Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis: A Focus on Disease Progression

Since amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) was discovered and described in 1869 as a neurodegenerative disease in which motor neuron death is induced, a wide range of biomarkers have been selected to identify therapeutic targets. ALS shares altered molecular pathways with other neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s diseases. However, the molecular targets that directly influence its aggressive nature remain unknown.What is the first link in the neurodegenerative chain of ALS that makes this disease so peculiar? In this review, we will discuss the progression of the disease from the viewpoint of the potential biomarkers described to date in human and animal model samples. Finally, we will consider potential therapeutic strategies for ALS treatment and future, innovative perspectives

European and Asian contribution to the genetic diversity of mainland South American chickens

Chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus) from the Americas have long been recognized as descendants of European chickens, transported by early Europeans since the fifteenth century. However, in recent years, a possible pre-Columbian introduction of chickens to South America by Polynesian seafarers has also been suggested. Here, we characterize the mitochondrial control region genetic diversity of modern chicken populations from South America and compare this to a worldwide dataset in order to investigate the potential maternal genetic origin of modern-day chicken populations in South America. The genetic analysis of newly generated chicken mitochondrial control region sequences from South America showed that the majority of chickens from the continent belong to mitochondrial haplogroup E. The rest belongs to haplogroups A, B and C, albeit at very low levels. Haplogroup D, a ubiquitous mitochondrial lineage in Island Southeast Asia and on Pacific Islands is not observed in continental South America. Modern-day mainland South American chickens are, therefore, closely allied with European and Asian chickens. Furthermore, we find high levels of genetic contributions from South Asian chickens to those in Europe and South America. Our findings demonstrate that modern-day genetic diversity of mainland South American chickens appear to have clear European and Asian contributions, and less so from Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. Furthermore, there is also some indication that South Asia has more genetic contribution to European chickens than any other Asian chicken populations.Michael B. Herrera, Spiridoula Kraitsek, Jose A. Alcalde, Daniel Quiroz .... Vicki Thomson ... Jeremy J. Austin ... et al

Track D Social Science, Human Rights and Political Science

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138414/1/jia218442.pd

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

A century of trends in adult human height

Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, and higher education and earnings. We reanalysed 1472 population-based studies, with measurement of height on more than 18.6 million participants to estimate mean height for people born between 1896 and 1996 in 200 countries. The largest gain in adult height over the past century has occurred in South Korean women and Iranian men, who became 20.2 cm (95% credible interval 17.5-22.7) and 16.5 cm (13.3-19.7) taller, respectively. In contrast, there was little change in adult height in some sub-Saharan African countries and in South Asia over the century of analysis. The tallest people over these 100 years are men born in the Netherlands in the last quarter of 20th century, whose average heights surpassed 182.5 cm, and the shortest were women born in Guatemala in 1896 (140.3 cm; 135.8-144.8). The height differential between the tallest and shortest populations was 19-20 cm a century ago, and has remained the same for women and increased for men a century later despite substantial changes in the ranking of countries

Rising rural body-mass index is the main driver of the global obesity epidemic in adults

Body-mass index (BMI) has increased steadily in most countries in parallel with a rise in the proportion of the population who live in cities 1,2 . This has led to a widely reported view that urbanization is one of the most important drivers of the global rise in obesity 3�6 . Here we use 2,009 population-based studies, with measurements of height and weight in more than 112 million adults, to report national, regional and global trends in mean BMI segregated by place of residence (a rural or urban area) from 1985 to 2017. We show that, contrary to the dominant paradigm, more than 55 of the global rise in mean BMI from 1985 to 2017�and more than 80 in some low- and middle-income regions�was due to increases in BMI in rural areas. This large contribution stems from the fact that, with the exception of women in sub-Saharan Africa, BMI is increasing at the same rate or faster in rural areas than in cities in low- and middle-income regions. These trends have in turn resulted in a closing�and in some countries reversal�of the gap in BMI between urban and rural areas in low- and middle-income countries, especially for women. In high-income and industrialized countries, we noted a persistently higher rural BMI, especially for women. There is an urgent need for an integrated approach to rural nutrition that enhances financial and physical access to healthy foods, to avoid replacing the rural undernutrition disadvantage in poor countries with a more general malnutrition disadvantage that entails excessive consumption of low-quality calories. © 2019, The Author(s)

Effect of gluten-free diet on preventing recurrence of gastroesophageal reflux disease-related symptoms in adult celiac patients with nonerosive reflux disease

In celiac disease (CD) the role of a gluten-free diet (GFD) on gastroesophageal reflux disease-related symptoms (GERD-rs) is unclear. The aim of this study was to establish the recurrence of GERD-rs, in CD patients with nonerosive reflux disease (NERD). METHODS: From a total of 105 adult CD patients observed, 29 who presented with the NERD form were enrolled in the study. Thirty non-CD patients with NERD were studied as controls. Recurrence of GERD-rs was clinically assessed at 6, 12, 18, and 24 months follow-up (FU) after withdrawal of initial proton-pump inhibitor (PPI) treatment for 8 weeks. RESULTS: GERD-rs were resolved in 25 (86.2%) CD patients and in 20 (66.7%) controls after 8 weeks of PPI treatment. In the CD group, recurrence of GERD-rs was found in five cases (20%) at 6 months but in none at 12, 18, and 24 months while in the control group recurrence was found in six of 20 controls (30%), in another six (12/20, 60%), in another three (15/20, 75%), and in another two (17/20, 85%) at 6, 12, 18, and 24 months FU respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The present study is the first to have evaluated the effect of a GFD in the nonerosive form of GERD in CD patients, by means of clinical long-term follow-up, suggesting that GFD could be a useful approach in reducing GERD symptoms and in the prevention of recurrenc