Individual nutrition therapy and exercise regime: A controlled trial of injured, vulnerable elderly (INTERACTIVE trial)

© 2008 Thomas et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Background Proximal femoral fractures are amongst the most devastating consequences of osteoporosis and injurious accidental falls with 25–35% of patients dying in the first year post-fracture. Effective rehabilitation strategies are evolving however, despite established associations between nutrition, mobility, strength and strength-related functional outcomes; there has been only one small study with older adults immediately following fragility fracture where a combination of both exercise and nutrition have been provided. The aim of the INTERACTIVE trial is to establish whether a six month, individualised exercise and nutrition program commencing within fourteen days of surgery for proximal femur fracture, results in clinically and statistically significant improvements in physical function, body composition and quality of life at an acceptable level of cost and resource use and without increasing the burden of caregivers. Methods and Design This randomised controlled trial will be performed across two sites, a 500 bed acute hospital in Adelaide, South Australia and a 250 bed acute hospital in Sydney, New South Wales. Four hundred and sixty community-dwelling older adults aged > 70 will be recruited after suffering a proximal femoral fracture and followed into the community over a 12-month period. Participants allocated to the intervention group will receive a six month individualised care plan combining resistance training and nutrition therapy commencing within 14 days post-surgery. Outcomes will be assessed by an individual masked to treatment allocation at six and 12 months. To determine differences between the groups at the primary end-point (six months), ANCOVA or logistic regression will be used with models adjusted according to potential confounders. Discussion The INTERACTIVE trial is among the first to combine nutrition and exercise therapy as an early intervention to address the serious consequence of rapid deconditioning and weight loss and subsequent ability to regain pre-morbid function in older patients post proximal femoral fracture. The results of this trial will guide the development of more effective rehabilitation programs, which may ultimately lead to reduced health care costs, and improvements in mobility, independence and quality of life for proximal femoral fracture sufferers. Trial registration Australian Clinical Trials Registry: ACTRN12607000017426

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

Field assessment of thermal after-ripening time for dormancy release prediction in Lolium rigidum seeds

Dormancy release was studied in four populations of annual ryegrass (Lolium rigidum) seeds to determine whether loss of dormancy in the field can be predicted from temperature alone or whether seed water content (WC) must also be considered. Freshly matured seeds were after-ripened at the northern and southern extremes of the Western Australian cereal cropping region and at constant 37degreesC. Seed WC was allowed to fluctuate with prevailing humidity, but full hydration was avoided by excluding rainfall. Dormancy was measured regularly during after-ripening by germinating seeds with 12-hourly light or in darkness. Germination was lower in darkness than in light/dark and dormancy release was slower when germination was tested in darkness. Seeds were consistently drier, and dormancy release was slower, during after-ripening at 37degreesC than under field conditions. However, within each population, the rate of dormancy release in the field (north and south) in terms of thermal time was unaffected by after-ripening site. While low seed WC slowed dormancy release in seeds held at 37degreesC, dormancy release in seeds after-ripened under Western Australian field conditions was adequately described by thermal after-ripening time, without the need to account for changes in WC elicited by fluctuating environmental humidity

Selection for low or high primary dormancy in Lolium rigidum Gaud seeds results in constitutive differences in stress protein expression and peroxidase activity

Seed dormancy in wild Lolium rigidum Gaud (annual ryegrass) populations is highly variable and not well characterized at the biochemical level. To identify some of the determinants of dormancy level in these seeds, the proteomes of subpopulations selected for low and high levels of primary dormancy were compared by two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis of extracts from mature, dry seeds. High-dormancy seeds showed higher expression of small heat shock proteins, enolase, and glyoxalase I than the low-dormancy seeds. The functional relevance of these differences in protein expression was confirmed by the fact that high-dormancy seeds were more tolerant to high temperatures imposed at imbibition and had consistently higher glyoxalase I activity over 0-42 d dark stratification. Higher expression of a putative glutathione peroxidase in low-dormancy seeds was not accompanied by higher activity, but these seeds had a slightly more oxidized glutathione pool and higher total peroxidase activity. Overall, these biochemical and physiological differences suggest that L. rigidum seeds selected for low dormancy are more prepared for rapid germination via peroxidase-mediated cell wall weakening, whilst seeds selected for high dormancy are constitutively prepared to survive environmental stresses, even in the absence of stress during seed development

Tissue-specific soluble sugars in seeds as indicators of storage category

The accumulation of specific soluble carbohydrates has been implicated in the acquisition of desiccation tolerance and improved longevity in orthodox seeds, leading to the hypothesis that carbohydrate composition might be used as a diagnostic marker for seed storage category. We have studied the sugar composition of 46 tissues from seeds of 18 species, covering 13 genera and ten families, and representing three seed storage categories: orthodox, intermediate and recalcitrant. Soluble carbohydrate extracts from each tissue were analysed using High pH Anion Exchange Chromatography. Total sugar content and sucrose level of the embryo were highly variable across all species and no simple association with seed storage physiology was evident. Monosaccharide levels were found to be low in most seeds studied, including those of the recalcitrant category. Sucrosyl-oligosaccharides, raffinose and stachyose, were observed to be lower in recalcitrant seeds compared to orthodox seeds. In general, orthodox and recalcitrant seeds had tissues with sucrosyl-oligosaccharide:sucrose mass ratios of > 0.143 (i.e. 1:7) and < 0.083 (1:12) respectively. Moreover, large variations in the content of these sugars were noted between different tissues within the recalcitrant and intermediate seeds. The results from the present study in combination with data in the literature show that the ratio of sucrosyl-oligosaccharide:sucrose in seed tissues is generally a good indicator of seed storage category. (C) 1996 Annals of Botany Company

Purification and molecular structure of two digalactosyl D-chiro-inositols and two trigalactosyl D-chiro-inositols from buckwheat seeds

Two digalactosyl D-chiro-inositols and two trigalactosyl D-chiuo-inositols, members of the fagopyritol A series and fagopyritol B series, were isolated from buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum Moench) seeds. Structures of the first three were determined by H-1 and C-13 NMR. Fagopyritol B2 is alpha -D-galactopyranosyl-(1->6)-alpha -D-galactopyranosyl-(1->2)-1D-chiro-inositol , and fagopyritol A2 is alpha -D-galactopyranosyl-(1->6)-alpha -D-galactopyranosyl-(1->3)-1D-chiro-inositol. Fagopyritol A3, a trigalactosyl D-chiro-inositol, is alpha -D-galactopyranosyl-(1->6)-alpha -D-galacto-pyranosyl-(1->6)-alpha -D-galactopyranosyl-(1->3)-1D-chiro-inositol. From analysis of hydrolysis products, the second trigalactosyl D-chiro-inositol, fagopyritol B3, is alpha -D-galactopyranosyl-(1->6)-alpha -D-galactopyranosyl-(1->6)-alpha -D-galactopyranosyl-(1->2)-1D-chiro-inositol. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved