Changes in use of herbs and dietary supplements (HDS) among clinicians enrolled in an online curriculum

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Little is known about clinicians' use of herbs and dietary supplements (HDS), how their personal HDS use changes with time and training, and how changes in their personal use affect their confidence or communication with patients about HDS.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We conducted a prospective cohort study of clinicians before and after an on-line curriculum about HDS in winter-spring, 2005.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Of the 569 clinicians who completed surveys both at baseline and after the course, 25% were male and the average age was 42 years old; 88% used HDS before and after the course. The average number of supplements used fell slightly from 6.2 at baseline to 5.8 after the course (P < 0.01). The most commonly used supplements at baseline were: multivitamins (65%), calcium (42%), B vitamins (34%), vitamin C (34%), green tea (27%), fish oil (27%) and vitamin E (25%). Use of fish oil increased to 30% after the course (P = 0.01). Use of supplements traditionally used to treat colds decreased: vitamin C (34% to 27%), zinc (13% to 10%), and echinacea (7% to 5%, P < 0.05 for all three). Changes in personal HDS use were not associated with significant changes in confidence or communication with patients.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Many clinicians use HDS personally; use changes seasonally and to a small extent with professional education. Professional use of HDS is dynamic and seasonal. Additional research is needed to understand the impact of personal use on professional attitudes and behavior in populations with lower baseline uses of HDS.</p

Measuring affective well-being at work using short-form scales : implications for affective structures and participant instructions

Measuring affective well-being in organizational studies has become increasingly widespread, given its association with key work-performance and other markers of organizational functioning. As such, researchers and policy-makers need to be confident that well-being measures are valid, reliable and robust. To reduce the burden on participants in applied settings, short-form measures of affective well-being are proving popular. However, these scales are seldom validated as standalone, comprehensive measures in their own right. In this article, we used a short-form measure of affective well-being with 10 items: the Daniels five-factor measure of affective well-being (D-FAW). In Study 1, across six applied sample groups (N = 2624), we found that the factor structure of the short-form D-FAW is robust when issued as a standalone measure, and that it should be scored differently depending on the participant instruction used. When participant instructions focus on now or today, then affect is best represented by five discrete emotion factors. When participant instructions focus on the past week, then affect is best represented by two or three mood-based factors. In Study 2 (N = 39), we found good construct convergent validity of short-form D-FAW with another widely used scale (PANAS). Implications for the measurement and structure of affect are discussed

Modification of cell surface properties of Pseudomonas alcaligenes S22 during hydrocarbon biodegradation

Biodegradation of water insoluble hydrocarbons can be significantly increased by the addition of natural surfactants one. Very promising option is the use of saponins. The obtained results indicated that in this system, after 21 days, 92% biodegradation of diesel oil could be achieved using Pseudomonas alcaligenes. No positive effect on the biodegradation process was observed using synthetic surfactant Triton X-100. The kind of carbon source influences the cell surface properties of microorganisms. Modification of the surface cell could be observed by control of the sedimentation profile. This analytical method is a new approach in microbiological analysis

Classification of Types of Stuttering Symptoms Based on Brain Activity

Among the non-fluencies seen in speech, some are more typical (MT) of stuttering speakers, whereas others are less typical (LT) and are common to both stuttering and fluent speakers. No neuroimaging work has evaluated the neural basis for grouping these symptom types. Another long-debated issue is which type (LT, MT) whole-word repetitions (WWR) should be placed in. In this study, a sentence completion task was performed by twenty stuttering patients who were scanned using an event-related design. This task elicited stuttering in these patients. Each stuttered trial from each patient was sorted into the MT or LT types with WWR put aside. Pattern classification was employed to train a patient-specific single trial model to automatically classify each trial as MT or LT using the corresponding fMRI data. This model was then validated by using test data that were independent of the training data. In a subsequent analysis, the classification model, just established, was used to determine which type the WWR should be placed in. The results showed that the LT and the MT could be separated with high accuracy based on their brain activity. The brain regions that made most contribution to the separation of the types were: the left inferior frontal cortex and bilateral precuneus, both of which showed higher activity in the MT than in the LT; and the left putamen and right cerebellum which showed the opposite activity pattern. The results also showed that the brain activity for WWR was more similar to that of the LT and fluent speech than to that of the MT. These findings provide a neurological basis for separating the MT and the LT types, and support the widely-used MT/LT symptom grouping scheme. In addition, WWR play a similar role as the LT, and thus should be placed in the LT type

Iron Behaving Badly: Inappropriate Iron Chelation as a Major Contributor to the Aetiology of Vascular and Other Progressive Inflammatory and Degenerative Diseases

The production of peroxide and superoxide is an inevitable consequence of aerobic metabolism, and while these particular "reactive oxygen species" (ROSs) can exhibit a number of biological effects, they are not of themselves excessively reactive and thus they are not especially damaging at physiological concentrations. However, their reactions with poorly liganded iron species can lead to the catalytic production of the very reactive and dangerous hydroxyl radical, which is exceptionally damaging, and a major cause of chronic inflammation. We review the considerable and wide-ranging evidence for the involvement of this combination of (su)peroxide and poorly liganded iron in a large number of physiological and indeed pathological processes and inflammatory disorders, especially those involving the progressive degradation of cellular and organismal performance. These diseases share a great many similarities and thus might be considered to have a common cause (i.e. iron-catalysed free radical and especially hydroxyl radical generation). The studies reviewed include those focused on a series of cardiovascular, metabolic and neurological diseases, where iron can be found at the sites of plaques and lesions, as well as studies showing the significance of iron to aging and longevity. The effective chelation of iron by natural or synthetic ligands is thus of major physiological (and potentially therapeutic) importance. As systems properties, we need to recognise that physiological observables have multiple molecular causes, and studying them in isolation leads to inconsistent patterns of apparent causality when it is the simultaneous combination of multiple factors that is responsible. This explains, for instance, the decidedly mixed effects of antioxidants that have been observed, etc...Comment: 159 pages, including 9 Figs and 2184 reference