Phytoestrogens

Collectively, plants contain several different families of natural products among which are compounds with weak estrogenic or antiestrogenic activity toward mammals. These compounds, termed phytoestrogens, include certain isoflavonoids, flavonoids, stilbenes, and lignans. The best-studied dietary phytoestrogens are the soy isoflavones and the flaxseed lignans. Their perceived health beneficial properties extend beyond hormone-dependent breast and prostate cancers and osteoporosis to include cognitive function, cardiovascular disease, immunity and inflammation, and reproduction and fertility. In the future, metabolic engineering of plants could generate novel and exquisitely controlled dietary sources with which to better assess the potential health beneficial effects of phytoestrogens

An exploratory randomised controlled trial of a premises-level intervention to reduce alcohol-related harm including violence in the United Kingdom

<b>Background</b><p></p> To assess the feasibility of a randomised controlled trial of a licensed premises intervention to reduce severe intoxication and disorder; to establish effect sizes and identify appropriate approaches to the development and maintenance of a rigorous research design and intervention implementation.<p></p> <b>Methods</b><p></p> An exploratory two-armed parallel randomised controlled trial with a nested process evaluation. An audit of risk factors and a tailored action plan for high risk premises, with three month follow up audit and feedback. Thirty-two premises that had experienced at least one assault in the year prior to the intervention were recruited, match paired and randomly allocated to control or intervention group. Police violence data and data from a street survey of study premises’ customers, including measures of breath alcohol concentration and surveyor rated customer intoxication, were used to assess effect sizes for a future definitive trial. A nested process evaluation explored implementation barriers and the fidelity of the intervention with key stakeholders and senior staff in intervention premises using semi-structured interviews.<p></p> <b>Results</b><p></p> The process evaluation indicated implementation barriers and low fidelity, with a reluctance to implement the intervention and to submit to a formal risk audit. Power calculations suggest the intervention effect on violence and subjective intoxication would be raised to significance with a study size of 517 premises.<p></p> <b>Conclusions</b><p></p> It is methodologically feasible to conduct randomised controlled trials where licensed premises are the unit of allocation. However, lack of enthusiasm in senior premises staff indicates the need for intervention enforcement, rather than voluntary agreements, and on-going strategies to promote sustainability

Assessing stimulus–stimulus (semantic) conflict in the Stroop task using saccadic two-to-one color response mapping and preresponse pupillary measures

© 2015, The Psychonomic Society, Inc. Conflict in the Stroop task is thought to come from various stages of processing, including semantics. Two-to-one response mappings, in which two response-set colors share a common response location, have been used to isolate stimulus–stimulus (semantic) from stimulus–response conflict in the Stroop task. However, the use of congruent trials as a baseline means that the measured effects could be exaggerated by facilitation, and recent research using neutral, non-color-word trials as a baseline has supported this notion. In the present study, we sought to provide evidence for stimulus–stimulus conflict using an oculomotor Stroop task and an early, preresponse pupillometric measure of effort. The results provided strong (Bayesian) evidence for no statistical difference between two-to-one response-mapping trials and neutral trials in both saccadic response latencies and preresponse pupillometric measures, supporting the notion that the difference between same-response and congruent trials indexes facilitation in congruent trials, and not stimulus–stimulus conflict, thus providing evidence against the presence of semantic conflict in the Stroop task. We also demonstrated the utility of preresponse pupillometry in measuring Stroop interference, supporting the idea that pupillary effects are not simply a residue of making a response

Unmanned aircraft systems as a new source of disturbance for wildlife: A systematic review.

The use of small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS; also known as "drones") for professional and personal-leisure use is increasing enormously. UAS operate at low altitudes (<500 m) and in any terrain, thus they are susceptible to interact with local fauna, generating a new type of anthropogenic disturbance that has not been systematically evaluated. To address this gap, we performed a review of the existent literature about animals' responses to UAS flights and conducted a pooled analysis of the data to determine the probability and intensity of the disturbance, and to identify the factors influencing animals' reactions towards the small aircraft. We found that wildlife reactions depended on both the UAS attributes (flight pattern, engine type and size of aircraft) and the characteristics of animals themselves (type of animal, life-history stage and level of aggregation). Target-oriented flight patterns, larger UAS sizes, and fuel-powered (noisier) engines evoked the strongest reactions in wildlife. Animals during the non-breeding period and in large groups were more likely to show behavioral reactions to UAS, and birds are more prone to react than other taxa. We discuss the implications of these results in the context of wildlife disturbance and suggest guidelines for conservationists, users and manufacturers to minimize the impact of UAS. In addition, we propose that the legal framework needs to be adapted so that appropriate actions can be undertaken when wildlife is negatively affected by these emergent practices

MICE: The muon ionization cooling experiment. Step I: First measurement of emittance with particle physics detectors

Copyright @ 2011 APSThe Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) is a strategic R&D project intended to demonstrate the only practical solution to providing high brilliance beams necessary for a neutrino factory or muon collider. MICE is under development at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the United Kingdom. It comprises a dedicated beamline to generate a range of input muon emittances and momenta, with time-of-flight and Cherenkov detectors to ensure a pure muon beam. The emittance of the incoming beam will be measured in the upstream magnetic spectrometer with a scintillating fiber tracker. A cooling cell will then follow, alternating energy loss in Liquid Hydrogen (LH2) absorbers to RF cavity acceleration. A second spectrometer, identical to the first, and a second muon identification system will measure the outgoing emittance. In the 2010 run at RAL the muon beamline and most detectors were fully commissioned and a first measurement of the emittance of the muon beam with particle physics (time-of-flight) detectors was performed. The analysis of these data was recently completed and is discussed in this paper. Future steps for MICE, where beam emittance and emittance reduction (cooling) are to be measured with greater accuracy, are also presented.This work was supported by NSF grant PHY-0842798

Towards the clinical implementation of pharmacogenetics in bipolar disorder.

BackgroundBipolar disorder (BD) is a psychiatric illness defined by pathological alterations between the mood states of mania and depression, causing disability, imposing healthcare costs and elevating the risk of suicide. Although effective treatments for BD exist, variability in outcomes leads to a large number of treatment failures, typically followed by a trial and error process of medication switches that can take years. Pharmacogenetic testing (PGT), by tailoring drug choice to an individual, may personalize and expedite treatment so as to identify more rapidly medications well suited to individual BD patients.DiscussionA number of associations have been made in BD between medication response phenotypes and specific genetic markers. However, to date clinical adoption of PGT has been limited, often citing questions that must be answered before it can be widely utilized. These include: What are the requirements of supporting evidence? How large is a clinically relevant effect? What degree of specificity and sensitivity are required? Does a given marker influence decision making and have clinical utility? In many cases, the answers to these questions remain unknown, and ultimately, the question of whether PGT is valid and useful must be determined empirically. Towards this aim, we have reviewed the literature and selected drug-genotype associations with the strongest evidence for utility in BD.SummaryBased upon these findings, we propose a preliminary panel for use in PGT, and a method by which the results of a PGT panel can be integrated for clinical interpretation. Finally, we argue that based on the sufficiency of accumulated evidence, PGT implementation studies are now warranted. We propose and discuss the design for a randomized clinical trial to test the use of PGT in the treatment of BD

The reduction of intoxication and disorder in premises licensed to serve alcohol: An exploratory randomised controlled trial

Background: Licensed premises offer a valuable point of intervention to reduce alcohol-related harm. Objective: To describe the research design for an exploratory trial examining the feasibility and acceptability of a premises-level intervention designed to reduce severe intoxication and related disorder. The study also aims to assess the feasibility of a potential future large scale effectiveness trial and provide information on key trial design parameters including inclusion criteria, premises recruitment methods, strategies to implement the intervention and trial design, outcome measures, data collection methods and intra-cluster correlations. Design: A randomised controlled trial in licensed premises that had experienced at least one assault in the year preceding the intervention, documented in police or hospital Emergency Department (ED) records. Premises were recruited from four study areas by piloting four recruitment strategies of varying intensity. Thirty two licensed premises were grouped into matched pairs to reduce potential bias and randomly allocated to the control or intervention condition. The study included a nested process evaluation to provide information on intervention acceptability and implementation. Outcome measures included police-recorded violent incidents, assault-related attendances at each premises' local ED and patron Breath Alcohol Concentration assessed on exiting and entering study premises. Results: The most successful recruitment method involved local police licensing officers and yielded a 100% success rate. Police-records of violence provided the most appropriate source of data about disorder at the premises level. Conclusion: The methodology of an exploratory trial is presented and despite challenges presented by the study environment it is argued an exploratory trial is warranted. Initial investigations in recruitment methods suggest that study premises should be recruited with the assistance of police officers. Police data were of sufficient quality to identify disorder and street surveys are a feasible method for measuring intoxication at the individual level

Loss of Expression and Promoter Methylation of SLIT2 Are Associated with Sessile Serrated Adenoma Formation.

Serrated adenomas form a distinct subtype of colorectal pre-malignant lesions that may progress to malignancy along a different molecular pathway than the conventional adenoma-carcinoma pathway. Previous studies have hypothesised that BRAF mutation and promoter hypermethylation plays a role, but the evidence for this is not robust. We aimed to carry out a whole-genome loss of heterozygosity analysis, followed by targeted promoter methylation and expression analysis to identify potential pathways in serrated adenomas. An initial panel of 9 sessile serrated adenomas (SSA) and one TSA were analysed using Illumina Goldengate HumanLinkage panel arrays to ascertain regions of loss of heterozygosity. This was verified via molecular inversion probe analysis and microsatellite analysis of a further 32 samples. Methylation analysis of genes of interest was carried out using methylation specific PCR (verified by pyrosequencing) and immunohistochemistry used to correlate loss of expression of genes of interest. All experiments used adenoma samples and normal tissue samples as control. SSA samples were found on whole-genome analysis to have consistent loss of heterozygosity at 4p15.1–4p15.31, which was not found in the sole TSA, adenomas, or normal tissues. Genes of interest in this region were PDCH7 and SLIT2, and combined MSP/IHC analysis of these genes revealed significant loss of SLIT2 expression associated with promoter methylation of SLIT2. Loss of expression of SLIT2 by promoter hypermethylation and loss of heterozygosity events is significantly associated with serrated adenoma development, and SLIT2 may represent a epimutated tumour suppressor gene according to the Knudson “two hit” hypothesis

An Assessment of the Effectiveness of High Definition Cameras as Remote Monitoring Tools for Dolphin Ecology Studies.

Research involving marine mammals often requires costly field programs. This paper assessed whether the benefits of using cameras outweighs the implications of having personnel performing marine mammal detection in the field. The efficacy of video and still cameras to detect Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) in the Fremantle Harbour (Western Australia) was evaluated, with consideration on how environmental conditions affect detectability. The cameras were set on a tower in the Fremantle Port channel and videos were perused at 1.75 times the normal speed. Images from the cameras were used to estimate position of dolphins at the water’s surface. Dolphin detections ranged from 5.6 m to 463.3 m for the video camera, and from 10.8 m to 347.8 m for the still camera. Detection range showed to be satisfactory when compared to distances at which dolphins would be detected by field observers. The relative effect of environmental conditions on detectability was considered by fitting a Generalised Estimation Equations (GEEs) model with Beaufort, level of glare and their interactions as predictors and a temporal auto-correlation structure. The best fit model indicated level of glare had an effect, with more intense periods of glare corresponding to lower occurrences of observed dolphins. However this effect was not large (-0.264) and the parameter estimate was associated with a large standard error (0.113).The limited field of view was the main restraint in that cameras can be only applied to detections of animals observed rather than counts of individuals. However, the use of cameras was effective for long term monitoring of occurrence of dolphins, outweighing the costs and reducing the health and safety risks to field personal. This study showed that cameras could be effectively implemented onshore for research such as studying changes in habitat use in response to development and construction activities