: physical attractiveness, resources, commitment, social skills, social attitudes, and interests. Attributes desired and offered did not differ by gender but did differ by type of relationship. Ad placers desired more commitment, social skills, and social attitudes when seeking a relationship than an intimate encounter. These attributes, in addition to resources, were offered more when seeking a relationship than an intimate encounter. Contrary to the theory, physical attractiveness was not desired or offered more when seeking an intimate encounter and to date compared to a relationship. Gender moderated the relationship between type of relationship sought and resources offered but none of the other attributes. A shift away from gender differences in mate preferences is suggested. The limitations of the theory for explaining the results are discussed and alternative explanations are provided.Arts, Faculty ofSociology, Department ofGraduat

Safely delegating data mining tasks

Data mining is playing an important role in decision making for business activities and governmental administration. Since many organizations or their divisions do not possess the in-house expertise and infrastructure for data mining, it is beneficial to delegate data mining tasks to external service providers. However, the organizations or divisions may lose of private information during the delegating process. In this paper, we present a Bloom filter based solution to enable organizations or their divisions to delegate the tasks of mining association rules while protecting data privacy. Our approach can achieve high precision in data mining by only trading-off storage requirements, instead of by trading-off the level of privacy preserving.<br /

Hepatitis B and its effect on the life insurance industry

Hepatitis is an inflammation of the liver and Hepatitis B is the most serious type of the viral hepatitis because of the high incidence of severe complications, such as massive liver cell death and its strong association with liver cancer. Singapore, being situated in the Hepatitis B endemic area has a significant number of Hepatitis B carriers. And therefore Hepatitis B imposes a health problem to this country. The purpose of this report is to provide the readers with an insight into the Hepatitis B disease and, its prevalence in the world, particularly in Asia and Singapore. This includes a study of Singaporean's awareness towards the disease, and also on its implications to life insurance industry.BUSINES

Feasibility of neurally adjusted positive end-expiratory pressure in rabbits with early experimental lung injury

Abstract Background During conventional Neurally Adjusted Ventilatory Assist (NAVA), the electrical activity of the diaphragm (EAdi) is used for triggering and cycling-off inspiratory assist, with a fixed PEEP (so called “Triggered Neurally Adjusted Ventilatory Assist” or “tNAVA”). However, significant post-inspiratory activity of the diaphragm can occur, believed to play a role in maintaining end-expiratory lung volume. Adjusting pressure continuously, in proportion to both inspiratory and expiratory EAdi (Continuous NAVA, or cNAVA), would not only offer inspiratory assist for tidal breathing, but also may aid in delivering a “neurally adjusted PEEP”, and more specific breath-by-breath unloading. Methods Nine adult New Zealand white rabbits were ventilated during independent conditions of: resistive loading (RES1 or RES2), CO2 load (CO2) and acute lung injury (ALI), either via tracheotomy (INV) or non-invasively (NIV). There were a total of six conditions, applied in a non-randomized fashion: INV-RES1, INV-CO2, NIV-CO2, NIV-RES2, NIV-ALI, INV-ALI. For each condition, tNAVA was applied first (3 min), followed by 3 min of cNAVA. This comparison was repeated 3 times (repeated cross-over design). The NAVA level was always the same for both modes, but was newly titrated for each condition. PEEP was manually set to zero during tNAVA. During cNAVA, the assist during expiration was proportional to the EAdi. During all runs and conditions, ventilator-delivered pressure (Pvent), esophageal pressure (Pes), and diaphragm electrical activity (EAdi) were measured continuously. The tracings were analyzed breath-by-breath to obtain peak inspiratory and mean expiratory values. Results For the same peak Pvent, the distribution of inspiratory and expiratory pressure differed between tNAVA and cNAVA. For each condition, the mean expiratory Pvent was always higher (for all conditions 4.0 ± 1.1 vs. 1.1 ± 0.5 cmH2O, P < 0.01) in cNAVA than in tNAVA. Relative to tNAVA, mean inspiratory EAdi was reduced on average (for all conditions) by 19 % (range 14 %–25 %), p < 0.05. Mean expiratory EAdi was also lower during cNAVA (during INV-RES1, INV-CO2, INV-ALI, NIV-CO2 and NIV-ALI respectively, P < 0.05). The inspiratory Pes was reduced during cNAVA all 6 conditions (p < 0.05). Unlike tNAVA, during cNAVA the expiratory pressure was comparable with that predicted mathematically (mean difference of 0.2 ± 0.8 cmH2O). Conclusion Continuous NAVA was able to apply neurally adjusted PEEP, which led to a reduction in inspiratory effort compared to triggered NAVA