Prevalence of the metabolic syndrome in Chinese adolescents

Since national figures on the occurrence of metabolic syndrome among Chinese adolescents are lacking, this study aims to estimate its prevalence and distribution among Chinese youngsters. The 2002 China National Nutrition and Health Survey is a nationally representative cross-sectional study. Applying the criteria for US adolescents, we estimated the prevalence of metabolic syndrome among 2761 adolescents aged 15 to 19 years. The prevalence of metabolic syndrome among Chinese adolescents overall was 3·7% (10% in US adolescents). It was 35·2 %, 23·4% and 2·3% among adolescents who were overweight (BMI $95th percentile), at risk of overweight (BMI between 85th and 95th percentile) and normal weight (BMI below the 85th percentile), respectively. Urban boys had the highest rate (5·8$85th percentile and one or two parent(s) with metabolic syndrome, the prevalence was 46·4 %. A total of 96% of overweight adolescents had at least one and 74·1% overweight adolescents had at least two abnormalities of metabolic syndrome. Based on these figures, it is estimated that more than three million Chinese adolescents have metabolic syndrome. Both overweight and metabolic syndrome prevalence among adolescents are still relatively low in China, but the prevalence of metabolic syndrome among Chinese overweight adolescents is similar to those living in the USA

USCID fourth international conference

Presented at the Role of irrigation and drainage in a sustainable future: USCID fourth international conference on irrigation and drainage on October 3-6, 2007 in Sacramento, California.Includes bibliographical references.This paper covers considerations in VFD applications, plus details a study performed by the Irrigation Training and Research Center (ITRC) to determine motor performances under varying speeds (controlled by a VFD) and loads

Cosmic Duality in Quintom Universe

In this paper we study the duality in two-field Quintom models of Dark Energy. We find that an expanding universe dominated by Quintom-A field is dual to a contracting universe with Quintom-B field

Disease-Associated Mutations Prevent GPR56-Collagen III Interaction

GPR56 is a member of the adhesion G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) family. Mutations in GPR56 cause a devastating human brain malformation called bilateral frontoparietal polymicrogyria (BFPP). Using the N-terminal fragment of GPR56 (GPR56N) as a probe, we have recently demonstrated that collagen III is the ligand of GPR56 in the developing brain. In this report, we discover a new functional domain in GPR56N, the ligand binding domain. This domain contains four disease-associated mutations and two N-glycosylation sites. Our study reveals that although glycosylation is not required for ligand binding, each of the four disease-associated mutations completely abolish the ligand binding ability of GPR56. Our data indicates that these four single missense mutations cause BFPP mostly by abolishing the ability of GPR56 to bind to its ligand, collagen III, in addition to affecting GPR56 protein surface expression as previously shown

Inflationary universe in loop quantum cosmology

Loop quantum cosmology provides a nice solution of avoiding the big bang singularity through a big bounce mechanism in the high energy region. In loop quantum cosmology an inflationary universe is emergent after the big bounce, no matter what matter component is filled in the universe. A super-inflation phase without phantom matter will appear in a certain way in the initial stage after the bounce; then the universe will undergo a normal inflation stage. We discuss the condition of inflation in detail in this framework. Also, for slow-roll inflation, we expect the imprint from the effects of the loop quantum cosmology should be left in the primordial perturbation power spectrum. However, we show that this imprint is too weak to be observed.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures; accepted for publication in JCA

Predicting the Digestible Energy of Rapeseed Meal from Its Chemical Composition in Growing-finishing Pigs

Two experiments were conducted to establish a digestible energy (DE) content prediction model of rapeseed meal for growing-finishing pig based on rapeseed meal’s chemical composition. In experiment 1, observed linear relationships between the determined DE content of 22 rapeseed meal calibration samples and proximate nutrients, gross energy (GE) and neutral detergent fiber (NDF) were used to develop the DE prediction model. In experiment 2, 4 samples of rapeseed meal selected at random from the primary rapeseed growing regions of China were used for testing the accuracy of DE prediction models. The results indicated that the DE was negatively correlated with NDF (r = −0.86) and acid detergent fiber (ADF) (r = −0.73) contents, and moderately correlated with gross energy (GE; r = 0.56) content in rapeseed meal calibration samples. In contrast, no significant correlations were found for crude protein, ether extract, crude fiber and ash contents. According to the regression analysis, NDF or both NDF and GE were found to be useful for the DE prediction models. Two prediction models: DE = 16.775−0.147×NDF (R2 = 0.73) and DE = 11.848−0.131×NDF+0.231×GE (R2 = 0.76) were obtained. The maximum absolute difference between the in vivo DE determinations and the predicted DE values was 0.62 MJ/kg and the relative difference was 5.21%. Therefore, it was concluded that, for growing-finishing pigs, these two prediction models could be used to predict the DE content of rapeseed meal with acceptable accuracy