Ökobilanzierung 2009 : Ansätze und Weiterentwicklungen zur Operationalisierung von Nachhaltigkeit ; Tagungsband der fünften Ökobilanz-Werkstatt, Campus Weihenstephan, Freising, 5. bis 7. Oktober 2009

Als entscheidungsunterstützendes Werkzeug im Sinn nachhaltiger Entwicklung ist Ökobilanzierung einerseits standardisiert, unterliegt andererseits einer steten Weiterentwicklung. Der Tagungsband zur fünften Ökobilanz-Werkstatt 2009 beinhaltet Beiträge und Diskussionen u.a. zur Allokationsfrage, Product Carbon Footprint, Fragestellungen im Zusammenhang nachwachsender Rohstoffe wie Nutzungskonkurrenzen und Flächeninanspruchnahme - um nur einige wenige Stichworte zu nennen

The Greifswald Post COVID Rehabilitation Study and Research (PoCoRe)–Study Design, Characteristics and Evaluation Tools

(1) Background: COVID-19 is often associated with significant long-term symptoms and disability, i.e., the long/post-COVID syndrome (PCS). Even after presumably mild COVID-19 infections, an increasing number of patients seek medical help for these long-term sequelae, which can affect various organ systems. The pathogenesis of PCS is not yet understood. Therapy has so far been limited to symptomatic treatment. The Greifswald Post COVID Rehabilitation Study (PoCoRe) aims to follow and deeply phenotype outpatients with PCS in the long term, taking a holistic and comprehensive approach to the analysis of their symptoms, signs and biomarkers. (2) Methods: Post-COVID outpatients are screened for symptoms in different organ systems with a standardized medical history, clinical examination, various questionnaires as well as physical and cardiopulmonary function tests. In addition, biomaterials are collected for the analysis of immunomodulators, cytokines, chemokines, proteome patterns as well as specific (auto)antibodies. Patients are treated according to their individual needs, adhering to the current standard of care. PoCoRe’s overall aim is to optimize diagnostics and therapy in PCS patients

Recognition of emotions in gait patterns by means of artificial neural nets

This paper describes an application of emotion recognition in human gait by means of kinetic and kinematic data using artificial neural nets. Two experiments were undertaken, one attempting to identify participants’ emotional states from gait patterns, and the second analyzing effects on gait patterns of listening to music while walking. In the first experiment gait was analyzed as participants attempted to simulate four distinct emotional states (normal, happy, sad, angry). In the second experiment, participants were asked to listen to different types of music (excitatory, calming, no music) before and during gait analysis. Derived data were fed into different types of artificial neural nets. Results showed not only a clear distinction between individuals, but also revealed clear indications of emotion recognition in nets

The genetic landscape of axonal neuropathies in the middle-aged and elderly: Focus on MME.

OBJECTIVE: To test the hypothesis that monogenic neuropathies such as Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT) contribute to frequent but often unexplained neuropathies in the elderly, we performed genetic analysis of 230 patients with unexplained axonal neuropathies and disease onset ≥35 years. METHODS: We recruited patients, collected clinical data, and conducted whole-exome sequencing (WES; n = 126) and MME single-gene sequencing (n = 104). We further queried WES repositories for MME variants and measured blood levels of the MME-encoded protein neprilysin. RESULTS: In the WES cohort, the overall detection rate for assumed disease-causing variants in genes for CMT or other conditions associated with neuropathies was 18.3% (familial cases 26.4%, apparently sporadic cases 12.3%). MME was most frequently involved and accounted for 34.8% of genetically solved cases. The relevance of MME for late-onset neuropathies was further supported by detection of a comparable proportion of cases in an independent patient sample, preponderance of MME variants among patients compared to population frequencies, retrieval of additional late-onset neuropathy patients with MME variants from WES repositories, and low neprilysin levels in patients' blood samples. Transmission of MME variants was often consistent with an incompletely penetrant autosomal-dominant trait and less frequently with autosomal-recessive inheritance. CONCLUSIONS: A detectable fraction of unexplained late-onset axonal neuropathies is genetically determined, by variants in either CMT genes or genes involved in other conditions that affect the peripheral nerves and can mimic a CMT phenotype. MME variants can act as completely penetrant recessive alleles but also confer dominantly inherited susceptibility to axonal neuropathies in an aging population