Perceptions of malaria and the utilisation of long lasting insecticide treated nets in a rural Niger delta community in Nigeria

Malaria represents a heavy disease burden with high death tolls in sub-Saharan countries, particularly among children less than five years of age and pregnant women. Misconceptions about the disease are reported to still exist in malaria endemic countries. Insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) have since been advocated as effective control measures against malaria, but how well are they utilised? Objectives: To explore and ascertain the perception of malaria and the utilisation of ITNs in a rural community in the swampy areas of Nigeria's Niger Delta region. Method: A cross-sectional, descriptive study was conducted using simple random sampling technique. Data were collected from household heads with the aid of pre-tested, semistructured, interviewer-administered questionnaires and analysed using SPSS version 17.0 Results: A good perception of the cause (86.9%), mode of transmission (92.8) and preventive measures of malaria were demonstrated. Although, the awareness of ITNs was high (75.6%) with health facilities (35.5%) and radios (33.5%) being the major sources of information, the utilisation rate of ITNs was poor (29%). Conclusion: Intensified efforts by government agencies and diverse stakeholders are recommended to increase the availability and access to ITNs, in order to improve their utilisation rate in rural communities, with adequate priority given to groups at higher risk. Such interventions when implemented consistently and comprehensively are likely to contribute to moving the nation further from malaria control and elimination, towards the possibilities of malaria vaccines and ultimate eradication

Temperate Performance Benefits after Heat, but Not Combined Heat and Hypoxic Training

© Copyright 2017 by the American College of Sports Medicine. Purpose Independent heat and hypoxic exposure can enhance temperate endurance performance in trained athletes, although their combined effects remain unknown. This study examined whether the addition of heat interval training during "live high, train low" (LHTL) hypoxic exposure would result in enhanced performance and physiological adaptations as compared with heat or temperate training. Methods Twenty-six well-trained runners completed 3 wk of interval training assigned to one of three conditions: 1) LHTL hypoxic exposure plus heat training (H + H; 3000 m for 13 h·d -1, train at 33°C, 60% relative humidity [RH]), 2) heat training with no hypoxic exposure (HOT, live at <600 m and train at 33°C, 60% RH), or 3) temperate training with no hypoxic exposure (CONT; live at <600 m and train at 14°C, 55% RH). Performance 3-km time-trials (3-km TT), running economy, hemoglobin mass, and plasma volume were assessed using magnitude-based inferences statistical approach before (Baseline), after (Post), and 3 wk (3wkP) after exposure. Results Compared with Baseline, 3-km TT performance was likely increased in HOT at 3wkP (-3.3% ± 1.3%; mean ± 90% confidence interval), with no performance improvement in either H + H or CONT. Hemoglobin mass increased by 3.8% ± 1.8% at Post in H + H only. Plasma volume in HOT was possibly elevated above H + H and CONT at Post but not at 3wkP. Correlations between changes in 3-km TT performance and physiological adaptations were unclear. Conclusion Incorporating heat-based training into a 3-wk training block can improve temperate performance at 3 wk after exposure, with athlete psychology, physiology, and environmental dose all important considerations. Despite hematological adaptations, the addition of LHTL to heat interval training has no greater 3-km TT performance benefit than temperate training alone

Caspase-3 and caspase-8 expression in breast cancer: caspase-3 is associated with survival

Impaired apoptosis is one of the hallmarks of cancer. Caspase-3 and -8 are key regulators of the apoptotic response and have been shown to interact with the calpain family, a group of cysteine proteases, during tumorigenesis. The current study sought to investigate the prognostic potential of caspase-3 and -8 in breast cancer, as well as the prognostic value of combinatorial caspase and calpain expression. A large cohort (n = 1902) of early stage invasive breast cancer patients was used to explore the expression of caspase-3 and -8. Protein expression was examined using standard immunohistochemistry on tissue microarrays. High caspase-3 expression, but not caspase-8, is significantly associated with adverse breast cancer-specific survival (P = 0.008 and P = 0.056, respectively). Multivariate analysis showed that caspase-3 remained an independent factor when confounding factors were included (hazard ratio (HR) 1.347, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.086–1.670; P = 0.007). The analyses in individual subgroups demonstrated the significance of caspase-3 expression in clinical outcomes in receptor positive (ER, PR or HER2) subgroups (P = 0.001) and in non-basal like subgroup (P = 0.029). Calpain expression had been previously assessed. Significant association was also found between high caspase-3/high calpain-1 and breast cancer-specific survival in the total patient cohort (P = 0.005) and basal-like subgroup (P = 0.034), as indicated by Kaplan–Meier analysis. Caspase-3 expression is associated with adverse breast cancer-specific survival in breast cancer patients, and provides additional prognostic values in distinct phenotypes. Combinatorial caspase and calpain expression can predict worse prognosis, especially in basal-like phenotypes. The findings warrant further validation studies in independent multi-centre patient cohorts

Multilevel models of age-related changes in facial shape in adolescents

Here we study the effects of age on facial shape in adolescents by using a method called multilevel principal components analysis (mPCA). An associated multilevel multivariate probability distribution is derived and expressions for the (conditional) probability of age-group membership are presented. This formalism is explored via Monte Carlo (MC) simulated data in the first dataset; where age is taken to increase the overall scale of a three-dimensional facial shape represented by 21 landmark points and all other “subjective” variations are related to the width of the face. Eigenvalue plots make sense and modes of variation correctly identify these two main factors at appropriate levels of the mPCA model. Component scores for both single-level PCA and mPCA show a strong trend with age. Conditional probabilities are shown to predict membership by age group and the Pearson correlation coefficient between actual and predicted group membership is r = 0.99. The effects of outliers added to the MC training data are reduced by the use of robust covariance matrix estimation and robust averaging of matrices. These methods are applied to another dataset containing 12 GPA-scaled (3D) landmark points for 195 shapes from 27 white, male schoolchildren aged 11 to 16 years old. 21% of variation in the shapes for this dataset was accounted for by age. Mode 1 at level 1 (age) via mPCA appears to capture an increase in face height with age, which is consistent with reported pubertal changes in children. Component scores for both single-level PCA and mPCA again show a distinct trend with age. Conditional probabilities are again shown to reflect membership by age group and the Pearson correlation coefficient is given by r = 0.63 in this case. These analyses are an excellent first test of the ability of multilevel statistical methods to model age-related changes in facial shape in adolescents

Spin Caloritronics

This is a brief overview of the state of the art of spin caloritronics, the science and technology of controlling heat currents by the electron spin degree of freedom (and vice versa).Comment: To be published in "Spin Current", edited by S. Maekawa, E. Saitoh, S. Valenzuela and Y. Kimura, Oxford University Pres

Potential climatic transitions with profound impact on Europe

We discuss potential transitions of six climatic subsystems with large-scale impact on Europe, sometimes denoted as tipping elements. These are the ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica, the Atlantic thermohaline circulation, Arctic sea ice, Alpine glaciers and northern hemisphere stratospheric ozone. Each system is represented by co-authors actively publishing in the corresponding field. For each subsystem we summarize the mechanism of a potential transition in a warmer climate along with its impact on Europe and assess the likelihood for such a transition based on published scientific literature. As a summary, the ‘tipping’ potential for each system is provided as a function of global mean temperature increase which required some subjective interpretation of scientific facts by the authors and should be considered as a snapshot of our current understanding. <br/

Dynamics of a Quantum Phase Transition and Relaxation to a Steady State

We review recent theoretical work on two closely related issues: excitation of an isolated quantum condensed matter system driven adiabatically across a continuous quantum phase transition or a gapless phase, and apparent relaxation of an excited system after a sudden quench of a parameter in its Hamiltonian. Accordingly the review is divided into two parts. The first part revolves around a quantum version of the Kibble-Zurek mechanism including also phenomena that go beyond this simple paradigm. What they have in common is that excitation of a gapless many-body system scales with a power of the driving rate. The second part attempts a systematic presentation of recent results and conjectures on apparent relaxation of a pure state of an isolated quantum many-body system after its excitation by a sudden quench. This research is motivated in part by recent experimental developments in the physics of ultracold atoms with potential applications in the adiabatic quantum state preparation and quantum computation.Comment: 117 pages; review accepted in Advances in Physic

Multitrait analysis of quantitative trait loci using Bayesian composite space approach

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Multitrait analysis of quantitative trait loci can capture the maximum information of experiment. The maximum-likelihood approach and the least-square approach have been developed to jointly analyze multiple traits, but it is difficult for them to include multiple QTL simultaneously into one model.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this article, we have successfully extended Bayesian composite space approach, which is an efficient model selection method that can easily handle multiple QTL, to multitrait mapping of QTL. There are many statistical innovations of the proposed method compared with Bayesian single trait analysis. The first is that the parameters for all traits are updated jointly by vector or matrix; secondly, for QTL in the same interval that control different traits, the correlation between QTL genotypes is taken into account; thirdly, the information about the relationship of residual error between the traits is also made good use of. The superiority of the new method over separate analysis was demonstrated by both simulated and real data. The computing program was written in FORTRAN and it can be available for request.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The results suggest that the developed new method is more powerful than separate analysis.</p

Actively evolving subglacial conduits and eskers initiate ice shelf channels at an Antarctic grounding line

Ice-shelf channels are long curvilinear tracts of thin ice found on Antarctic ice shelves. Many of them originate near the grounding line, but their formation mechanisms remain poorly understood. Here we use ice-penetrating radar data from Roi Baudouin Ice Shelf, East Antarctica, to infer that the morphology of several ice-shelf channels is seeded upstream of the grounding line by large basal obstacles indenting the ice from below. We interpret each obstacle as an esker ridge formed from sediments deposited by subglacial water conduits, and calculate that the eskers’ size grows towards the grounding line where deposition rates are maximum. Relict features on the shelf indicate that these linked systems of subglacial conduits and ice-shelf channels have been changing over the past few centuries. Because ice-shelf channels are loci where intense melting occurs to thin an ice shelf, these findings expose a novel link between subglacial drainage, sedimentation and ice-shelf stability