Does angiotensin-1 converting enzyme genotype influence motor or cognitive development after pre-term birth?

BACKGROUND: Raised activity of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS) may both amplify inflammatory and free radical responses and decrease tissue metabolic efficiency and thus enhance cerebral injury in the preterm infant. The angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) DD genotype is associated with raised ACE and RAS activity as well as potentially adverse stimuli such as inflammation. The DD genotype has been associated with neurological impairments in the elderly, and thus may be also associated with poorer motor or cognitive development amongst children born preterm prematurely. METHODS: The association of DD genotype with developmental progress amongst 176 Caucasian children born at less than 33 weeks gestation (median birthweight 1475 g, range 645–2480 g; gestation 30 weeks, range 22–32; 108 male) was examined at 2 and 5 1/2 years of age. Measured neuro-cognitive outcomes were cranial ultrasound abnormalities, cerebral palsy, disability, Griffiths Developmental Quotient [DQ] at 2 yrs, and General Cognitive Ability [British Ability Scales-11] and motor performance [ABC Movement], both performed at 5 1/2 yrs. All outcomes were correlated with ACE genotype. RESULTS: The DD genotype was not associated with lower developmental quotients even after accounting for important social variables. CONCLUSION: These data do not support either a role for ACE in the development of cognitive or motor function in surviving infants born preterm or inhibition of ACE as a neuroprotective therapy

Pneumocystis jirovecii infection of the external auditory canal

Pneumocystis jirovecii is well known to cause interstitial plasma cell pneumonia in immunocompromised patients. It has been implicated as a rare cause of infections in other anatomical sites.¹ We report a rare case of P. jirovecii infection of the external auditory canal. This was the first manifestation of a previously unknown HIV infection

Post-discharge follow-up of stroke patients at Groote Schuur Hospital - a prospective study

A survey of 59 stroke patients was undertaken between 3 and 6 months after the event to determine whether a weekly stroke round would improve the rate of referral for rehabilitation. Comparison with a previous survey at Groote Schuur Hospital showed a marked improvement (40% for physiotherapy and 10% for occupational therapy v. 76% and 50% respectively). A comparison of referral rates between younger « 65 years old) and older patients (> 65 years old) revealed a significantly higher rate of referral among the younger patients. Attendance for both groups was low (approx. 7 sessions per 3 months). Social work was an important requirement and 60% of all patients expressed a need for more help. Social needs of older and younger patients differ. Despite the improved referral rate the rehabilitation of stroke patients is unsatisfactory, mainly because of transport difficulties. Methods should be investigated to establish rehabilitation centres in the community to overcome this impasse

Influence of variation of etching conditions on the sensitivity of PADC detectors with a new evaluation method

At the Paul Scherrer Institut, a personal neutron dosimetry system based on chemically etched poly allyl diglycol carbonate (PADC) detectors and an automatic track counting (Autoscan 60) for neutron dose evaluations has been in routine use since 1998. Today, the hardware and the software of the Autoscan 60 are out of date, no spare components are available anymore and more sophisticated image-analysis systems are already developed. Therefore, a new evaluation system, the ‘TASLIMAGE', was tested thoroughly in 2009 for linearity, reproducibility, influence of etching conditions and so forth, with the intention of replacing the Autoscan 60 in routine evaluations. The TASLIMAGE system is based on a microscope (high-quality Nikon optics) and an ultra-fast three-axis motorised control for scanning the detectors. In this paper, the TASLIMAGE system and its possibilities for neutron dose calculation are explained in more detail and the study of the influence of the variation of etching conditions on the sensitivity and background of the PADC detectors is described. The etching temperature and etching duration were varied, which showed that the etching conditions do not have a significant influence on the results of non-irradiated detectors. However, the sensitivity of irradiated detectors decreases by 5 % per 1°C when increasing the etching temperature. For the variation of the etching duration, the influence on the sensitivity of irradiated detectors is less pronounce

Getting to Common Ground: A Comparison of Ontario, Canada's Provincial Policy Statement and the Auckland Council Regional Policy Statement with Respect to Indigenous Peoples

Indigenous rights are crucial to contemporary land use planning and policy in settler states. This article comparatively analyzes the manifest and latent content of the 2014 Provincial Policy Statement of Ontario, Canada (PPS) and the 1999 Auckland Council Regional Policy Statement of Aotearoa New Zealand (ACRPS) in order to evaluate their relative capacity to recognize the rights of Indigenous peoples. While the results show that jurisdiction is an impediment to fostering common ground between Indigenous peoples and settler states, the authors conclude that the PPS and the ACRPS serve vital roles in building dialogue and equitable planning outcomes

Scaling of Hunter Gatherer Camp Size and Human Sociality

One of the most commonly-observed properties of human settlements, both past and present, is the tendency for larger settlements to display higher population densities. Work in urban science and archaeology suggests this densification pattern reflects an emergent spatial equilibrium where individuals balance movement costs with social interaction benefits, leading to increases in aggregate productivity and social interdependence. In this context, it is perhaps not surprising that the more temporary camps created by mobile hunters and gatherers exhibit a tendency to become less dense with their population size. Here we examine why this difference occurs and consider conditions under which hunter-gatherer groups may transition to sedentism and densification. We investigate the relationship between population and area in mobile hunter-gatherer camps using a dataset, representing a large cross-cultural sample, derived from the ethnographic literature. We present a model based on the interplay between social interactions and scalar stress for the relationship between camp area and group size that describes the observed patterns among mobile hunter-gatherers. The model highlights the tradeoffs between the costs and benefits of proximity and interaction that are common to all human aggregations and specifies the constraints that must be overcome for economies of scale and cooperation to emerge

An Approach to Web-Scale Named-Entity Disambiguation

We present a multi-pass clustering approach to large scale. wide-scope named-entity disambiguation (NED) oil collections of web pages. Our approach Uses name co-occurrence information to cluster and hence disambiguate entities. and is designed to handle NED on the entire web. We show that on web collections, NED becomes increasing), difficult as the corpus size increases, not only because of the challenge of scaling the NED algorithm, but also because new and surprising facets of entities become visible in the data. This effect limits the potential benefits for data-driven approaches of processing larger data-sets, and suggests that efficient clustering-based disambiguation methods for the web will require extracting more specialized information front documents