“We can all just get on a bus and go” : Rethinking independent mobility in the context of the universal provision of free bus travel to young Londoners

This paper uses qualitative data from interviews with 118 young Londoners (age 12-18) to examine how the universal provision of free bus travel has affected young people’s independent mobility. Drawing on Sen’s ‘capabilities approach’, we argue that free bus travel enhanced young Londoners’ capability to shape their daily mobility, both directly by increasing financial access and indirectly by facilitating the acquisition of the necessary skills, travelling companions and confidence. These capabilities in turn extended both opportunity freedoms (e.g. facilitating non-“necessary” recreational and social trips) and process freedoms (e.g. feeling more independent by decreasing reliance on parents). Moreover, the universal nature of the entitlement rendered buses a socially inclusive way for groups to travel and spend time together, thereby enhancing group-level capabilities. We believe this attention to individual and group capabilities for self-determination provides the basis for a broader and more child-centred view of ‘independent mobility’ than the typical research focus upon ‘travelling without an adult’ and acquiring parental permissions.Peer reviewe

Age, left atrial dimension and arterial stiffness after external cardioversion of atrial fibrillation. A vascular component in arrhythmia maintenance? Results from a preliminary study.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most frequent arrhythmia in elderly patients. Aims of this study were to evaluate the predictors of arterial stiffness after external cardioversion (ECV) of AF and to establish whether a link exists between vascular properties and left atrial diameter (LAD). METHODS: We studied 33 patients (age 73 ± 12 years). After 5 h from ECV of persistent AF, an echocardiogram was recorded and arterial stiffness was evaluated with cardio-ankle vascular stiffness index (CAVI). RESULTS: In multivariate analysis (R = 0.538, p = 0.006), CAVI (mean 9.60 ± 1.63) increased with age (p = 0.018) and with an AF length ≤3 months (p = 0.022). LAD was significantly related to CAVI (p = 0.007) even after adjustment for interventricular septum thickness (p = 0.018) (R = 0.574, p = 0.002). CONCLUSIONS: In patients with AF, immediately after ECV, arterial stiffness is associated with age and AF length, and could represent an important factor for left atrium remodeling and, therefore, for AF maintenance

The eventization of leisure and the strange death of alternative Leeds

The communicative potential of city spaces as leisure spaces is a central assumption of political activism and the creation of alternative, counter-cultural and subcultural scenes. However, such potential for city spaces is limited by the gentrification, privatization and eventization of city centres in the wake of wider societal and cultural struggles over leisure, work and identity formation. In this paper, we present research on alternative scenes in the city of Leeds to argue that the eventization of the city centre has led to a marginalization and of alternative scenes on the fringes of the city. Such marginalization has not caused the death of alternative Leeds or political activism associated with those scenes—but it has changed the leisure spaces (physical, political and social) in which alternative scenes contest the mainstream

Psychological effects of treatment with new oral anticoagulants in elderly patients with atrial fibrillation: a preliminary report

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common arrhythmia in elderly people, yet oral anticoagulation is underused in the aged. We tried to determine whether new oral anticoagulants (NOA) have greater psychological tolerability than warfarin. METHODS: Age-, gender-matched groups of AF patients receiving NOA (N = 15) or warfarin (N = 15) were assessed with the Anti-Clot Treatment Scale (ACTS) and the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS). RESULTS: Patients were old (81 ± 9 years). NOA group showed greater psychological satisfaction, with lower therapy-related burden (ACTS burdens: 16.3 ± 4.5 vs. 32.9 ± 10.2, p < 0.001) and higher awareness of benefits (ACTS benefits: 13.0 ± 1.3 vs. 10.8 ± 1.9, p = 0.001). Even stress was lower (PSS: 13.1 ± 4.0 vs. 17.1 ± 4.2, p = 0.013). The multivariate analysis confirmed these findings, showing that higher levels of anxiety and depression could justify more stress in warfarin patients. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this preliminary study show that NOA have an improved psychological impact compared with warfarin in elderly patients

Diabetes and prediabetes in patients with hepatitis B residing in North America

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/115977/1/hep28110-sup-0001-suppinfo01.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/115977/2/hep28110.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/115977/3/hep28110_am.pd

Preclinical development of a bispecific TNFα/IL-23 neutralising domain antibody as a novel oral treatment for inflammatory bowel disease.

Anti-TNFα and anti-IL-23 antibodies are highly effective therapies for Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis in a proportion of patients. V56B2 is a novel bispecific domain antibody in which a llama-derived IL-23p19-specific domain antibody, humanised and engineered for intestinal protease resistance, V900, was combined with a previously-described TNFα-specific domain antibody, V565. V56B2 contains a central protease-labile linker to create a single molecule for oral administration. Incubation of V56B2 with trypsin or human faecal supernatant resulted in a complete separation of the V565 and V900 monomers without loss of neutralising potency. Following oral administration of V900 and V565 in mice, high levels of each domain antibody were detected in the faeces, demonstrating stability in the intestinal milieu. In ex vivo cultures of colonic biopsies from IBD patients, treatment with V565 or V900 inhibited tissue phosphoprotein levels and with a combination of the two, inhibition was even greater. These results support further development of V56B2 as an oral therapy for IBD with improved safety and efficacy in a greater proportion of patients as well as greater convenience for patients compared with traditional monoclonal antibody therapies

A river runs through it: Robust automated mapping of riparian woodlands and land surface phenology across dryland regions

Riparian woodlands in drylands are critically important to human society, global biodiversity, and regional water and energy budgets. These sensitive ecosystems have experienced substantial degradation over the last several decades from climatic change and direct human activity. Nevertheless, quantifying long-term change in dryland riparian woodlands remains a major challenge, and much uncertainty exists in their remaining extent, historical breadth, and likely future trajectories. Dryland landscapes show large, fine-scale spatial heterogeneity in seasonal greenness patterns, driven in part by spatial variation in water availability. Riparian woodlands occur where water is concentrated in the landscape, either as aboveground streamflow or subsurface groundwater. In arid and semi-arid climates, this renders them phenologically distinctive from upland ecosystems. However, despite their importance and distinctiveness, there are currently no automated methods for delineating dryland riparian woodlands across regional extents in the cloud. Here we designed and implemented a cloud-based algorithm to retrieve dryland land surface phenology patterns from multispectral satellite imagery and conducted sensitivity analyses using real and simulated data to demonstrate that the approach is robust for MODIS, Sentinel-2, and Landsat over realistic ranges of noise and cloud cover. We then designed a series of random forest vegetation classifiers that integrate phenological and spectral information, vegetative structure from LiDAR, and topography from LiDAR or the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. We implemented classifiers for three local study sites and then generalized our model to run regionally across the southwestern United States, with balanced accuracy for the riparian woodland class ranging from 94.5% to 97.5% when validated with local to regional datasets. Generally, phenological information proved more important than any other data source for mapping riparian woodlands, which showed more stability in interannual phenology than did upland vegetation types. To our knowledge, ours is the first regional, annual, automatically-generated and updated approach for mapping dryland riparian woodlands in the southwestern United States, paving the way for improved modeling and management efforts on watershed to regional scales. We also provide one of the first operational, exclusively cloud-based methods to extract dryland land surface phenology patterns using Landsat, Sentinel-2, MODIS, or other sensors, providing a framework for future studies investigating other aspects of long-term or spatial variation in dryland vegetative seasonality across the globe

Short and long-read genome sequencing methodologies for somatic variant detection; genomic analysis of a patient with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma

Recent advances in throughput and accuracy mean that the Oxford Nanopore Technologies PromethiON platform is a now a viable solution for genome sequencing. Much of the validation of bioinformatic tools for this long-read data has focussed on calling germline variants (including structural variants). Somatic variants are outnumbered many-fold by germline variants and their detection is further complicated by the effects of tumour purity/subclonality. Here, we evaluate the extent to which Nanopore sequencing enables detection and analysis of somatic variation. We do this through sequencing tumour and germline genomes for a patient with diffuse B-cell lymphoma and comparing results with 150 bp short-read sequencing of the same samples. Calling germline single nucleotide variants (SNVs) from specific chromosomes of the long-read data achieved good specificity and sensitivity. However, results of somatic SNV calling highlight the need for the development of specialised joint calling algorithms. We find the comparative genome-wide performance of different tools varies significantly between structural variant types, and suggest long reads are especially advantageous for calling large somatic deletions and duplications. Finally, we highlight the utility of long reads for phasing clinically relevant variants, confirming that a somatic 1.6 Mb deletion and a p.(Arg249Met) mutation involving TP53 are oriented in trans

Is the Roux Limb a Determinant for Meal Size After Gastric Bypass Surgery?

The Roux-Y gastric bypass (RYGBP) is an effective weight-reducing procedure but the involved mechanisms of action are obscure. The Roux limb is the intestinal segment that following surgery is the primary recipient for food intake. The aims of the study were to explore the mechanosensory and biomechanical properties of the Roux limb and to make correlations with preferred meal size. Ten patients participated and were examined preoperatively, 6 weeks and 1 year after RYGBP. Each subject ingested unrestricted amounts of a standardized meal and the weight of the meal was recorded. On another study day, the Roux limb was subjected to gradual distension by the use of an intraluminal balloon. Luminal volume–pressure relationships and thresholds for induction of sensations were monitored. At 6 weeks and 1 year post surgery, the subjects had reduced their meal sizes by 62% and 41% (medians), respectively, compared to preoperative values. The thresholds for eliciting distension-induced sensations were strongly and negatively correlated to the preferred meal size. Intraluminal pressure during Roux limb distension, both at low and high balloon volumes, correlated negatively to the size of the meal that the patients had chosen to eat. The results suggest that the Roux limb is an important determinant for regulating food intake after Roux-Y bypass bariatric surgery