Polycystic kidney disease: an unrecognized emerging infectious disease?

Polycystic kidney disease (PKD) is one of the most common genetic diseases in humans. We contend that it may be an emerging infectious disease and/or microbial toxicosis in a vulnerable human subpopulation. Use of a differential activation protocol for the Limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL) assay showed bacterial endotoxin and fungal (1-->3)-beta-D-glucans in cyst fluids from human kidneys with PKD. Fatty acid analysis of cyst fluid confirmed the presence of 3-hydroxy fatty acids characteristic of endotoxin. Tissue and cyst fluid from three PKD patients were examined for fungal components. Serologic tests showed Fusarium, Aspergillus, and Candida antigens. IgE, but not IgG, reactive with Fusarium and Candida were also detected in cyst fluid. Fungal DNA was detected in kidney tissue and cyst fluid from these three PKD patients, but not in healthy human kidney tissue. We examine the intertwined nature of the actions of endotoxin and fungal components, sphingolipid biology in PKD, the structure of PKD gene products, infections, and integrity of gut function to establish a mechanistic hypothesis for microbial provocation of human cystic disease. Proof of this hypothesis will require identification of the microbes and microbial components involved and multifaceted studies of PKD cell biology

Skilled deaf readers have an enhanced perceptual span in reading

Recent evidence suggests that, compared with hearing people, deaf people have enhanced visual attention to simple stimuli viewed in the parafovea and periphery. Although a large part of reading involves processing the fixated words in foveal vision, readers also utilize information in parafoveal vision to preprocess upcoming words and decide where to look next. In the study reported here, we investigated whether auditory deprivation affects low-level visual processing during reading by comparing the perceptual span of deaf signers who were skilled and less-skilled readers with the perceptual span of skilled hearing readers. Compared with hearing readers, the two groups of deaf readers had a larger perceptual span than would be expected given their reading ability. These results provide the first evidence that deaf readers' enhanced attentional allocation to the parafovea is used during complex cognitive tasks, such as reading

Homeschooling and the criticism of school: hybridisms and educational (dis)continuities

Desde os anos 1960, o homeschooling apresenta dinâmicas de crescimento atualizadas nos diagnósticos da crise do capitalismo e dos sistemas educativos. Por ser praticado por famílias próximas do progressismo libertário, do cristianismo conservador ou de outras inspirações axiológicas, a abordagem investigativa presente neste texto pressupôs romper com uma visão unívoca e alheia à sua diversidade e aos diferentes graus de (in)formalidade dos quotidianos educativos de crianças e de jovens que caracterizam este fenómeno educativo. Procura-se captar as especificidades do ensino doméstico (ED) em Portugal e a sua crescente expressão social e educacional e reflete-se sobre os sentidos das aprendizagens que ele encerra. Conclui-se que o ED parece ser contrário aos horizontes formativos da criança segundo o interesse da sociedade, sendo omisso sobre o seu papel na emancipação dos sujeitos. Confrontam-se a escola e o seu modo de funcionamento a partir do racional do ED, à procura de novas epistemologias e de novas linhas de pesquisa.Since the 1960s, homeschooling has shown growth dynamics updated by the diagnosis of the crisis of capitalism and of educational systems. Because it is practiced by families close to libertarian progressivism, conservative Christianity, or other axiological inspirations, this paper’s approach sought to break with a univocal conception alien to its diversity and to the different degrees of (in)formality of the children’s and young people’s educational daily lives inherent to this educational practice. Therefore, this paper seeks to understand the specificities of Portuguese homeschooling and its increasing social and educational expression, and to reflect on the meanings of the learning it entails. Being unclear about its role on the emancipation of the subjects, homeschooling seems to be contrary to the educational horizons of the child according to the interests of the whole society. This paper confronts school and its way of functioning with the homeschooling rationale in order to search for new epistemologies and new lines of research.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Cancer survival in England and Wales at the end of the 20th century

Survival has risen steadily since the 1970s for most cancers in adults in England and Wales, but persistent inequalities exist between those living in affluent and deprived areas. These differences are not seen for children. For many of the common adult cancers, these inequalities in survival (the 'deprivation gap') became more marked in the 1990s. This volume presents extended analyses of survival for adults diagnosed during the 14 years 1986-1999 and followed up to 2001, including trends in overall survival in England and Wales and trends in the deprivation gap in survival. The analyses include individual tumour data for 2.2 million cancer patients. This article outlines the structure of the supplement - an article for each of the 20 most common cancers in adults, followed by an expert commentary from one of the leading UK clinicians specialising in malignancies of that organ or system. The available data, quality control and methods of analysis are described here, rather than repeated in each of the 20 articles. We open the discussion between clinicians and epidemiologists on how to interpret the observed trends and inequalities in cancer survival, and we highlight some of the most important contrasts in these very different points of view. Survival improved substantially for adult cancer patients in England and Wales up to the end of the 20th century. Although socioeconomic inequalities in survival are remarkably persistent, the overall patterns suggest that these inequalities are largely avoidable

Research specialties as emergent phenomena: Connecting emergence theory and scientometrics

This short paper represents an initial effort to connect the emergence theory literature with the bibliometric, informetric, and scientometic literatures. It begins with a prominent definition of emergence, and then connects each of the components of this definition with the relevant insights about the development of new scientific and technical concepts or research specialties. Finally, it concludes with a discussion of the relationship between these two distinct areas of scholarly inquiry and the need for further exploration of this intersection.Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) viapublished or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Sentence Repetition in Deaf Children with Specific Language Impairment in British Sign Language

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) perform poorly on sentence repetition tasks across different spoken languages, but until now, this methodology has not been investigated in children who have SLI in a signed language. Users of a natural sign language encode different sentence meanings through their choice of signs and by altering the sequence and inflections of these signs. Grammatical information is expressed through movement and configurational changes of the hands and face. The visual modality thus influences how grammatical morphology and syntax are instantiated. How would language impairment impact on the acquisition of these types of linguistic devices in child signers? We investigated sentence repetition skills in a group of 11 deaf children who display SLI in British Sign Language (BSL) and 11 deaf controls with no language impairment who were matched for age and years of BSL exposure. The SLI group was significantly less accurate on an overall accuracy score, and they repeated lexical items, overall sentence meaning, sign order, facial expressions, and verb morphological structures significantly less accurately than controls. This pattern of language deficits is consistent with the characterization of SLI in spoken languages even though expression is in a different modality. We conclude that explanations of SLI, and of poor sentence repetition by children with this disorder, must be able to account for both the spoken and signed modalities