Dietary behaviors related to cancer prevention among pre-adolescents and adolescents: the gap between recommendations and reality

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Diet is thought to play an important role in cancer risk. This paper summarizes dietary recommendations for cancer prevention and compares these recommendations to the dietary behaviors of U.S. youth ages 8-18.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We identified cancer prevention-related dietary recommendations from key health organizations and assessed dietary consumption patterns among youth using published statistics from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, the national Youth Risk Behavior Survey, and other supplemental sources.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Cancer prevention guidelines recommend a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, recommend limiting sugary foods and beverages, red and processed meats, sodium, and alcohol, and recommend avoiding foods contaminated with carcinogens. However, youth typically do not meet the daily recommendations for fruit, vegetable, or whole grain consumption and are over-consuming energy-dense, sugary and salty foods.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>A large discrepancy exists between expert recommendations about diet and cancer and actual dietary practices among young people and points to the need for more research to better promote the translation of science into practice. Future research should focus on developing and evaluating policies and interventions at the community, state and national levels for aligning the diets of youth with the evolving scientific evidence regarding cancer prevention.</p

Predictors of early recurrence after resection of colorectal liver metastases

BACKGROUND: Early recurrence after resection of colorectal liver metastases (CLM) is common. Patients at risk of early recurrence may be candidates for enhanced preoperative staging and/or earlier postoperative imaging. The aim of this study was to determine if there are any risk factors that specifically predict early liver-only and systemic recurrence. METHODS: Retrospective analysis of prospective database of patients undergoing liver resection (LR) for CLM from 2004 to 2006 was undertaken. Early recurrence was defined as occurring within 18 months of LR. Patients were classified into three groups: early liver-only recurrence, early systemic recurrence and recurrence-free. Preoperative factors were compared between patients with and without early recurrence. RESULTS: Two hundred and forty-three consecutive patients underwent LR for CLM. Twenty-seven patients (11%) developed early liver-only recurrence. Dukes C stage and male sex were significantly associated with early liver-only recurrence (P < 0.05). Sixty-six patients (27%) developed early systemic recurrence. Tumour size ≥3.6 cm and tumour number (>2) were significantly associated with early systemic recurrence (P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: It is possible to stratify patients according to the risk of early liver-only or systemic recurrence after resection of CLM. High-risk patients may be candidates for preoperative MRI and/or computed tomography-positron emission tomography (CT-PET) scan and should receive intensive postoperative surveillance

Autoregulation in resistance training : addressing the inconsistencies

Autoregulation is a process that is used to manipulate training based primarily on the measurement of an individual's performance or their perceived capability to perform. Despite being established as a training framework since the 1940s, there has been limited systematic research investigating its broad utility. Instead, researchers have focused on disparate practices that can be considered specific examples of the broader autoregulation training framework. A primary limitation of previous research includes inconsistent use of key terminology (e.g., adaptation, readiness, fatigue, and response) and associated ambiguity of how to implement different autoregulation strategies. Crucially, this ambiguity in terminology and failure to provide a holistic overview of autoregulation limits the synthesis of existing research findings and their dissemination to practitioners working in both performance and health contexts. Therefore, the purpose of the current review was threefold: first, we provide a broad overview of various autoregulation strategies and their development in both research and practice whilst highlighting the inconsistencies in definitions and terminology that currently exist. Second, we present an overarching conceptual framework that can be used to generate operational definitions and contextualise autoregulation within broader training theory. Finally, we show how previous definitions of autoregulation fit within the proposed framework and provide specific examples of how common practices may be viewed, highlighting their individual subtleties

Efficient representation of uncertainty in multiple sequence alignments using directed acyclic graphs

Background A standard procedure in many areas of bioinformatics is to use a single multiple sequence alignment (MSA) as the basis for various types of analysis. However, downstream results may be highly sensitive to the alignment used, and neglecting the uncertainty in the alignment can lead to significant bias in the resulting inference. In recent years, a number of approaches have been developed for probabilistic sampling of alignments, rather than simply generating a single optimum. However, this type of probabilistic information is currently not widely used in the context of downstream inference, since most existing algorithms are set up to make use of a single alignment. Results In this work we present a framework for representing a set of sampled alignments as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) whose nodes are alignment columns; each path through this DAG then represents a valid alignment. Since the probabilities of individual columns can be estimated from empirical frequencies, this approach enables sample-based estimation of posterior alignment probabilities. Moreover, due to conditional independencies between columns, the graph structure encodes a much larger set of alignments than the original set of sampled MSAs, such that the effective sample size is greatly increased. Conclusions The alignment DAG provides a natural way to represent a distribution in the space of MSAs, and allows for existing algorithms to be efficiently scaled up to operate on large sets of alignments. As an example, we show how this can be used to compute marginal probabilities for tree topologies, averaging over a very large number of MSAs. This framework can also be used to generate a statistically meaningful summary alignment; example applications show that this summary alignment is consistently more accurate than the majority of the alignment samples, leading to improvements in downstream tree inference. Implementations of the methods described in this article are available at http://statalign.github.io/WeaveAlign webcite

Prognostic model to predict postoperative acute kidney injury in patients undergoing major gastrointestinal surgery based on a national prospective observational cohort study.

Background: Acute illness, existing co-morbidities and surgical stress response can all contribute to postoperative acute kidney injury (AKI) in patients undergoing major gastrointestinal surgery. The aim of this study was prospectively to develop a pragmatic prognostic model to stratify patients according to risk of developing AKI after major gastrointestinal surgery. Methods: This prospective multicentre cohort study included consecutive adults undergoing elective or emergency gastrointestinal resection, liver resection or stoma reversal in 2-week blocks over a continuous 3-month period. The primary outcome was the rate of AKI within 7 days of surgery. Bootstrap stability was used to select clinically plausible risk factors into the model. Internal model validation was carried out by bootstrap validation. Results: A total of 4544 patients were included across 173 centres in the UK and Ireland. The overall rate of AKI was 14·2 per cent (646 of 4544) and the 30-day mortality rate was 1·8 per cent (84 of 4544). Stage 1 AKI was significantly associated with 30-day mortality (unadjusted odds ratio 7·61, 95 per cent c.i. 4·49 to 12·90; P < 0·001), with increasing odds of death with each AKI stage. Six variables were selected for inclusion in the prognostic model: age, sex, ASA grade, preoperative estimated glomerular filtration rate, planned open surgery and preoperative use of either an angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor or an angiotensin receptor blocker. Internal validation demonstrated good model discrimination (c-statistic 0·65). Discussion: Following major gastrointestinal surgery, AKI occurred in one in seven patients. This preoperative prognostic model identified patients at high risk of postoperative AKI. Validation in an independent data set is required to ensure generalizability

Obesity at age 20 and the risk of miscarriages, irregular periods and reported problems of becoming pregnant: the Adventist Health Study-2

In a group of 46,000 North-American Adventist women aged 40 and above, we investigated the relationships between body mass index (BMI, kg/m(2)) at age 20 and the proportion of women who reported at least one miscarriage, periods with irregular menstruation or failing to become pregnant even if trying for more than one straight year. Approximately 31, 14 and 17 %, respectively, reported the three different problems related to reproduction. Positive age- and marital status adjusted relationships were found between BMI at age 20 and periods with irregular menstruation or failing to become pregnant even if trying for more than 1 year, but not with the risk of miscarriages. Women with BMI ≥ 32.5 kg/m(2) when aged 20 had approximately 2.0 (95 % CI: 1.6, 2.4) and 1.5 (95 % CI: 1.3, 1.9) higher odds for irregular periods or failing to get pregnant, respectively, than women with BMI in the 20–24.9 kg/m(2) bracket. These relationships were consistently found in a number of strata of the population, including the large proportion of the women who never had smoked or never used alcohol. Underweight (BMI < 18.5 kg/m(2)) when aged 20 marginally (approximately 15 %) increased the risk of failing to get pregnant within a year. Thus, obesity at age 20 increases the risk of reporting some specific reproductive problems, but not the risk of miscarriages. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10654-012-9749-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Multi-ancestry genome-wide association meta-analysis of Parkinson’s disease

\ua9 2023, This is a U.S. Government work and not under copyright protection in the US; foreign copyright protection may apply. Although over 90 independent risk variants have been identified for Parkinson’s disease using genome-wide association studies, most studies have been performed in just one population at a time. Here we performed a large-scale multi-ancestry meta-analysis of Parkinson’s disease with 49,049 cases, 18,785 proxy cases and 2,458,063 controls including individuals of European, East Asian, Latin American and African ancestry. In a meta-analysis, we identified 78 independent genome-wide significant loci, including 12 potentially novel loci (MTF2, PIK3CA, ADD1, SYBU, IRS2, USP8, PIGL, FASN, MYLK2, USP25, EP300 and PPP6R2) and fine-mapped 6 putative causal variants at 6 known PD loci. By combining our results with publicly available eQTL data, we identified 25 putative risk genes in these novel loci whose expression is associated with PD risk. This work lays the groundwork for future efforts aimed at identifying PD loci in non-European populations