EFFECTS OF A PROPRIETARY BLEND RICH IN GLYCOSIDE BASED STANDARDIZED FENUGREEK SEED EXTRACT (IBPR) ON INFLAMMATORY MARKERS DURING ACUTE ECCENTRIC RESISTANCE EXERCISE IN YOUNG SUBJECTS

  Objective: To assess the efficacy of a proprietary blend rich in glycoside based standardized fenugreek seed extract (400 mg) and minor quantities of curcumin and cinnamon (25 mg each) supplementation (IBPR) on inflammatory markers related to skeletal muscle soreness using double-blind placebo control, parallel design.Methods: A total of 20 healthy non-resistance trained young male and female subjects were assigned to ingest either IBPR or matching placebo for 14 days before the eccentric exercise bout. Subjects were instructed to perform 24 sets with 10 eccentric knee extensor repetitions (with one leg at 30°/s on an isokinetic device). Subjects had their blood drawn at baseline, immediately post, 1 hr, 3 hrs, and 24 hrs post-eccentric exercise. Efficacy in terms of serum levels of anti-inflammatory cytokines interleukin-10 (IL-10), pro-inflammatory cytokines (IL-1ra, IL-1b, IL-6, and tumor necrosis factor) and safety in terms of kidney function (blood urea nitrogen (BUN), serum creatinine, BUN to creatinine ratio), and differential leukocyte count were measured. The data of each parameter were analyzed by two-way repeated measure ANOVA.Results: Significant time-dependent effects were observed in IL1b, IL6, and creatinine values from baseline whereas significant treatment dependent effect was seen in IL-1ra. IBPR was found to be safe and well tolerated.Conclusion: IBPR supplementation showed a significant anti-inflammatory efficacy on eccentric exercise-induced inflammatory markers of skeletal muscle soreness in non-resistance trained subjects

Pre- versus post-exercise protein intake has similar effects on muscular adaptations

The purpose of this study was to test the anabolic window theory by investigating muscle strength, hypertrophy, and body composition changes in response to an equal dose of protein consumed either immediately pre- versus post-resistance training (RT) in trained men. Subjects were 21 resistance-trained men (\u3e1 year RT experience) recruited from a university population. After baseline testing, participants were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 experimental groups: a group that consumed a supplement containing 25 g protein and 1 g carbohydrate immediately prior to exercise (PRE-SUPP) (nD9) or a group that consumed the same supplement immediately post-exercise (POST- SUPP) (n D 12). The RT protocol consisted of three weekly sessions performed on non-consecutive days for 10 weeks. A total-body routine was employed with three sets of 812 repetitions for each exercise. Results showed that pre- and post-workout protein consumption had similar effects on all measures studied (p \u3e 0:05). These findings refute the contention of a narrow post-exercise anabolic window to maximize the muscular response and instead lends support to the theory that the interval for protein intake may be as wide as several hours or perhaps more after a training bout depending on when the pre-workout meal was consumed

Allergic disease, corticosteroid use, and risk of Hodgkin lymphoma: A United Kingdom nationwide case-control study.

BACKGROUND: Immunodeficiency syndromes (acquired/congenital/iatrogenic) are known to increase Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) risk, but the effects of allergic immune dysregulation and corticosteroids are poorly understood. OBJECTIVE: We sought to assess the risk of HL associated with allergic disease (asthma, eczema, and allergic rhinitis) and corticosteroid use. METHODS: We conducted a case-control study using the United Kingdom Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) linked to hospital data. Multivariable logistic regression investigated associations between allergic diseases and HL after adjusting for established risk factors. Potential confounding or effect modification by steroid treatment were examined. RESULTS: One thousand two hundred thirty-six patients with HL were matched to 7416 control subjects. Immunosuppression was associated with 6-fold greater odds of HL (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 6.18; 95% CI, 3.04-12.57), with minimal change after adjusting for steroids. Any prior allergic disease or eczema alone was associated with 1.4-fold increased odds of HL (aOR, 1.41 [95% CI, 1.24-1.60] and 1.41 [95% CI, 1.20-1.65], respectively). These associations decreased but remained significant after adjustment for steroids (aOR, 1.25 [95% CI, 1.09-1.43] and 1.27 [95% CI, 1.08-1.49], respectively). There was no effect modification by steroid use. Previous steroid treatment was associated with 1.4-fold greater HL odds (aOR, 1.38; 95% CI, 1.20-1.59). CONCLUSIONS: In addition to established risk factors (immunosuppression and infectious mononucleosis), allergic disease and eczema are risk factors for HL. This association is only partially explained by steroids, which are associated with increased HL risk. These findings add to the growing evidence that immune system malfunction after allergic disease or immunosuppression is central to HL development

Cinnamon Shows Antidiabetic Properties that Are Species-Specific : Effects on Enzyme Activity Inhibition and Starch Digestion

The study was funded by the Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division of the Scottish government (RESAS). The authors are grateful to Phyllis Nicol for assisting with AGE measurements.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Urgent assessment and ongoing care for infection in community-dwelling older people : a qualitative study of patient experience

Objectives To explore the experience of infection from the perspective of community-dwelling older people, including access and preferences for place of care.Design Qualitative interview study, carried out between March 2017 and August 2018.Setting Ambulatory care units in Oxfordshire, UK.Participants Adults >70 years with a clinical diagnosis of infection.Methods Semistructured interviews based on a flexible topic guide. Participants were given the option to be interviewed with their caregiver. Thematic analysis was facilitated by NVivo V.11.Results Participants described encountering several barriers when accessing an urgent healthcare assessment which were hard to negotiate when they felt unwell. They valued home comforts and independence if they received care for their infection at home, though were worried about burdening their family. Most talked about hospital admission being a necessity in the context of more severe illness. Perceived advantages included monitoring, availability of treatments and investigations. However, some recognised that admission put them at risk of a hospital-acquired infection. Ambulatory care was felt to be convenient if local, but daily transport was challenging.Conclusions Providers may need to think about protocols and targeted advice that could improve access for older people to urgent healthcare when they feel unwell. General practitioners making decisions about place of care may need to better communicate risks associated with the available options and think about balancing convenience with facilities for care

SNP and Haplotype Regional Heritability Mapping (SNHap-RHM):Joint Mapping of Common and Rare Variation Affecting Complex Traits

We describe a genome-wide analytical approach, SNP and Haplotype Regional Heritability Mapping (SNHap-RHM), that provides regional estimates of the heritability across locally defined regions in the genome. This approach utilises relationship matrices that are based on sharing of SNP and haplotype alleles at local haplotype blocks delimited by recombination boundaries in the genome. We implemented the approach on simulated data and show that the haplotype-based regional GRMs capture variation that is complementary to that captured by SNP-based regional GRMs, and thus justifying the fitting of the two GRMs jointly in a single analysis (SNHap-RHM). SNHap-RHM captures regions in the genome contributing to the phenotypic variation that existing genome-wide analysis methods may fail to capture. We further demonstrate that there are real benefits to be gained from this approach by applying it to real data from about 20,000 individuals from the Generation Scotland: Scottish Family Health Study. We analysed height and major depressive disorder (MDD). We identified seven genomic regions that are genome-wide significant for height, and three regions significant at a suggestive threshold (p-value < 1 × 10(−5)) for MDD. These significant regions have genes mapped to within 400 kb of them. The genes mapped for height have been reported to be associated with height in humans. Similarly, those mapped for MDD have been reported to be associated with major depressive disorder and other psychiatry phenotypes. The results show that SNHap-RHM presents an exciting new opportunity to analyse complex traits by allowing the joint mapping of novel genomic regions tagged by either SNPs or haplotypes, potentially leading to the recovery of some of the “missing” heritability

Variations in the slope of the resolved star-forming main sequence: a tool for constraining the mass of star-forming regions

The correlation between galaxies’ integrated stellar masses and star formation rates (the ‘star formation main sequence’, SFMS) is a well-established scaling relation. Recently, surveys have found a relationship between the star formation rate (SFR) and stellar mass surface densities on kpc and sub-kpc scales (the ‘resolved SFMS’, rSFMS). In this work, we demonstrate that the rSFMS emerges naturally in Feedback In Realistic Environments 2 (FIRE-2) zoom-in simulations of Milky Way-mass galaxies. We make SFR and stellar mass maps of the simulated galaxies at a variety of spatial resolutions and star formation averaging time-scales and fit the rSFMS using multiple methods from the literature. While the absolute value of the SFMS slope (α_(MS)) depends on the fitting method, the slope is steeper for longer star formation time-scales and lower spatial resolutions regardless of the fitting method employed. We present a toy model that quantitatively captures the dependence of the simulated galaxies’ α_(MS) on spatial resolution and use it to illustrate how this dependence can be used to constrain the characteristic mass of star-forming clumps

Deep learning predictions of galaxy merger stage and the importance of observational realism

Machine learning is becoming a popular tool to quantify galaxy morphologies and identify mergers. However, this technique relies on using an appropriate set of training data to be successful. By combining hydrodynamical simulations, synthetic observations, and convolutional neural networks (CNNs), we quantitatively assess how realistic simulated galaxy images must be in order to reliably classify mergers. Specifically, we compare the performance of CNNs trained with two types of galaxy images, stellar maps and dust-inclusive radiatively transferred images, each with three levels of observational realism: (1) no observational effects (idealized images), (2) realistic sky and point spread function (semirealistic images), and (3) insertion into a real sky image (fully realistic images). We find that networks trained on either idealized or semireal images have poor performance when applied to survey-realistic images. In contrast, networks trained on fully realistic images achieve 87.1 per cent classification performance. Importantly, the level of realism in the training images is much more important than whether the images included radiative transfer, or simply used the stellar maps (⁠87.1 per cent compared to 79.6 per cent accuracy, respectively). Therefore, one can avoid the large computational and storage cost of running radiative transfer with a relatively modest compromise in classification performance. Making photometry-based networks insensitive to colour incurs a very mild penalty to performance with survey-realistic data (⁠86.0 per cent with r-only compared to 87.1 per cent with gri). This result demonstrates that while colour can be exploited by colour-sensitive networks, it is not necessary to achieve high accuracy and so can be avoided if desired. We provide the public release of our statistical observational realism suite, REALSIM, as a companion to this paper