Obese Zucker Rats as a Reverse Translational Model of Human Left Ventricular Hypertrophy

Heart failure is a lifelong disability that for over half of those affected leads to mortality within five years after initial diagnosis. Left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) is one of the most reliable independent predictors of heart failure. Pathological LVH is irreversible, but early diagnosis is often missed due to its asymptomatic nature. Obese Zucker rats (OZR), which develop obesity due to dysfunctional leptin signaling, naturally exhibit a LVH that mimics the obese human condition. Animal models are necessary because human donor tissue is scarce. The central hypothesis is that genes and proteins that are differentially expressed during development of LVH, relative to sex and obesity status, will serve as clinical biomarkers or therapeutic targets for detection and prevention of heart failure. No previous studies have addressed LVH on an exome-wide basis. In the present research, I address these knowledge gaps with transcriptome analysis of rat and human left ventricles in a sex- and obesity-specific manner. Specific genes (NPPA, NPPB, HBB, MYL7, PDK4) known to be involved in cardiac development and function were then validated proteomically to form a LVH gene signature that may be useful for future diagnosis or represent targets for intervention. This work defines novel LVH transcriptomes in humans and OZR and these datasets allow for confirmation of whether an individual gene or geneset is translationally-relevant for further investigation in LVH. Future work should address transcriptomic and proteomic changes throughout LVH development and whether intervention targeting specific gene products can ameliorate onset of LVH

A reflection on: preparing the dietetic workforce of the future: developing innovative placements in social care settings.

Looking back eight years, and reflecting on this project, we consider on our professional and personal learning. This pilot project came about because there is always pressure on practice placements in clinical practice, and we were aware of the changing face of dietetic practice. We brought different perspectives to the project. Evelyn was Nutrition and Dietetic Adviser for care homes in NHS (National Health Service) Highland (in Scotland) and saw at first hand the potential positive impact that dietetics could have for both staff and residents in care homes. We felt it was putting into practice the ScottishGovernment 2020 Vision for the integration of health and social care; NHS Highland was an early adopter. Myra was in an academic role and saw the value of ensuring that dietetic students on practice placement had the opportunity to experience as many potential workplaces as possible

Design as conversation with digital materials

This paper explores Donald Schön's concept of design as a conversation with materials, in the context of designing digital systems. It proposes material utterance as a central event in designing. A material utterance is a situated communication act that depends on the particularities of speaker, audience, material and genre. The paper argues that, if digital designing differs from other forms of designing, then accounts for such differences must be sought by understanding the material properties of digital systems and the genres of practice that surround their use. Perspectives from human-computer interaction (HCI) and the psychology of programming are used to examine how such an understanding might be constructed.</p

An 8-month longitudinal exploration of body image and disordered eating in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic

Research suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic is negatively impacting mental health, with rates of eating disorder referrals in particular rising steeply during the pandemic. This study aimed to examine 8-month changes in body image and disordered eating during the COVID-19 pandemic, and explore whether any changes were moderated by gender, age, or eating disorder history. This study used a longitudinal survey design in which 587 adults living in the UK (85 % women; mean age = 32.87 years) completed assessments every two months over five timepoints from May/June 2020 to January/February 2021. Measures included body esteem, disordered eating, and psychological distress. Mixed effect models showed small but significant improvements in body esteem and disordered eating symptoms from May/June 2020 to January/February 2021. These improvements were independent of changes in psychological distress, and did not vary by gender, age or eating disorder history. Whilst poor body image and disordered eating may have been elevated in the early period of the pandemic, this study suggests improvements, rather than worsening, of these outcomes over time. This may reflect adaptation to this changing context

Empirical investigation of co-authorship in the field of finance: A network perspective

© 2017 Elsevier Inc. Collaboration among academic authors promotes innovation and research productivity and increases the quality of published papers. The aim of this paper is to investigate collaboration and co-authorship in the area of finance, focusing on ten leading journals in the field. We employed social network analysis to examine the structure of the networks and the ways in which authors, institutions and countries interact. Our empirical results indicate that co-authorship networks are greatly integrated. We also observed that the size of collaboration networks has been increasing over the last 18 years. Our findings highlight the mechanics of collaborative research production and are therefore useful for the administration of academic institutions and policymaking in higher education

The metastate approach to thermodynamic chaos

In realistic disordered systems, such as the Edwards-Anderson (EA) spin glass, no order parameter, such as the Parisi overlap distribution, can be both translation-invariant and non-self-averaging. The standard mean-field picture of the EA spin glass phase can therefore not be valid in any dimension and at any temperature. Further analysis shows that, in general, when systems have many competing (pure) thermodynamic states, a single state which is a mixture of many of them (as in the standard mean-field picture) contains insufficient information to reveal the full thermodynamic structure. We propose a different approach, in which an appropriate thermodynamic description of such a system is instead based on a metastate, which is an ensemble of (possibly mixed) thermodynamic states. This approach, modelled on chaotic dynamical systems, is needed when chaotic size dependence (of finite volume correlations) is present. Here replicas arise in a natural way, when a metastate is specified by its (meta)correlations. The metastate approach explains, connects, and unifies such concepts as replica symmetry breaking, chaotic size dependence and replica non-independence. Furthermore, it replaces the older idea of non-self-averaging as dependence on the bulk couplings with the concept of dependence on the state within the metastate at fixed coupling realization. We use these ideas to classify possible metastates for the EA model, and discuss two scenarios introduced by us earlier --- a nonstandard mean-field picture and a picture intermediate between that and the usual scaling/droplet picture.Comment: LaTeX file, 49 page

A formal model based on Game Theory for the analysis of cooperation in distributed service discovery

New systems can be designed, developed, and managed as societies of agents that interact with each other by o↵ering and providing services. These systems can be viewed as complex networks where nodes are bounded rational agents. In order to deal with complex goals, agents must cooperate with other agents to be able to locate the required services. The aim of this paper is to formally and empirically analyze under what circumstances cooperation emerges in decentralized search for services. We propose a repeated game model that formalizes the interactions among agents in a search process where each agent has the freedom to choose whether or not to cooperate with other agents. Agents make decisions based on the cost of their actions and the expected reward if they participate by forwarding queries in a search process that ends successfully. We propose a strategy that is based on random-walks, and we study under what conditions the strategy is a Nash Equilibrium. We performed several experiments in order to evaluate the model and the strategy and to analyze which network structures are the most appropriate for promoting cooperation