222 research outputs found
Should providers encourage realistic weight expectations and satisfaction with lost weight in commercial weight loss programs? a preliminary study
Background
Attrition is a problem among patients who participate in commercial weight loss programs. One possible explanation is that if patients are unable to reach a weight that they expect to achieve, they may be more likely to drop out of treatment. This study investigated variables associated with attrition among 30 obese patients who completed a liquid meal replacement program (LMR) and enrolled in a 52-week Small Changes Maintenance intervention (SCM). Patients lost a median 18% of body weight during LMR and completed assessments about weight expectations and weight satisfaction pre- and post-SCM.
Findings
Of the 30 patients who started SCM, 8 (27%) were lost to attrition. Odds of SCM attrition were higher in patients who lost ≤ 18.2% of pre-LMR weight (OR: 12.25, P = 0.035), had lower satisfaction (≤7) pre-SCM (OR: 10.11, P = 0.040), and who expected further weight loss of 9.1 kg or more pre-SCM (OR: 10.11, P = 0.040). SCM completers significantly increased weight loss expectations by a median of 2.3 kg from pre-SCM to post-SCM (WSR P = 0.049) that paralleled weight regained post-SCM (2.7 kg).
Conclusions
After completion of a medically-supervised commercial weight loss program, patients with the greatest expectations for further weight loss and the lowest weight satisfaction were more likely to drop out of SCM. Failure to participate in maintenance treatment may lead to regain of greater than half of lost weight over the next year. Among SCM completers, lower expectations for further weight loss and greater weight satisfaction appeared to be associated with continued engagement in maintenance treatment
The chemerin knockout rat reveals chemerin dependence in female, but not male, experimental hypertension
Measures of the adipokine chemerin are elevated in multiple cardiovascular diseases, including hypertension, but little mechanistic work has been done to implicate chemerin as being causative in such diseases. The chemerin knockout (KO) rat was created to test the hypothesis that removal of chemerin would reduce pressure in the normal and hypertensive state. Western analyses confirmed loss of chemerin in the plasma and tissues of the KO vs. wild‐type (WT) rats. Chemerin concentration in plasma and tissues was lower in WT females than in WT males, as determined by Western analysis. Conscious male and female KO rats had modest differences in baseline measures vs. the WT that included systolic, diastolic, mean arterial and pulse pressures, and heart rate, all measured telemetrically. The mineralocorticoid deoxycorticosterone acetate (DOCA) and salt water, combined with uninephrectomy as a hypertensive stimulus, elevated mean and systolic blood pressures of the male KO higher than the male WT. By contrast, all pressures in the female KO were lower than their WT throughout DOCA‐salt treatment. These results revealed an unexpected sex difference in chemerin expression and the ability of chemerin to modify blood pressure in response to a hypertensive challenge.—Watts, S. W., Darios, E. S., Mullick, A. E., Garver, H., Saunders, T. L., Hughes, E. D., Filipiak, W. E., Zeidler, M. G., McMullen, N., Sinal, C. J., Kumar, R. K., Ferland, D. J., Fink, G. D. The chemerin knockout rat reveals chemerin dependence in female, but not male, experimental hypertension. FASEB J. 32, 6596–6614 (2018). www.fasebj.orgPeer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/154357/1/fsb2fj201800479.pd
Polydispersity and ordered phases in solutions of rodlike macromolecules
We apply density functional theory to study the influence of polydispersity
on the stability of columnar, smectic and solid ordering in the solutions of
rodlike macromolecules. For sufficiently large length polydispersity (standard
deviation ) a direct first-order nematic-columnar transition is
found, while for smaller there is a continuous nematic-smectic and
first-order smectic-columnar transition. For increasing polydispersity the
columnar structure is stabilized with respect to solid perturbations. The
length distribution of macromolecules changes neither at the nematic-smectic
nor at the nematic-columnar transition, but it does change at the
smectic-columnar phase transition. We also study the phase behaviour of binary
mixtures, in which the nematic-smectic transition is again found to be
continuous. Demixing according to rod length in the smectic phase is always
preempted by transitions to solid or columnar ordering.Comment: 13 pages (TeX), 2 Postscript figures uuencode
Unimodality Problems in Ehrhart Theory
Ehrhart theory is the study of sequences recording the number of integer
points in non-negative integral dilates of rational polytopes. For a given
lattice polytope, this sequence is encoded in a finite vector called the
Ehrhart -vector. Ehrhart -vectors have connections to many areas of
mathematics, including commutative algebra and enumerative combinatorics. In
this survey we discuss what is known about unimodality for Ehrhart
-vectors and highlight open questions and problems.Comment: Published in Recent Trends in Combinatorics, Beveridge, A., et al.
(eds), Springer, 2016, pp 687-711, doi 10.1007/978-3-319-24298-9_27. This
version updated October 2017 to correct an error in the original versio
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