Evaluation of an integrated system for classification, assessment and comparison of services for long-term care in Europe: the eDESDE-LTC study

The harmonization of European health systems brings with it a need for tools to allow the standardized collection of information about medical care. A common coding system and standards for the description of services are needed to allow local data to be incorporated into evidence-informed policy, and to permit equity and mobility to be assessed. The aim of this project has been to design such a classification and a related tool for the coding of services for Long Term Care (DESDE-LTC), based on the European Service Mapping Schedule (ESMS). Methods. The development of DESDE-LTC followed an iterative process using nominal groups in 6 European countries. 54 researchers and stakeholders in health and social services contributed to this process. In order to classify services, we use the minimal organization unit or "Basic Stable Input of Care" (BSIC), coded by its principal function or "Main Type of Care" (MTC). The evaluation of the tool included an analysis of feasibility, consistency, ontology, inter-rater reliability, Boolean Factor Analysis, and a preliminary impact analysis (screening, scoping and appraisal). Results: DESDE-LTC includes an alpha-numerical coding system, a glossary and an assessment instrument for mapping and counting LTC. It shows high feasibility, consistency, inter-rater reliability and face, content and construct validity. DESDE-LTC is ontologically consistent. It is regarded by experts as useful and relevant for evidence-informed decision making. Conclusion: DESDE-LTC contributes to establishing a common terminology, taxonomy and coding of LTC services in a European context, and a standard procedure for data collection and international comparison

Allosteric regulation of glycogen breakdown by the second messenger cyclic di-GMP

Streptomyces are our principal source of antibiotics, which they generate concomitant with a complex developmental transition from vegetative hyphae to spores. c-di-GMP acts as a linchpin in this transition by binding and regulating the key developmental regulators, BldD and WhiG. Here we show that c-di-GMP also binds the glycogen-debranching-enzyme, GlgX, uncovering a direct link between c-di-GMP and glycogen metabolism in bacteria. Further, we show c-di-GMP binding is required for GlgX activity. We describe structures of apo and c-di-GMP-bound GlgX and, strikingly, their comparison shows c-di-GMP induces long-range conformational changes, reorganizing the catalytic pocket to an active state. Glycogen is an important glucose storage compound that enables animals to cope with starvation and stress. Our in vivo studies reveal the important biological role of GlgX in Streptomyces glucose availability control. Overall, we identify a function of c-di-GMP in controlling energy storage metabolism in bacteria, which is widespread in Actinobacteria

Weight, Diet, and Physical Activity-Related Beliefs and Practices Among Pregnant and Postpartum Latino Women: The Role of Social Support

Objectives : Eating and physical activity patterns may contribute to excessive pregnancy weight gain and postpartum retention that increase the risks of obesity and diabetes for both Latino mothers and their children. Social support is an important health determinant and may affect health-related beliefs and behaviors. The objective of this study was to investigate the influence of social support on weight, diet, and physical activity-related beliefs and behaviors among pregnant and postpartum Latinas. Methods : A community-based participatory project, Promoting Healthy Lifestyles among Women, was conducted in southwest Detroit to plan interventions aimed at reducing risks of obesity and type 2 diabetes. Qualitative analyses of in-depth semistructured interviews with dyads of 10 pregnant and postpartum Latinas, and 10 people who influenced them were conducted. Results : Husbands and some female relatives were primary sources of emotional, instrumental, and informational support for weight, diet, and physical activity-related beliefs and behaviors for Latina participants. Holistic health beliefs and the opinions of others consistently influenced Latinas' motivation and beliefs about the need to remain healthy and the links between behavior and health. Absence of mothers, other female relatives, and friends to provide childcare, companionship for exercise, and advice about food were prominent barriers that limited women's ability to maintain healthy practices during and after pregnancy. Conclusion : The findings support evidence that low-income, recently immigrated pregnant and postpartum Latinas could benefit from community-based, family-oriented interventions that provide social support necessary to promote and sustain healthy lifestyles.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45320/1/10995_2005_Article_25.pd

Rational design of a conformation-specific antibody for the quantification of Aβ oligomers.

Protein misfolding and aggregation is the hallmark of numerous human disorders, including Alzheimer's disease. This process involves the formation of transient and heterogeneous soluble oligomers, some of which are highly cytotoxic. A major challenge for the development of effective diagnostic and therapeutic tools is thus the detection and quantification of these elusive oligomers. Here, to address this problem, we develop a two-step rational design method for the discovery of oligomer-specific antibodies. The first step consists of an "antigen scanning" phase in which an initial panel of antibodies is designed to bind different epitopes covering the entire sequence of a target protein. This procedure enables the determination through in vitro assays of the regions exposed in the oligomers but not in the fibrillar deposits. The second step involves an "epitope mining" phase, in which a second panel of antibodies is designed to specifically target the regions identified during the scanning step. We illustrate this method in the case of the amyloid β (Aβ) peptide, whose oligomers are associated with Alzheimer's disease. Our results show that this approach enables the accurate detection and quantification of Aβ oligomers in vitro, and in Caenorhabditis elegans and mouse hippocampal tissues

Above- and below-ground net primary productivity across ten Amazonian forests on contrasting soils

Copyright © 2009 European Geosciences Union. This is the published version available at http://www.biogeosciences.net/6/2759/2009/bg-6-2759-2009.html © Author(s) 2009. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.The net primary productivity (NPP) of tropical forests is one of the most important and least quantified components of the global carbon cycle. Most relevant studies have focused particularly on the quantification of the above-ground coarse wood productivity, and little is known about the carbon fluxes involved in other elements of the NPP, the partitioning of total NPP between its above- and below-ground components and the main environmental drivers of these patterns. In this study we quantify the above- and below-ground NPP of ten Amazonian forests to address two questions: (1) How do Amazonian forests allocate productivity among its above- and below-ground components? (2) How do soil and leaf nutrient status and soil texture affect the productivity of Amazonian forests? Using a standardized methodology to measure the major elements of productivity, we show that NPP varies between 9.3±1.3MgC ha−1 yr−1 (mean±standard error), at a white sand plot, and 17.0±1.4MgC ha−1 yr−1 at a very fertile Terra Preta site, with an overall average of 12.8±0.9MgC ha−1 yr−1. The studied forests allocate on average 64±3% and 36±3% of the total NPP to the above and below-ground components, respectively. The ratio of above-ground and below-ground NPP is almost invariant with total NPP. Litterfall and fine root production both increase with total NPP, while stem production shows no overall trend. Total NPP tends to increase with soil phosphorus and leaf nitrogen status. However, allocation of NPP to below-ground shows no relationship to soil fertility, but appears to decrease with the increase of soil clay content

The variation of productivity and its allocation along a tropical elevation gradient: a whole carbon budget perspective

Why do forest productivity and biomass decline with elevation? To address this question, research to date generally has focused on correlative approaches describing changes in woody growth and biomass with elevation. We present a novel, mechanistic approach to this question by quantifying the autotrophic carbon budget in 16 forest plots along a 3300 m elevation transect in Peru. Low growth rates at high elevations appear primarily driven by low gross primary productivity (GPP), with little shift in either carbon use efficiency (CUE) or allocation of net primary productivity (NPP) between wood, fine roots and canopy. The lack of trend in CUE implies that the proportion of photosynthate allocated to autotrophic respiration is not sensitive to temperature. Rather than a gradual linear decline in productivity, there is some limited but nonconclusive evidence of a sharp transition in NPP between submontane and montane forests, which may be caused by cloud immersion effects within the cloud forest zone. Leaf-level photosynthetic parameters do not decline with elevation, implying that nutrient limitation does not restrict photosynthesis at high elevations. Our data demonstrate the potential of whole carbon budget perspectives to provide a deeper understanding of controls on ecosystem functioning and carbon cycling

Probiotic Sonicates Selectively Induce Mucosal Immune Cells Apoptosis through Ceramide Generation via Neutral Sphingomyelinase

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.-- et al.[Background]: Probiotics appear to be beneficial in inflammatory bowel disease, but their mechanism of action is incompletely understood. We investigated whether probiotic-derived sphingomyelinase mediates this beneficial effect. [Methodology/Principal Findings]: Neutral sphingomyelinase (NSMase) activity was measured in sonicates of the probiotic L. brevis (LB) and S. thermophilus (ST) and the non-probiotic E. coli (EC) and E. faecalis (EF). Lamina propria mononuclear cells (LPMC) were obtained from patients with Crohn's disease (CD) and Ulcerative Colitis (UC), and peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) from healthy volunteers, analysing LPMC and PBMC apoptosis susceptibility, reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation and JNK activation. In some experiments, sonicates were preincubated with GSH or GW4869, a specific NSMase inhibitor. NSMase activity of LB and ST was 10-fold that of EC and EF sonicates. LB and ST sonicates induced significantly more apoptosis of CD and UC than control LPMC, whereas EC and EF sonicates failed to induce apoptosis. Pre-stimulation with anti-CD3/CD28 induced a significant and time-dependent increase in LB-induced apoptosis of LPMC and PBMC. Exposure to LB sonicates resulted in JNK activation and ROS production by LPMC. NSMase activity of LB sonicates was completely abrogated by GW4869, causing a dose-dependent reduction of LB-induced apoptosis. LB and ST selectively induced immune cell apoptosis, an effect dependent on the degree of cell activation and mediated by bacterial NSMase. [Conclusions]: These results suggest that induction of immune cell apoptosis is a mechanism of action of some probiotics, and that NSMase-mediated ceramide generation contributes to the therapeutic effects of probiotics.The funding sources included grants from Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Enfermedades Hepáticas y Digestivas (CIBERehd), Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (SAF2005-00280 and SAF2008-03676 to MS, FIS2009-00056 to AM, SAF2009-11417 to JCF), Fundación Ramón Areces (to MS), the National Institutes of Health (DK30399 and DK50984 to CF) and the Research Center for Liver and Pancreatic Diseases funded by the United States National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (P50 AA 11999 to JCF).Peer reviewe

Phylogenetic diversity of Amazonian tree communities

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Honorio Coronado, E. N., Dexter, K. G., Pennington, R. T., Chave, J., Lewis, S. L., Alexiades, M. N., Alvarez, E., Alves de Oliveira, A., Amaral, I. L., Araujo-Murakami, A., Arets, E. J. M. M., Aymard, G. A., Baraloto, C., Bonal, D., Brienen, R., Cerón, C., Cornejo Valverde, F., Di Fiore, A., Farfan-Rios, W., Feldpausch, T. R., Higuchi, N., Huamantupa-Chuquimaco, I., Laurance, S. G., Laurance, W. F., López-Gonzalez, G., Marimon, B. S., Marimon-Junior, B. H., Monteagudo Mendoza, A., Neill, D., Palacios Cuenca, W., Peñuela Mora, M. C., Pitman, N. C. A., Prieto, A., Quesada, C. A., Ramirez Angulo, H., Rudas, A., Ruschel, A. R., Salinas Revilla, N., Salomão, R. P., Segalin de Andrade, A., Silman, M. R., Spironello, W., ter Steege, H., Terborgh, J., Toledo, M., Valenzuela Gamarra, L., Vieira, I. C. G., Vilanova Torre, E., Vos, V., Phillips, O. L. (2015), Phylogenetic diversity of Amazonian tree communities. Diversity and Distributions, 21: 1295–1307. doi: 10.1111/ddi.12357, which has been published in final form at 10.1111/ddi.12357Aim: To examine variation in the phylogenetic diversity (PD) of tree communities across geographical and environmental gradients in Amazonia. Location: Two hundred and eighty-three c. 1 ha forest inventory plots from across Amazonia. Methods: We evaluated PD as the total phylogenetic branch length across species in each plot (PDss), the mean pairwise phylogenetic distance between species (MPD), the mean nearest taxon distance (MNTD) and their equivalents standardized for species richness (ses.PDss, ses.MPD, ses.MNTD). We compared PD of tree communities growing (1) on substrates of varying geological age; and (2) in environments with varying ecophysiological barriers to growth and survival. Results: PDss is strongly positively correlated with species richness (SR), whereas MNTD has a negative correlation. Communities on geologically young- and intermediate-aged substrates (western and central Amazonia respectively) have the highest SR, and therefore the highest PDss and the lowest MNTD. We find that the youngest and oldest substrates (the latter on the Brazilian and Guiana Shields) have the highest ses.PDss and ses.MNTD. MPD and ses.MPD are strongly correlated with how evenly taxa are distributed among the three principal angiosperm clades and are both highest in western Amazonia. Meanwhile, seasonally dry tropical forest (SDTF) and forests on white sands have low PD, as evaluated by any metric. Main conclusions: High ses.PDss and ses.MNTD reflect greater lineage diversity in communities. We suggest that high ses.PDss and ses.MNTD in western Amazonia results from its favourable, easy-to-colonize environment, whereas high values in the Brazilian and Guianan Shields may be due to accumulation of lineages over a longer period of time. White-sand forests and SDTF are dominated by close relatives from fewer lineages, perhaps reflecting ecophysiological barriers that are difficult to surmount evolutionarily. Because MPD and ses.MPD do not reflect lineage diversity per se, we suggest that PDss, ses.PDss and ses.MNTD may be the most useful diversity metrics for setting large-scale conservation priorities.FINCyT - PhD studentshipSchool of Geography of the University of LeedsRoyal Botanic Garden EdinburghNatural Environment Research Council (NERC)Gordon and Betty Moore FoundationEuropean Union's Seventh Framework ProgrammeERCCNPq/PELDNSF - Fellowshi