Changing contexts and critical moments: interim outcomes for children and young people living through involuntary relocation

The aim of this article is to understand how involuntary relocation – in the context of transformational regeneration – affects children and young people’s (CYP) interim outcomes through its impacts on residential contexts, and its intersections with their transitions and critical moments. Findings are based on a longitudinal qualitative study of 13 families’ (comprising 32 CYP) lives as they relocated from high rise flats to different housing and neighbourhoods over three years. Relocation altered two key contexts directly, home and neighbourhood, and may have indirectly altered the other contexts – peers, school and family. However, we found there were as many non-relocation related factors as relocation factors associated with outcomes, and a number of significant critical moments affecting CYP’s lives. Whilst relocation can seem the ‘big thing’ from the point of view of practitioners and researchers, from the perspective of CYP, it can seem a small part of the much bigger picture of change in their lives

A Population-Based Assessment of Rates of Bone Loss at Multiple Skeletal Sites: Evidence for Substantial Trabecular Bone Loss in Young Adult Women and Men

Using QCT, we made a longitudinal, population-based assessment of rates of bone loss over life at the distal radius, distal tibia, and lumbar spine. Cortical bone loss began in perimenopause in women and later in life in men. In contrast, trabecular bone loss began in young adulthood in both sexes

MRI in Rodent Models of Brain Disorders

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a well-established tool in clinical practice and research on human neurological disorders. Translational MRI research utilizing rodent models of central nervous system (CNS) diseases is becoming popular with the increased availability of dedicated small animal MRI systems. Projects utilizing this technology typically fall into one of two categories: 1) true “pre-clinical” studies involving the use of MRI as a noninvasive disease monitoring tool which serves as a biomarker for selected aspects of the disease and 2) studies investigating the pathomechanism of known human MRI findings in CNS disease models. Most small animal MRI systems operate at 4.7–11.7 Tesla field strengths. Although the higher field strength clearly results in a higher signal-to-noise ratio, which enables higher resolution acquisition, a variety of artifacts and limitations related to the specific absorption rate represent significant challenges in these experiments. In addition to standard T1-, T2-, and T2*-weighted MRI methods, all of the currently available advanced MRI techniques have been utilized in experimental animals, including diffusion, perfusion, and susceptibility weighted imaging, functional magnetic resonance imaging, chemical shift imaging, heteronuclear imaging, and 1H or 31P MR spectroscopy. Selected MRI techniques are also exclusively utilized in experimental research, including manganese-enhanced MRI, and cell-specific/molecular imaging techniques utilizing negative contrast materials. In this review, we describe technical and practical aspects of small animal MRI and provide examples of different MRI techniques in anatomical imaging and tract tracing as well as several models of neurological disorders, including inflammatory, neurodegenerative, vascular, and traumatic brain and spinal cord injury models, and neoplastic diseases