Winter wheat roots grow twice as deep as spring wheat roots, is this important for N uptake and N leaching losses?

Cropping systems comprising winter catch crops followed by spring wheat could reduce N leaching risks compared to traditional winter wheat systems in humid climates. We studied the soil mineral N (Ninorg) and root growth of winter- and spring wheat to 2.5 m depth during three years. Root depth of winter wheat (2.2 m) was twice that of spring wheat, and this was related to much lower amounts of Ninorg in the 1 to 2.5 m layer after winter wheat (81 kg Ninorg ha-1 less). When growing winter catch crops before spring wheat, N content in the 1 to 2.5 m layer after spring wheat was not different from that after winter wheat. The results suggest that by virtue of its deep rooting, winter wheat may not lead to high levels of leaching as it is often assumed in humid climates. Deep soil and root measurements (below 1 m) in this experiment were essential to answer the questions we posed

Immunization coverage and risk factors for failure to immunize within the Expanded Programme on Immunization in Kenya after introduction of new Haemophilus influenzae type b and hepatitis b virus antigens

Background: Kenya introduced a pentavalent vaccine including the DTP, Haemophilus influenzae type b and hepatitis b virus antigens in Nov 2001 and strengthened immunization services. We estimated immunization coverage before and after introduction, timeliness of vaccination and risk factors for failure to immunize in Kilifi district, Kenya. Methods: In Nov 2002 we performed WHO cluster-sample surveys of > 200 children scheduled for vaccination before or after introduction of pentavalent vaccine. In Mar 2004 we conducted a simple random sample (SRS) survey of 204 children aged 9 - 23 months. Coverage was estimated by inverse Kaplan-Meier survival analysis of vaccine- card and mothers' recall data and corroborated by reviewing administrative records from national and provincial vaccine stores. The contribution to timely immunization of distance from clinic, seasonal rainfall, mother's age, and family size was estimated by a proportional hazards model. Results: Immunization coverage for three DTP and pentavalent doses was 100% before and 91% after pentavalent vaccine introduction, respectively. By SRS survey, coverage was 88% for three pentavalent doses. The median age at first, second and third vaccine dose was 8, 13 and 18 weeks. Vials dispatched to Kilifi District during 2001 - 2003 would provide three immunizations for 92% of the birth cohort. Immunization rate ratios were reduced with every kilometre of distance from home to vaccine clinic (HR 0.95, CI 0.91 - 1.00), rainy seasons ( HR 0.73, 95% CI 0.61 - 0.89) and family size, increasing progressively up to 4 children ( HR 0.55, 95% CI 0.41 - 0.73). Conclusion: Vaccine coverage was high before and after introduction of pentavalent vaccine, but most doses were given late. Coverage is limited by seasonal factors and family siz

Maternal feeding practices and fussy eating in toddlerhood: A discordant twin analysis

Background: Parental feeding practices are thought to play a causal role in shaping a child's fussiness; however, a child-responsive model suggests that feeding practices may develop in response to a child's emerging appetitive characteristics. We used a novel twin study design to test the hypothesis that mothers vary their feeding practices for twin children who differ in their 'food fussiness', in support of a child-responsive model. Methods: Participants were mothers and their 16 month old twin children (n=2026) from Gemini, a British twin birth cohort of children born in 2007. Standardized psychometric measures of maternal 'pressure to eat', 'restriction' and 'instrumental feeding', as well as child 'food fussiness', were completed by mothers. Within-family analyses examined if twin-pair differences in 'food fussiness' were associated with differences in feeding practices using linear regression models. In a subset of twins (n=247 pairs) who were the most discordant (highest quartile) on 'food fussiness' (difference score≥.50), Paired Samples T-test were used to explore the magnitude of differences in feeding practices between twins. Between-family analyses used Complex Samples General Linear Models to examine associations between feeding practices and 'food fussiness'. Results: Within-pair differences in 'food fussiness' were associated with differential 'pressure to eat' and 'instrumental feeding' (ps<.001), but not with 'restriction'. In the subset of twins most discordant on 'food fussiness', mothers used more pressure (p<.001) and food rewards (p<.05) with the fussier twin. Between-family analyses indicated that 'pressure to eat' and 'instrumental feeding' were positively associated with 'food fussiness', while 'restriction' was negatively associated with 'food fussiness' (ps<.001). Conclusions: Mothers appear to subtly adjust their feeding practices according to their perceptions of their toddler's emerging fussy eating behavior. Specifically, the fussier toddler is pressured more than their less fussy co-twin, and is more likely to be offered food rewards. Guiding parents on how to respond to fussy eating may be an important aspect of promoting feeding practices that encourage food acceptance

Approach to Dyslipidemia, Lipodystrophy, and Cardiovascular Risk in Patients with HIV Infection

There is a significant prevalence (20%–80% depending on the population and the study) of lipid disorders and other cardiovascular risk factors in people living with HIV infection. This review focuses on HIV and HIV treatment–associated metabolic and cardiovascular concerns, including dyslipidemias, lipodystrophy syndromes, endothelial dysfunctions, and associated metabolic events such as insulin resistance. Emerging hypotheses of the underlying pathophysiology of these issues, with impact on selection of specific antiretroviral treatment (ART) strategies, therapy, and preventive approaches to decreasing cardiovascular risk and other problems associated with these syndromes are discussed. Screening for cardiovascular risk as part of the decision of starting antiretroviral therapy, and during care of patients with HIV regardless of ART therapy status, is suggested with particular areas of focus. Statins, other hyperlipidemic therapies, treatment for specific problems arising due to lipodystrophy, and implications on ART selection to avoid drug interactions and adverse effects are also discussed

A phase II multi-institutional study assessing simultaneous in-field boost helical tomotherapy for 1-3 brain metastases

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Our research group has previously published a dosimetric planning study that demonstrated that a 60 Gy/10 fractions intralesional boost with whole-brain radiotherapy (WBRT) to 30 Gy/10 fractions was biologically equivalent with a stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) boost of 18 Gy/1 fraction with 30 Gy/10 fractions WBRT. Helical tomotherapy (HT) was found to be dosimetrically equivalent to SRS in terms of target coverage and superior to SRS in terms of normal tissue tolerance. A phase I trial has been now completed at our institution with a total of 60 enrolled patients and 48 evaluable patients. The phase II dose has been determined to be the final phase I cohort dose of 60 Gy/10 fractions.</p> <p>Methods/Design</p> <p>The objective of this clinical trial is to subject the final phase I cohort dose to a phase II assessment of the endpoints of overall survival, intracranial control (ICC) and intralesional control (ILC). We hypothesize HT would be considered unsuitable for further study if the median OS for patients treated with the HT SIB technique is degraded by 2 months, or the intracranial progression-free rates (ICC and ILC) are inferior by 10% or greater compared to the expected results with treatment by whole brain plus SRS as defined by the RTOG randomized trial. A sample size of 93 patients was calculated based on these parameters as well as the statistical assumptions of alpha = 0.025 and beta = 0.1 due to multiple statistical testing. Secondary assessments of toxicity, health-related quality-of-life, cognitive changes, and tumor response are also integrated into this research protocol.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>To summarize, the purpose of this phase II trial is to assess this non-invasive alternative to SRS in terms of central nervous system (CNS) control when compared to SRS historical controls. A follow-up phase III trial may be required depending on the results of this trial in order to definitively assess non-inferiority/superiority of this approach. Ultimately, the purpose of this line of research is to provide patients with metastatic disease to the brain a shorter course, dose intense, non-invasive radiation treatment with equivalent or improved CNS control/survival and health-related quality-of-life/toxicity profile when compared to SRS radiotherapy.</p> <p>Trial registration</p> <p>Clinicaltrials.gov - <a href="http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01543542">NCT01543542</a>.</p

The fitness consequences of inbreeding in natural populations and their implications for species conservation – a systematic map

Background: Threatened species often have small and isolated populations where mating among relatives can result in inbreeding depression increasing extinction risk. Effective management is hampered by a lack of syntheses summarising the magnitude of, and variation in inbreeding depression. Here we describe the nature and scope of the literature examining phenotypic/fitness consequences of inbreeding, to provide a foundation for future syntheses and management. Methods: We searched the literature for articles documenting the impact of inbreeding in natural populations. Article titles, abstracts and full-texts were assessed against a priori defined criteria, and information relating to study design, quality and other factors that may influence inbreeding responses (e.g. population size) was extracted from relevant articles. Results: The searches identified 11457 articles, of which 614 were assessed as relevant and included in the systematic map (corresponding to 703 distinct studies). Most studies (663) assessed within-population inbreeding resulting from self-fertilisation or consanguineous pairings, while 118 studies assessed among-population inbreeding due to drift load. Plants were the most studied taxon (469 studies) followed by insects (52 studies) and birds (43 studies). Most studies investigated the effects of inbreeding on components of fitness (e.g. survival or fecundity; 648 studies) but measurements were typically under laboratory/greenhouse conditions (486 studies). Observations were also often restricted to the first inbred generation (607 studies) and studies frequently lacked contextual information (e.g. population size). Conclusions: Our systematic map describes the scope and quality of the evidence describing the phenotypic consequences of inbreeding. The map reveals substantial evidence relating to inbreeding responses exists, but highlights information is still limited for some aspects, including the effects of multiple generations of inbreeding. The systematic map allowed us to define several conservation-relevant questions, where sufficient data exists to support systematic reviews, e.g. How do inbreeding responses vary with population size? However, we found that such syntheses are likely to be constrained by incomplete reporting of critical contextual information. Our systematic map employed the same rigorous literature assessment methods as systematic review, including a novel survey of study quality and thus provides a robust foundation to guide future research and syntheses seeking to inform conservation decision-making

Mechanical Properties of Plant Underground Storage Organs and Implications for Dietary Models of Early Hominins

The diet of early human ancestors has received renewed theoretical interest since the discovery of elevated d13C values in the enamel of Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus. As a result, the hominin diet is hypothesized to have included C4 grass or the tissues of animals which themselves consumed C4 grass. On mechanical grounds, such a diet is incompatible with the dental morphology and dental microwear of early hominins. Most inferences, particularly for Paranthropus, favor a diet of hard or mechanically resistant foods. This discrepancy has invigorated the longstanding hypothesis that hominins consumed plant underground storage organs (USOs). Plant USOs are attractive candidate foods because many bulbous grasses and cormous sedges use C4 photosynthesis. Yet mechanical data for USOs—or any putative hominin food—are scarcely known. To fill this empirical void we measured the mechanical properties of USOs from 98 plant species from across sub-Saharan Africa. We found that rhizomes were the most resistant to deformation and fracture, followed by tubers, corms, and bulbs. An important result of this study is that corms exhibited low toughness values (mean = 265.0 J m-2) and relatively high Young’s modulus values (mean = 4.9 MPa). This combination of properties fits many descriptions of the hominin diet as consisting of hard-brittle objects. When compared to corms, bulbs are tougher (mean = 325.0 J m-2) and less stiff (mean = 2.5 MPa). Again, this combination of traits resembles dietary inferences, especially for Australopithecus, which is predicted to have consumed soft-tough foods. Lastly, we observed the roasting behavior of Hadza hunter-gatherers and measured the effects of roasting on the toughness on undomesticated tubers. Our results support assumptions that roasting lessens the work of mastication, and, by inference, the cost of digestion. Together these findings provide the first mechanical basis for discussing the adaptive advantages of roasting tubers and the plausibility of USOs in the diet of early hominins

The impact of parenthood on environmental attitudes and behaviour: a longitudinal investigation of the legacy hypothesis

Willingness to engage in sustainable actions may be limited by the psychological distance of climate change. In this study, we test the legacy hypothesis, which holds that having children leads parents to consider the legacy left to offspring in respect of environmental quality. Using the Understanding Society dataset, a longitudinal survey representative of the UK population (n = 18,176), we assess how having children may change people’s individual environmental attitudes and behaviour. Results indicate that having a new child is associated with a small decrease in the frequency of a few environmental behaviours. Only parents with already high environmental concern show a small increase in the desire to act more sustainably after the birth of their first child. Overall, the results do not provide evidence in support of the legacy hypothesis in terms of individual-level environmental attitudes and behaviours. We argue that the transition to parenthood is a time where concern is prioritised on the immediate wellbeing of the child and not on the future environmental threats

Cross-platform genetic discovery of small molecule products of metabolism and application to clinical outcomes

Circulating levels of small molecules or metabolites are highly heritable, but the impact of genetic differences in metabolism on human health is not well understood. In this cross-platform, genome-wide meta-analysis of 174 metabolite levels across six cohorts including up to 86,507 participants (70% unpublished data), we identify 499 (362 novel) genome-wide significant associations (p<4.9×10 -10 ) at 144 (94 novel) genomic regions. We show that inheritance of blood metabolite levels in the general population is characterized by pleiotropy, allelic heterogeneity, rare and common variants with large effects, non-linear associations, and enrichment for nonsynonymous variation in transporter and enzyme encoding genes. The majority of identified genes are known to be involved in biochemical processes regulating metabolite levels and to cause monogenic inborn errors of metabolism linked to specific metabolites, such as ASNS (rs17345286, MAF=0.27) and asparagine levels. We illustrate the influence of metabolite-associated variants on human health including a shared signal at GLP2R (p.Asp470Asn) associated with higher citrulline levels, body mass index, fasting glucose-dependent insulinotropic peptide and type 2 diabetes risk, and demonstrate beta-arrestin signalling as the underlying mechanism in cellular models. We link genetically-higher serine levels to a 95% reduction in the likelihood of developing macular telangiectasia type 2 [odds ratio (95% confidence interval) per standard deviation higher levels 0.05 (0.03-0.08; p=9.5×10 -30 )]. We further demonstrate the predictive value of genetic variants identified for serine or glycine levels for this rare and difficult to diagnose degenerative retinal disease [area under the receiver operating characteristic curve: 0.73 (95% confidence interval: 0.70-0.75)], for which low serine availability, through generation of deoxysphingolipids, has recently been shown to be causally relevant. These results show that integration of human genomic variation with circulating small molecule data obtained across different measurement platforms enables efficient discovery of genetic regulators of human metabolism and translation into clinical insights.M.P. was supported by a fellowship from the German Research Foundation (DFG PI 1446/2-1). C.O. was founded by an early career fellowship at Homerton College, University of Cambridge. L. B. L. W. acknowledges funding by the Wellcome Trust (WT083442AIA). J.G. was supported by grants from the Medical Research Council (MC_UP_A090_1006, MC_PC_13030, MR/P011705/1 and MR/P01836X/1). Work in the Reimann/Gribble laboratories was supported by the Wellcome Trust (106262/Z/14/Z and 106263/Z/14/Z), UK Medical Research Council (MRC_MC_UU_12012/3) and PhD funding for EKB from MedImmune/AstraZeneca. Praveen Surendran is supported by a Rutherford Fund Fellowship from the Medical Research Council grant MR/S003746/1. A. W. is supported by a BHF-Turing Cardiovascular Data Science Award and by the EC-Innovative Medicines Initiative (BigData@Heart). J.D. is funded by the National Institute for Health Research [Senior Investigator Award] [*]. The EPIC-Norfolk study (https://doi.org/10.22025/2019.10.105.00004) has received funding from the Medical Research Council (MR/N003284/1 and MC-UU_12015/1) and Cancer Research UK (C864/A14136). The genetics work in the EPIC-Norfolk study was funded by the Medical Research Council (MC_PC_13048). Metabolite measurements in the EPIC-Norfolk study were supported by the MRC Cambridge Initiative in Metabolic Science (MR/L00002/1) and the Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking under EMIF grant agreement no. 115372. We are grateful to all the participants who have been part of the project and to the many members of the study teams at the University of Cambridge who have enabled this research. The Fenland Study is supported by the UK Medical Research Council (MC_UU_12015/1 and MC_PC_13046). Participants in the INTERVAL randomised controlled trial were recruited with the active collaboration of NHS Blood and Transplant England (www.nhsbt.nhs.uk), which has supported field work and other elements of the trial. DNA extraction and genotyping was co-funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), the NIHR BioResource (http://bioresource.nihr.ac.uk) and the NIHR [Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre at the Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust] [*]. Nightingale Health NMR assays were funded by the European Commission Framework Programme 7 (HEALTH-F2-2012-279233). Metabolon Metabolomics assays were funded by the NIHR 26 BioResource and the National Institute for Health Research [Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre at the Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust] [*]. The academic coordinating centre for INTERVAL was supported by core funding from: NIHR Blood and Transplant Research Unit in Donor Health and Genomics (NIHR BTRU-2014-10024), UK Medical Research Council (MR/L003120/1), British Heart Foundation (SP/09/002; RG/13/13/30194; RG/18/13/33946) and the NIHR [Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre at the Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust] [*].The academic coordinating centre would like to thank blood donor centre staff and blood donors for participating in the INTERVAL trial. This work was supported by Health Data Research UK, which is funded by the UK Medical Research Council, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, Department of Health and Social Care (England), Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates, Health and Social Care Research and Development Division (Welsh Government), Public Health Agency (Northern Ireland), British Heart Foundation and Wellcome. *The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care. UK Biobank: This research has been conducted using the UK Biobank resource under Application Number 44448

Association between anemia and quality of life in a population sample of individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

BACKGROUND: Several studies investigated the association of anemia with health related quality of life (HRQL) in patients with chronic disease. However, there is little evidence regarding the association of anemia with HRQL in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). METHODS: This is a post-hoc analysis of a study which enrolled a population of adults aged 35–79 randomly selected from residents of Erie and Niagara Counties, NY, between 1996 and 2000. In addition to demographic information and physical measurements, we obtained spirometry data and hemoglobin levels. We used modified Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) criteria to define COPD, and World Health Organization (WHO) criteria to define anemia. To assess HRQL we used the Short Form-36 (SF-36) to assess physical functioning (PF), physical component summary (PCS) measures and mental component summary (MCS) measures. RESULTS: In the entire study population (n = 2704), respondents with anemia had lower scores on the physical functioning domain [45.4 (SD10.9) vs. 49.2 (SD 9.1); p < 0.0001]. Among patients with COPD (n = 495) the PF scores (39.9 vs. 45.4) and the PCS (41.9 vs. 45.9) were significantly lower in individuals with anemia compared to those without. In multiple regression analysis, the association between hemoglobin and PCS was positive (regression coefficient 0.02, p = 0.003). There was no significant association of hemoglobin with PF scores or the mental component summary measure after adjusting for covariates in patients with COPD. CONCLUSION: In patients with moderate to very severe COPD anemia may be associated with worse HRQL. However, co-morbidities may explain part or all of this association in these patients