Use of ecstasy and other psychoactive substances among school-attending adolescents in Taiwan: national surveys 2004–2006

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>With the backdrop of a global ecstasy epidemic, this study sought to examine the trend, correlates, and onset sequence of ecstasy use among adolescents in Taiwan, where a well-established gateway drug such as marijuana is much less popular.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A multistage probability survey of school-attending adolescents in grades 7, 9, 10, and 12, aged 11–19 years, was conducted in 2004, 2005, and 2006. A self-administered anonymous questionnaire elicited response rates ranging from 94.3% to 96.6%. The sample sizes were 18232 respondents in 2004, 17986 in 2005, and 17864 in 2006.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In terms of lifetime prevalence and incidence, ecstasy and ketamine by and large appeared as the first and second commonly used illegal drugs, respectively, among middle (grades 7 and 9) and high school students (grades 10 and 12) during the 3-year survey period; however, this order was reversed in the middle school-aged students starting in 2006. Having sexual experience, tobacco use, and betel nut use were factors consistently associated with the onset of ecstasy use across years. The majority of ecstasy users had been involved in polydrug use, such as the use of ketamine (41.4%–53.5%), marijuana (12.7%–18.7%), and methamphetamine (4.2%–9.5%).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>From 2004 to 2006, a decline was noted in the prevalence and incidence rate of ecstasy, a leading illegal drug used by school-attending adolescents in Taiwan since the early 2000s. The emerging ketamine use trend may warrant more attention in the future.</p

Cancer Treatment and Bone Health

Considerable advances in oncology over recent decades have led to improved survival, while raising concerns about long-term consequences of anticancer treatments. In patients with breast or prostate malignancies, bone health is a major issue due to the high risk of bone metastases and the frequent prolonged use of hormone therapies that alter physiological bone turnover, leading to increased fracture risk. Thus, the onset of cancer treatment-induced bone loss (CTIBL) should be considered by clinicians and recent guidelines should be routinely applied to these patients. In particular, baseline and periodic follow-up evaluations of bone health parameters enable the identification of patients at high risk of osteoporosis and fractures, which can be prevented by the use of bone-targeting agents (BTAs), calcium and vitamin D supplementation and modifications of lifestyle. This review will focus upon the pathophysiology of breast and prostate cancer treatment-induced bone loss and the most recent evidence about effective preventive and therapeutic strategies

Ste20-Related Proline/Alanine-Rich Kinase (SPAK) Regulated Transcriptionally by Hyperosmolarity Is Involved in Intestinal Barrier Function

The Ste20-related protein proline/alanine-rich kinase (SPAK) plays important roles in cellular functions such as cell differentiation and regulation of chloride transport, but its roles in pathogenesis of intestinal inflammation remain largely unknown. Here we report significantly increased SPAK expression levels in hyperosmotic environments, such as mucosal biopsy samples from patients with Crohn's disease, as well as colon tissues of C57BL/6 mice and Caco2-BBE cells treated with hyperosmotic medium. NF-κB and Sp1-binding sites in the SPAK TATA-less promoter are essential for SPAK mRNA transcription. Hyperosmolarity increases the ability of NF-κB and Sp1 to bind to their binding sites. Knock-down of either NF-κB or Sp1 by siRNA reduces the hyperosmolarity-induced SPAK expression levels. Furthermore, expression of NF-κB, but not Sp1, was upregulated by hyperosmolarity in vivo and in vitro. Nuclear run-on assays showed that hyperosmolarity increases SPAK expression levels at the transcriptional level, without affecting SPAK mRNA stability. Knockdown of SPAK expression by siRNA or overexpression of SPAK in cells and transgenic mice shows that SPAK is involved in intestinal permeability in vitro and in vivo. Together, our data suggest that SPAK, the transcription of which is regulated by hyperosmolarity, plays an important role in epithelial barrier function

Mechanisms of T cell organotropism

F.M.M.-B. is supported by the British Heart Foundation, the Medical Research Council of the UK and the Gates Foundation

The Genetic Signatures of Noncoding RNAs

The majority of the genome in animals and plants is transcribed in a developmentally regulated manner to produce large numbers of non–protein-coding RNAs (ncRNAs), whose incidence increases with developmental complexity. There is growing evidence that these transcripts are functional, particularly in the regulation of epigenetic processes, leading to the suggestion that they compose a hitherto hidden layer of genomic programming in humans and other complex organisms. However, to date, very few have been identified in genetic screens. Here I show that this is explicable by an historic emphasis, both phenotypically and technically, on mutations in protein-coding sequences, and by presumptions about the nature of regulatory mutations. Most variations in regulatory sequences produce relatively subtle phenotypic changes, in contrast to mutations in protein-coding sequences that frequently cause catastrophic component failure. Until recently, most mapping projects have focused on protein-coding sequences, and the limited number of identified regulatory mutations have been interpreted as affecting conventional cis-acting promoter and enhancer elements, although these regions are often themselves transcribed. Moreover, ncRNA-directed regulatory circuits underpin most, if not all, complex genetic phenomena in eukaryotes, including RNA interference-related processes such as transcriptional and post-transcriptional gene silencing, position effect variegation, hybrid dysgenesis, chromosome dosage compensation, parental imprinting and allelic exclusion, paramutation, and possibly transvection and transinduction. The next frontier is the identification and functional characterization of the myriad sequence variations that influence quantitative traits, disease susceptibility, and other complex characteristics, which are being shown by genome-wide association studies to lie mostly in noncoding, presumably regulatory, regions. There is every possibility that many of these variations will alter the interactions between regulatory RNAs and their targets, a prospect that should be borne in mind in future functional analyses

Localization and broadband follow-up of the gravitational-wave transient GW150914

A gravitational-wave (GW) transient was identified in data recorded by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors on 2015 September 14. The event, initially designated G184098 and later given the name GW150914, is described in detail elsewhere. By prior arrangement, preliminary estimates of the time, significance, and sky location of the event were shared with 63 teams of observers covering radio, optical, near-infrared, X-ray, and gamma-ray wavelengths with ground- and space-based facilities. In this Letter we describe the low-latency analysis of the GW data and present the sky localization of the first observed compact binary merger. We summarize the follow-up observations reported by 25 teams via private Gamma-ray Coordinates Network circulars, giving an overview of the participating facilities, the GW sky localization coverage, the timeline, and depth of the observations. As this event turned out to be a binary black hole merger, there is little expectation of a detectable electromagnetic (EM) signature. Nevertheless, this first broadband campaign to search for a counterpart of an Advanced LIGO source represents a milestone and highlights the broad capabilities of the transient astronomy community and the observing strategies that have been developed to pursue neutron star binary merger events. Detailed investigations of the EM data and results of the EM follow-up campaign are being disseminated in papers by the individual teams

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research

Localization and broadband follow-up of the gravitational-wave transient GW150914

A gravitational-wave transient was identified in data recorded by the Advanced LIGO detectors on 2015 September 14. The event candidate, initially designated G184098 and later given the name GW150914, is described in detail elsewhere. By prior arrangement, preliminary estimates of the time, significance, and sky location of the event were shared with 63 teams of observers covering radio, optical, near-infrared, X-ray, and gamma-ray wavelengths with ground- and space-based facilities. In this Letter we describe the low-latency analysis of the gravitational wave data and present the sky localization of the first observed compact binary merger. We summarize the follow-up observations reported by 25 teams via private Gamma-ray Coordinates Network Circulars, giving an overview of the participating facilities, the gravitational wave sky localization coverage, the timeline and depth of the observations. As this event turned out to be a binary black hole merger, there is little expectation of a detectable electromagnetic signature. Nevertheless, this first broadband campaign to search for a counterpart of an Advanced LIGO source represents a milestone and highlights the broad capabilities of the transient astronomy community and the observing strategies that have been developed to pursue neutron star binary merger events. Detailed investigations of the electromagnetic data and results of the electromagnetic follow-up campaign will be disseminated in the papers of the individual teams