Value of Social Science Research Often Measured by What You Don\u27t See

In early April, our UCF colleagues at the Florida Space Institute secured a $55 million grant to produce an instrument for space research. Congratulations

\u27Everything I Love is Illegal, Immoral or Against the Advice of the Surgeon General\u27

The recent situation of TV anchor Jennifer Livingston in La Crosse, Wisc., offers a glimpse into how external indicators of health are becoming stigmatized in the public-health efforts to battle the “epidemic of obesity.

The Future of Health Care? Lessons of a Simple Model

Transforming health care is as much about social change and resistance as it is about individual health and party politics

\u27Smart\u27 Justice is Based on More Than Just Reducing Costs

I attended a statewide “justice summit” in December, but left wondering about how some people think we should achieve that

Violence is Not a Virus, but it is Transmitted

Recent mass shootings have again brought out the violence is a disease crowd. Their thinking is that if we reduce the availability of firearms, we will decrease violence

Family Violence: Victim, Perpetrator And Service Provider Perceptions Of The Nature Of, Factors Associated With, And Responses To Wife-Battering - An Australian Sample

This research investigates the varying perceptions of victims, perpetrators, and service providers of factors associated with wife battering, and responses to it. First, attention is given to pregnancy as a potentially vulnerable period for battered women. Second, the impact of wife battering for the battered women in this study has been that of "learned hopefulness", as opposed to the "learned helplessness" commonly assumed. "Hope" is a significant factor influencing the women's decision to leave a battering relationship. Third, the three-way focus (victims, perpetrators and service providers), which has been rare in previous research on wife-battering, is very important in its revelation of substantial differences in perceptions and attitudes. For example, the findings point to the identification of the power of service providers in dominating the nature of public discussion of wife battering in ways which are to a significant extent at odds with the views and needs of service users. The recommendations flowing from this finding should make a significant contribution to public debate about the nature of, and factors associated with, wife battering and the desirable responses to it. The conclusions of this study speak with and for those directly affected by wife battering. It is recommended that problems should drive and direct treatment for those in need of such; organisational philosophy, particularly service provision, should not direct treatment, intervention and/or response. Wife battering should remain entirely under the ownership of those who lived it instead of being managed and manipulated. This is required if we wish to narrow the gap between empirical evidence and organisational philosophy

Genetic risk and a primary role for cell-mediated immune mechanisms in multiple sclerosis.

Multiple sclerosis is a common disease of the central nervous system in which the interplay between inflammatory and neurodegenerative processes typically results in intermittent neurological disturbance followed by progressive accumulation of disability. Epidemiological studies have shown that genetic factors are primarily responsible for the substantially increased frequency of the disease seen in the relatives of affected individuals, and systematic attempts to identify linkage in multiplex families have confirmed that variation within the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) exerts the greatest individual effect on risk. Modestly powered genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have enabled more than 20 additional risk loci to be identified and have shown that multiple variants exerting modest individual effects have a key role in disease susceptibility. Most of the genetic architecture underlying susceptibility to the disease remains to be defined and is anticipated to require the analysis of sample sizes that are beyond the numbers currently available to individual research groups. In a collaborative GWAS involving 9,772 cases of European descent collected by 23 research groups working in 15 different countries, we have replicated almost all of the previously suggested associations and identified at least a further 29 novel susceptibility loci. Within the MHC we have refined the identity of the HLA-DRB1 risk alleles and confirmed that variation in the HLA-A gene underlies the independent protective effect attributable to the class I region. Immunologically relevant genes are significantly overrepresented among those mapping close to the identified loci and particularly implicate T-helper-cell differentiation in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis

A genome-wide association study in Europeans and South Asians identifies five new loci for coronary artery disease

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Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

Abdominal aortic aneurysm is associated with a variant in low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein 1

Abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is a common cause of morbidity and mortality and has a significant heritability. We carried out a genome-wide association discovery study of 1866 patients with AAA and 5435 controls and replication of promising signals (lead SNP with a p value < 1 × 10-5) in 2871 additional cases and 32,687 controls and performed further follow-up in 1491 AAA and 11,060 controls. In the discovery study, nine loci demonstrated association with AAA (p < 1 × 10-5). In the replication sample, the lead SNP at one of these loci, rs1466535, located within intron 1 of low-density-lipoprotein receptor-related protein 1 (LRP1) demonstrated significant association (p = 0.0042). We confirmed the association of rs1466535 and AAA in our follow-up study (p = 0.035). In a combined analysis (6228 AAA and 49182 controls), rs1466535 had a consistent effect size and direction in all sample sets (combined p = 4.52 × 10-10, odds ratio 1.15 [1.10-1.21]). No associations were seen for either rs1466535 or the 12q13.3 locus in independent association studies of coronary artery disease, blood pressure, diabetes, or hyperlipidaemia, suggesting that this locus is specific to AAA. Gene-expression studies demonstrated a trend toward increased LRP1 expression for the rs1466535 CC genotype in arterial tissues; there was a significant (p = 0.029) 1.19-fold (1.04-1.36) increase in LRP1 expression in CC homozygotes compared to TT homozygotes in aortic adventitia. Functional studies demonstrated that rs1466535 might alter a SREBP-1 binding site and influence enhancer activity at the locus. In conclusion, this study has identified a biologically plausible genetic variant associated specifically with AAA, and we suggest that this variant has a possible functional role in LRP1 expression