The Weight of Opinion - The early childhood sector's perceptions about childhood overweight and obesty

Early childhood is a critical time in a child’s development when the foundations for good or poor eating habits and self-regulation of appetite are laid. Because long day care centres and preschools structure the daily environment in which the children in their care play and learn, the early childhood sector can make an important contribution to preventing and (sometimes) dealing with childhood overweight and obesity. Whether through the direct provision of food at child care or rules/suggestions surrounding the food that children are to bring to preschool, they exert some control over what children consume while in their care. Similarly, they control the amount of active play time that is available during the day. Long day care centres and preschools may also incorporate messages about healthy eating and the benefits of active play into their curriculum, and may provide modelling of good eating habits by the teachers/workers during snack or meal times. They may also regulate the kinds of fundraising opportunities used to support their preschools/centres (e.g. no chocolates or donut fundraisers), and provide parents with information and support regarding the development of healthy habits. This report presents the findings from a series of in-depth interviews on the perceptions of early childhood staff about the issue of childhood overweight and obesity and their role in supporting healthy eating and active play.Interviews were conducted with eleven directors and staff members from four long day care centres and four preschools, located in three areas within metropolitan Sydney and one area in rural NSW. The results show that the early childhood educators recognise childhood overweight and obesity as a serious issue and appreciate the complexity of the causes of the increasing prevalence of overweight. They viewed these issues as part of their core mission as early childhood educators, and worked under a philosophy of close partnership with families (and, in some cases, with local health professionals). All of the participants also acknowledged that parents can be sensitive about their children’s weight, that there can be uncertainty surrounding definitions of overweight among young children, and that there can be emotions around the provision of food and children’s eating patterns. At the same time, interviewees recognised that the early childhood sector can only do so much by themselves and that their efforts need to be complemented by efforts to support parents and change cultural and environmental factors that make it difficult to eat healthy foods and get adequate physical activity, especially considering the fact that not all children have access to or participate in early childhood education. However, given the large proportion of children and parents who do have contact with the early childhood sector, the potential to strengthen the role of the sector in preventing childhood overweight and obesity and promoting healthy eating and active play was highlighted in the research. The interviewees gave practical suggestions for how that could occur. They wanted more early childhood-friendly games, activities, books, songs, and posters about healthy eating and physical activity, more resources they could give directly to parents, more guidance on optimal nutrition policies (for preschools), more training for themselves (including information on when to be concerned about children’s weight and what to do about it), and more access to health professionals who could come and speak to them and the parents.This research was funded by NSW Health and The Ross Family Trust. Principal Investigators: Dr Michael Booth and Lesley King. The authors would like to thank Louise Erickson for her valuable contribution to this project, as well as all the preschools and child care centres who participated in the study

A high-resolution fuel type mapping procedure based on satellite imagery and neural networks: Updating fuel maps for wildfire simulators

A major limitation in the simulation of forest fires involves the proper characterization of the surface vegetation over the study area, based on land cover maps. Unfortunately, these maps may be outdated, with areas where vegetation is either not documented or inaccurately portrayed. These limitations may impair the predictions of wildfire simulators or the design of risk maps and prevention plans. This study proposes a complete procedure for fuel type classification using satellite imagery and fully-connected neural networks. Specifically, our work is based on pixel- based processing cells, generating high-resolution maps. The field study is located in the Northeast of Castilla y Leo ́n, a central Spanish region, and the Rothermel criteria was followed for the fuel classification. The results record an accuracy of close to 78% on the test sets for the two studied settings, improving on the results reported in previous studies and ratifying the robustness of our approach. Additionally, the confusion matrix analysis and the per-class statistics computed confirm good reliability for all fuel types in a cross-validation framework. The predicted maps can be used on wildfire simulators through GIS tools.BERC 2022–2025 PID2019-107685RB-I00 European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the Department of Education of the regional government, the Junta of Castilla y Leo ́n, (Grant contract SA089P20); the European Union’s Horizon 2020 – Research and Innovation Framework Program under Grant agreement ID 101036926

Crossover from anomalous to normal diffusion: truncated power-law noise correlations and applications to dynamics in lipid bilayers

The emerging diffusive dynamics in many complex systems shows a characteristic crossover behaviour from anomalous to normal diffusion which is otherwise fitted by two independent power-laws. A prominent example for a subdiffusive-diffusive crossover are viscoelastic systems such as lipid bilayer membranes, while superdiffusive-diffusive crossovers occur in systems of actively moving biological cells. We here consider the general dynamics of a stochastic particle driven by so-called tempered fractional Gaussian noise, that is noise with Gaussian amplitude and power-law correlations, which are cut off at some mesoscopic time scale. Concretely we consider such noise with built-in exponential or power-law tempering, driving an overdamped Langevin equation (fractional Brownian motion) and fractional Langevin equation motion. We derive explicit expressions for the mean squared displacement and correlation functions, including different shapes of the crossover behaviour depending on the concrete tempering, and discuss the physical meaning of the tempering. In the case of power-law tempering we also find a crossover behaviour from faster to slower superdiffusion and slower to faster subdiffusion. As a direct application of our model we demonstrate that the obtained dynamics quantitatively described the subdiffusion-diffusion and subdiffusion-subdiffusion crossover in lipid bilayer systems. We also show that a model of tempered fractional Brownian motion recently proposed by Sabzikar and Meerschaert leads to physically very different behaviour with a seemingly paradoxical ballistic long time scaling

Multiparametric Mri in the Management of Prostate Cancer: an Update-A Narrative Review

The growing interest in multiparametric MRI is leading to important changes in the diagnostic process of prostate cancer. MRI-targeted biopsy is likely to become a standard for the diagnosis of prostate cancer in the next years. Despite it is well known that MRI has no role as a staging technique, it is clear that multiparametric MRI may be of help in active surveillance protocols. Noteworthy, MRI in active surveillance is not recommended, but a proper understanding of its potential may be of help in achieving the goals of a delayed treatment strategy. Moreover, the development of minimally invasive techniques, like laparoscopic and robotic surgery, has led to greater expectations as regard to the functional outcomes of radical prostatectomy. Multiparametric MRI may play a role in planning surgical strategies, with the aim to provide the highest oncologic outcome with a minimal impact on the quality of life. We maintain that a proper anatomic knowledge of prostate lesions may allow the surgeon to achieve a better result in planning as well as in performing surgery and help the surgeon and the patient engage in a shared decision in planning a more effective strategy for prostate cancer control and treatment. This review highlights the advantages and the limitations of multiparametric MRI in prostate cancer diagnosis, in active surveillance and in planning surgery

Enhancement of cytosine arabinoside-induced apoptosis in human myeloblastic leukemia cells by NFkB/Rel- specific decoy oligodeoxynucleotides

The activity of NF-kB/Rel nuclear factors is known to inhibit apoptosis in various cell types. We investigated whether the subtraction of NF-kB/Rel activity influenced the response of 11 AML (M1, M2 and M4) patients’ cells to AraC. To this end we used a phosphorothioate double-stranded decoy oligodeoxynucleotide (ODN) carrying the NF-kB/Rel- consensus sequence. Cell incubation with this ODN, but not its mutated (scrambled) form used as a control, resulted in abating the NF-kB/Rel nuclear levels in these cells, as verified by electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA) of cells’ nuclear extracts. We incubated the leukemic cells with AraC (32 or 1 mM), in either the absence or presence of the decoy or the scrambled ODN, and analyzed cell apoptosis. The spontaneous cell apoptosis detectable in the absence of AraC (,25%) was not modulated by the oligonucleotide presence in cell cultures. On the other hand, in 10 of the 11 samples tested, the decoy kB, but not the scrambled ODN significantly (P ,0.01 in a Student’s t test) enhanced cell apoptotic response to AraC. Such an effect was particularly remarkable at low AraC doses (1 mM). These findings indicate that NF-kB/Rel activity influences response to AraC in human primary myeloblastic cells, and suggests that the inhibition of NF-kB/Rel factors can improve the effect of chemotherapy in AM

Cardiovascular and thrombophilic risk factors for idiopathic sudden sensorineural hearing loss

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Elbow monoarthritis: an atypical onset of juvenile idiopathic arthritis

Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) is the most common chronic rheumatic condition in childhood and an important cause of short and long term disability. Oligoarthritis is defined as an arthritis that affects four o fewer joints during the first 6 months of disease. The large majority of patients within this category belongs to a quite well defined disease which is not observed in adults. It is characterized by an early onset (before 6 years of age), an asymmetric arthritis involving mainly large joints, a female predilection, a high frequency of positive antinuclear antibodies (ANA), a high risk for developing chronic iridocyclitis and consistent HLA associations. We describe 3 clinical cases who presented monoarthritis of the elbow as early sign of oligoarticular JIA. All patients showed inflammatory markers elevation and 2/3 were ANA positive. MRI showed the presence of synovial inflammation without bone involvement. Intraarticular triamcinolone hexacetonide, led to remission in one case, while in the other two there was a re-activation of the disease treated with NSAIDs and/or MTX. The reported cases represent 0.6% of 490 patients with JIA followed by our unit in the last 10 years. Cases of exclusive involvement of the elbow at onset of JIA in literature are rare. Therefore, we report 3 cases of monoarthritis of the elbow as initial sign of oligoarticular JIA, a very atypical onset of this disease