Breast feeding and weaning practices among Pakistani and Chinese communities in Newcastle upon Tyne

Objectives The objectives of this study were to determine the patterns of breast feeding and weaning among the Pakistani and Chinese communities in Newcastle upon Tyne. The study also assessed the needs and priorities of the mothers in these communities about support from health workers and other sources of advice on feeding. Design The study was carried out in two municipal wards of Newcastle upon Tyne, viz. Elswick and Fenham for the Pakistani community and the whole of Newcastle for the Chinese community. A stratified sampling method was used in which the sample was stratified according to their ethnic minority groups and a sample of 67 mothers from the Pakistani community was selected using a snowball sampling method. Twenty mothers from the Chinese community were selected using a simple random sampling method. The study was cross sectional using a structured questionnaire. Setting The setting was Newcastle upon Tyne in two wards in which a large proportion of the Pakistani community is concentrated. The whole of Newcastle upon Tyne was used as a sampling frame for the Chinese community which is dispersed throughout the city. Main outcome The rate and duration of breast feeding in the Pakistani and the Chinese communities, the main reasons for not breast feeding, the reasons for discontinuation of breast feeding, the mothers' knowledge and attitude towards breast feeding and weaning, the profiles of breast feeding/non breast feeding mothers and the profiles of mothers who wean early or late were determined. Results 47.8% of the Pakistani and 30% of the Chinese mothers breast feed their children at birth. 3% of Pakistani and 5% of the Chinese mothers breast feed exclusively. All the Pakistani mothers used commercial weaning preparations while 41% of the Chinese mothers used home made preparations. Conclusions There is still a need to promote breast feeding in both the Pakistani and Chinese communities so that the rate and duration of breast feeding would be similar to those in their countries of origin which are Pakistan, where the breast feeding rate was 90 % at birth, and the People's Republic of China, where it was 75 % in the rural and 49 % in the urban areas

Salient Objects in Clutter: Bringing Salient Object Detection to the Foreground

We provide a comprehensive evaluation of salient object detection (SOD) models. Our analysis identifies a serious design bias of existing SOD datasets which assumes that each image contains at least one clearly outstanding salient object in low clutter. The design bias has led to a saturated high performance for state-of-the-art SOD models when evaluated on existing datasets. The models, however, still perform far from being satisfactory when applied to real-world daily scenes. Based on our analyses, we first identify 7 crucial aspects that a comprehensive and balanced dataset should fulfill. Then, we propose a new high quality dataset and update the previous saliency benchmark. Specifically, our SOC (Salient Objects in Clutter) dataset, includes images with salient and non-salient objects from daily object categories. Beyond object category annotations, each salient image is accompanied by attributes that reflect common challenges in real-world scenes. Finally, we report attribute-based performance assessment on our dataset.Comment: ECCV 201

Metabolic Syndrome among Type-2 Diabetic Patients in Benghazi-Libya: A pilot study

ABSTRACTBackground: Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of three out of five conditions that are due to hyperinsulinemia: abdominal obesity, atherogenic dyslipidemia (high triglycerides and/or low HDL),elevated blood pressure, and elevated plasma glucose. The syndrome is highly prevalent in patients with type-2 diabetes mellitus and often precedes the onset of hyperglycemia. It has been shown thatmetabolic syndrome is an independent clinical indicator of macro- and microvascular complications in diabetics. Aim and objectives: the aim of this pilot study was to estimate the frequency andcharacteristics of metabolic syndrome among type-2 diabetic patients in Benghazi. Patients and methods: This cross-sectional study involved 99 randomly selected adult patients with type-2diabetes mellitus. The patients were interviewed and examined, and their lipid profiles were checked 9-12 hours after overnight fasting. Metabolic syndrome was defined according to the criteria of the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) Adult Treatment Panel III (ATP III) and of the International Diabetes Federation (IDF). Results: About 92% of the patients had the metabolicsyndrome according to ATP III criteria and 80.8% according to IDF criteria. Females were more affected, males with metabolic syndrome were significantly older, and females were significantly moreobese. No significant difference was observed between males and females regarding waistcircumference, HDL level and triglyceride level. The commonest and most important component ofmetabolic syndrome in the study group was low HDL. Conclusion: Metabolic syndrome is common among Libyans with type-2 diabetes mellitus, and it is significantly more common in females thanmales. The most significant predictor of metabolic syndrome in type-2 diabetic patients in Benghazi is low HDL

Editorial: A good sleep: the role of factors in psychosocial health

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Weakly- and Semi-Supervised Panoptic Segmentation

We present a weakly supervised model that jointly performs both semantic- and instance-segmentation -- a particularly relevant problem given the substantial cost of obtaining pixel-perfect annotation for these tasks. In contrast to many popular instance segmentation approaches based on object detectors, our method does not predict any overlapping instances. Moreover, we are able to segment both "thing" and "stuff" classes, and thus explain all the pixels in the image. "Thing" classes are weakly-supervised with bounding boxes, and "stuff" with image-level tags. We obtain state-of-the-art results on Pascal VOC, for both full and weak supervision (which achieves about 95% of fully-supervised performance). Furthermore, we present the first weakly-supervised results on Cityscapes for both semantic- and instance-segmentation. Finally, we use our weakly supervised framework to analyse the relationship between annotation quality and predictive performance, which is of interest to dataset creators.Comment: ECCV 2018. The first two authors contributed equall

ZNF750 is a lineage-specific tumour suppressor in squamous cell carcinoma.

ZNF750 controls epithelial homeostasis by regulating epidermal-differentiation genes, a role underscored by its pathogenic mutations in esophageal squamous cell cancers (SCCs). However, the precise role of ZNF750 in SCC cell biology remains unclear. In this study, we report that ZNF750 is exclusively deleted, mutated and underexpressed in human SCCs, and low ZNF750 expression is associated with poor survival. Restoration of wildtype, but not mutant ZNF750 protein uniquely inhibited the malignant phenotypes of SCC cells both in vitro and in vivo. Notably, ZNF750 promoted the expression of a long non-coding RNA (TINCR), which mediated both cancer-inhibition and differentiation-induction effects of ZNF750. In addition, ZNF750 potently suppressed cell migration by directly inhibiting the transactivation of LAMC2. Together, our findings characterize ZNF750 as a crucial SCC-specific suppressor and uncover its novel anticancer-associated functions

Evaluation of Simplified HCV Diagnostics in HIV/HCV Co-Infected Patients in Myanmar

To evaluate a decentralised testing model and simplified treatment protocol of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection to facilitate treatment scale-up in Myanmar, this prospective, observational study recruited HIV–HCV co-infected outpatients receiving sofosbuvir/daclatasvir in Yangon, Myanmar. The study examined the outcomes and factors associated with a sustained virological response (SVR). A decentralised “hub-and-spoke” testing model was evaluated where fingerstick capillary specimens were transported by taxi and processed centrally. The performance of the Xpert HCV VL Fingerstick Assay in detecting HCV RNA was compared to the local standard of care (plasma HCV RNA collected by venepuncture). Between January 2019 and February 2020, 162 HCV RNA-positive individuals were identified; 154/162 (95%) initiated treatment, and 128/154 (84%) returned for their SVR12 visit. A SVR was achieved in 119/154 (77%) participants in the intent-to-treat population and 119/128 (93%) participants in the modified-intent-to-treat population. Individuals receiving an antiretroviral therapy were more likely to achieve a SVR (with an odds ratio (OR) of 7.16, 95% CI 1.03–49.50), while those with cirrhosis were less likely (OR: 0.26, 95% CI 0.07–0.88). The sensitivity of the Xpert HCV VL Fingerstick Assay was 99.4% (95% CI 96.7–100.0), and the specificity was 99.2% (95% CI 95.9–99.9). A simplified treatment protocol using a hub-and-spoke testing model of fingerstick capillary specimens can achieve an SVR rate in LMIC comparable to well-resourced high-income settings

Thermal Giant Gravitons

We study the giant graviton solution as the AdS_5 X S^5 background is heated up to finite temperature. The analysis employs the thermal brane probe technique based on the blackfold approach. We focus mainly on the thermal giant graviton corresponding to a thermal D3-brane probe wrapped on an S^3 moving on the S^5 of the background at finite temperature. We find several interesting new effects, including that the thermal giant graviton has a minimal possible value for the angular momentum and correspondingly also a minimal possible radius of the S^3. We compute the free energy of the thermal giant graviton in the low temperature regime, which potentially could be compared to that of a thermal state on the gauge theory side. Moreover, we analyze the space of solutions and stability of the thermal giant graviton and find that, in parallel with the extremal case, there are two available solutions for a given temperature and angular momentum, one stable and one unstable. In order to write down the equations of motion, action and conserved charges for the thermal giant graviton we present a slight generalization of the blackfold formalism for charged black branes. Finally, we also briefly consider the thermal giant graviton moving in the AdS_5 part.Comment: v1: 32 pages + 11 pages appendices, 13 figures, v2: typos fixed in Sec.2 and other misprints, references adde

Self-assembled 2D Free-Standing Janus Nanosheets with Single-Layer Thickness

We report the thermodynamically controlled growth of solution-processable and free-standing nanosheets via peptide assembly in two dimensions. By taking advantage of self-sorting between peptide β-strands and hydrocarbon chains, we have demonstrated the formation of Janus 2D structures with single-layer thickness, which enable a predetermined surface heterofunctionalization. A controlled 2D-to-1D morphological transition was achieved by subtly adjusting the intermolecular forces. These nanosheets provide an ideal substrate for the engineering of guest components (e.g., proteins and nanoparticles), where enhanced enzyme activity was observed. We anticipate that sequence-specific programmed peptides will offer promise as design elements for 2D assemblies with face-selective functionalization

To VBAC or Not to VBAC

Catherine Spong discusses new research in PLoS Medicine that sheds more light on the risks of uterine rupture for women attempting a trial of labor following previous cesarean section