Approaching the distribution of funerary space in El Argar (Antas, Almería)

El Argar (Antas, Almería) is the main reference site for the study of the Bronze Age in the Iberian Peninsula. The burial assemblages of more than 1000 excavated tombs show the social diversity of the interred. This article analyses the spatial distribution of the burials, considering the multiple variables of the funerary ritual in relation to their location. The aim is to try to understand whether socioeconomic patterns can explain their location. For this, based on the documentation from the Siret Archive, we have been able to situate a considerable number of graves on the plateau that forms the site and we have considered the variability of funerary containers, the burial assemblages and the physical characteristics of the interred. Statistical significance tests do not show a relation between sex, age and location, but they indicate one between rich grave assemblages and spatial distribution, which cluster in a particular area of the site

Prevalence and Determinants of Obesity among Primary School Children in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Childhood obesity has increased dramatically and has become a public health concern worldwide. Childhood obesity is likely to persist through adulthood and may lead to early onset of NCDs. However, there is paucity of data on obesity among primary school children in Tanzania. This study assessed the prevalence and determinants of obesity among primary school children in Dar es Salaam. A cross sectional study was conducted among school age children in randomly selected schools in Dar es Salaam. Anthropometric and blood pressure measurements were taken using standard procedures. Body Mass Index (BMI) was calculated as weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters (kg/m2). Child obesity was defined as BMI at or above 95th percentile for age and sex. Socio-demographic characteristics of children were determined using a structured questionnaire. Logistic regression was used to determine association between independent variables with obesity among primary school children in Dar es Salaam. A total of 446 children were included in the analysis. The mean age of the participants was 11.1±2.0 years and 53.1% were girls. The mean BMI, SBP and DBP were 16.6±4.0 kg/m2, 103.9±10.3mmHg and 65.6±8.2mmHg respectively. The overall prevalence of child obesity was 5.2% and was higher among girls (6.3%) compared to boys (3.8%). Obese children had significantly higher mean values for age (p=0.042), systolic and diastolic blood pressures (all p<0.001). Most obese children were from households with fewer children (p=0.019) and residing in urban areas (p=0.002). Controlling for other variables, age above 10 years (AOR=3.3, 95% CI=1.5-7.2), female sex (AOR=2.6, 95% CI=1.4-4.9), urban residence (AOR=2.5, 95% CI=1.2-5.3) and having money to spend at school (AOR=2.6, 95% CI=1.4-4.8) were significantly associated with child obesity. The prevalence of childhood obesity in this population was found to be low. However, children from urban schools and girls were proportionately more obese compared to their counterparts. Primary preventive measures for childhood obesity should start early in childhood and address socioeconomic factors of parents contributing to childhood obesity

Phenotypic and molecular assessment of seven patients with 6p25 deletion syndrome: Relevance to ocular dysgenesis and hearing impairment

BACKGROUND: Thirty-nine patients have been described with deletions involving chromosome 6p25. However, relatively few of these deletions have had molecular characterization. Common phenotypes of 6p25 deletion syndrome patients include hydrocephalus, hearing loss, and ocular, craniofacial, skeletal, cardiac, and renal malformations. Molecular characterization of deletions can identify genes that are responsible for these phenotypes. METHODS: We report the clinical phenotype of seven patients with terminal deletions of chromosome 6p25 and compare them to previously reported patients. Molecular characterization of the deletions was performed using polymorphic marker analysis to determine the extents of the deletions in these seven 6p25 deletion syndrome patients. RESULTS: Our results, and previous data, show that ocular dysgenesis and hearing impairment are the two most highly penetrant phenotypes of the 6p25 deletion syndrome. While deletion of the forkhead box C1 gene (FOXC1) probably underlies the ocular dysgenesis, no gene in this region is known to be involved in hearing impairment. CONCLUSIONS: Ocular dysgenesis and hearing impairment are the two most common phenotypes of 6p25 deletion syndrome. We conclude that a locus for dominant hearing loss is present at 6p25 and that this locus is restricted to a region distal to D6S1617. Molecular characterization of more 6p25 deletion patients will aid in refinement of this locus and the identification of a gene involved in dominant hearing loss

Adaptive remodeling of the bacterial proteome by specific ribosomal modification regulates Pseudomonas infection and niche colonisation

Post-transcriptional control of protein abundance is a highly important, underexplored regulatory process by which organisms respond to their environments. Here we describe an important and previously unidentified regulatory pathway involving the ribosomal modification protein RimK, its regulator proteins RimA and RimB, and the widespread bacterial second messenger cyclic-di-GMP (cdG). Disruption of rimK affects motility and surface attachment in pathogenic and commensal Pseudomonas species, with rimK deletion significantly compromising rhizosphere colonisation by the commensal soil bacterium P. fluorescens, and plant infection by the pathogens P. syringae and P. aeruginosa. RimK functions as an ATP-dependent glutamyl ligase, adding glutamate residues to the C-terminus of ribosomal protein RpsF and inducing specific effects on both ribosome protein complement and function. Deletion of rimK in P. fluorescens leads to markedly reduced levels of multiple ribosomal proteins, and also of the key translational regulator Hfq. In turn, reduced Hfq levels induce specific downstream proteomic changes, with significant increases in multiple ABC transporters, stress response proteins and non-ribosomal peptide synthetases seen for both ΔrimK and Δhfq mutants. The activity of RimK is itself controlled by interactions with RimA, RimB and cdG. We propose that control of RimK activity represents a novel regulatory mechanism that dynamically influences interactions between bacteria and their hosts; translating environmental pressures into dynamic ribosomal changes, and consequently to an adaptive remodeling of the bacterial proteome

The emotional movie database (EMDB): a self-report and psychophysiological study

Film clips are an important tool for evoking emotional responses in the laboratory. When compared with other emotionally potent visual stimuli (e.g., pictures), film clips seem to be more effective in eliciting emotions for longer periods of time at both the subjective and physiological levels. The main objective of the present study was to develop a new database of affective film clips without auditory content, based on a dimensional approach to emotional stimuli (valence, arousal and dominance). The study had three different phases: (1) the pre-selection and editing of 52 film clips (2) the self-report rating of these film clips by a sample of 113 participants and (3) psychophysiological assessment [skin conductance level (SCL) and the heart rate (HR)] on 32 volunteers. Film clips from different categories were selected to elicit emotional states from different quadrants of affective space. The results also showed that sustained exposure to the affective film clips resulted in a pattern of a SCL increase and HR deceleration in high arousal conditions (i.e., horror and erotic conditions). The resulting emotional movie database can reliably be used in research requiring the presentation of non-auditory film clips with different ratings of valence, arousal and dominance.Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology with individual grants (SFRH/BD/41484/2007 and SFRH/BD/64355/2009

Protection and consolidation of stone heritage by self-inoculation with indigenous carbonatogenic bacterial communities

Enhanced salt weathering resulting from global warming and increasing environmental pollution is endangering the survival of stone monuments and artworks. To mitigate the effects of these deleterious processes, numerous conservation treatments have been applied that, however, show limited efficacy. Here we present a novel, environmentally friendly, bacterial self-inoculation approach for the conservation of stone, based on the isolation of an indigenous community of carbonatogenic bacteria from salt damaged stone, followed by their culture and re-application back onto the same stone. This method results in an effective consolidation and protection due to the formation of an abundant and exceptionally strong hybrid cement consisting of nanostructured bacterial CaCO3 and bacterially derived organics, and the passivating effect of bacterial exopolymeric substances (EPS) covering the substrate. The fact that the isolated and identified bacterial community is common to many stone artworks may enable worldwide application of this novel conservation methodology.This work was supported by the Spanish Government (Grants MAT2012-37584, CGL2012-35992 and CGL2015-70642-R), the Junta de Andalucía through Proyecto de excelencia RNM-3493 and Project P11-RNM-7550, the Research Groups BIO 103 and RNM-179, and the University of Granada (Unidad Científica de Excelencia UCE-PP2016-05). Additional funds were provided by the Molecular Foundry (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, LBNL, University of California, Berkeley, CA) for a research stay of M.S. (project #1451; User Agreement No. NPUSR009206)

Normalizing biomedical terms by minimizing ambiguity and variability

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>One of the difficulties in mapping biomedical named entities, e.g. genes, proteins, chemicals and diseases, to their concept identifiers stems from the potential variability of the terms. Soft string matching is a possible solution to the problem, but its inherent heavy computational cost discourages its use when the dictionaries are large or when real time processing is required. A less computationally demanding approach is to normalize the terms by using heuristic rules, which enables us to look up a dictionary in a constant time regardless of its size. The development of good heuristic rules, however, requires extensive knowledge of the terminology in question and thus is the bottleneck of the normalization approach.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We present a novel framework for discovering a list of normalization rules from a dictionary in a fully automated manner. The rules are discovered in such a way that they minimize the ambiguity and variability of the terms in the dictionary. We evaluated our algorithm using two large dictionaries: a human gene/protein name dictionary built from BioThesaurus and a disease name dictionary built from UMLS.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The experimental results showed that automatically discovered rules can perform comparably to carefully crafted heuristic rules in term mapping tasks, and the computational overhead of rule application is small enough that a very fast implementation is possible. This work will help improve the performance of term-concept mapping tasks in biomedical information extraction especially when good normalization heuristics for the target terminology are not fully known.</p

Trends of adverse drug reactions related-hospitalizations in Spain (2001-2006)

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Adverse drug reactions (ADR) are a substantial cause of hospital admissions. We conducted a nationwide study to estimate the burden of hospital admissions for ADRs in Spain during a six-year period (2001-2006) along with the associated total health cost.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Data were obtained from the national surveillance system for hospital data (Minimum Basic Data Set) maintained by the Ministry of Health and Consumer Affairs, and covering more than 95% of Spanish hospitals. From these admissions we selected all hospitalization that were code as drug-related (ICD-9-CM codes E), but intended forms of overdoses, errors in administration and therapeutics failure were excluded. The average number of hospitalizations per year, annual incidence of hospital admissions, average length of stay in the hospital, and case-fatality rate, were calculated.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>During the 2001-2006 periods, the total number of hospitalized patients with ADR diagnosis was 350,835 subjects, 1.69% of all acute hospital admissions in Spain. The estimated incidence of admissions due to ADR decreased during the period 2001-2006 (p < 0.05). More than five percent of patients (n = 19,734) died during an ADR-related hospitalization. The drugs most commonly associated with ADR-related hospitalization were antineoplastic and immunosuppressive drugs (n = 75,760), adrenal cortical steroids (n = 47,539), anticoagulants (n = 26,546) and antibiotics (n = 22,144). The costs generated by patients in our study increased by 19.05% between 2001 and 2006.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Approximately 1.69% of all acute hospital admissions were associated with ADRs. The rates were much higher for elderly patients. The total cost of ADR-related hospitalization to the Spanish health system is high and has increased between 2001 and 2006. ADRs are an important cause of admission, resulting in considerable use of national health system beds and a significant number of deaths.</p

Genetic association study of QT interval highlights role for calcium signaling pathways in myocardial repolarization.

The QT interval, an electrocardiographic measure reflecting myocardial repolarization, is a heritable trait. QT prolongation is a risk factor for ventricular arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death (SCD) and could indicate the presence of the potentially lethal mendelian long-QT syndrome (LQTS). Using a genome-wide association and replication study in up to 100,000 individuals, we identified 35 common variant loci associated with QT interval that collectively explain ∼8-10% of QT-interval variation and highlight the importance of calcium regulation in myocardial repolarization. Rare variant analysis of 6 new QT interval-associated loci in 298 unrelated probands with LQTS identified coding variants not found in controls but of uncertain causality and therefore requiring validation. Several newly identified loci encode proteins that physically interact with other recognized repolarization proteins. Our integration of common variant association, expression and orthogonal protein-protein interaction screens provides new insights into cardiac electrophysiology and identifies new candidate genes for ventricular arrhythmias, LQTS and SCD