Mediational pathways of the impact of cigarette warning labels on quit attempts

OBJECTIVES: To test and develop, using structural equation modelling, a robust model of the mediational pathways through which health warning labels exert their influence on smokers’ subsequent quitting behaviour. METHODS: Data come from the International Tobacco Control Four-Country Survey, a longitudinal cohort study conducted in Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US. Waves 5–6 data (n=4988) were used to calibrate the hypothesized model of warning label impact on subsequent quit attempts via a set of policy-specific and general psychosocial mediators. The finalised model was validated using Waves 6–7 data (n=5065). RESULTS: As hypothesized, warning label salience was positively associated with thoughts about risks of smoking stimulated by the warnings (β=.58, p<.001), which in turn were positively related to increased worry about negative outcomes of smoking (β=.52, p<.001); increased worry in turn predicted stronger intention to quit (β=.39, p<.001) which was a strong predictor of subsequent quit attempts (β=.39, p<.001). This calibrated model was successfully replicated using Waves 6–7 data. CONCLUSIONS: Health warning labels seem to influence future quitting attempts primarily through their ability to stimulate thoughts about the risks of smoking, which in turn help to raise smoking-related health concerns, which lead to stronger intentions to quit, a known key predictor of future quit attempts for smokers. By making warning labels more salient and engaging, they should have a greater chance to change behaviour

Toward Male Individualization with Rapidly Mutating Y-Chromosomal Short Tandem Repeats

Peer reviewe

Association analyses of East Asian individuals and trans-ancestry analyses with European individuals reveal new loci associated with cholesterol and triglyceride levels

Large-scale meta-analyses of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified >175 loci associated with fasting cholesterol levels, including total cholesterol (TC), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), and triglycerides (TG). With differences in linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure and allele frequencies between ancestry groups, studies in additional large samples may detect new associations. We conducted staged GWAS meta-analyses in up to 69,414 East Asian individuals from 24 studies with participants from Japan, the Philippines, Korea, China, Singapore, and Taiwan. These meta-analyses identified (P < 5 × 10-8) three novel loci associated with HDL-C near CD163-APOBEC1 (P = 7.4 × 10-9), NCOA2 (P = 1.6 × 10-8), and NID2-PTGDR (P = 4.2 × 10-8), and one novel locus associated with TG near WDR11-FGFR2 (P = 2.7 × 10-10). Conditional analyses identified a second signal near CD163-APOBEC1. We then combined results from the East Asian meta-analysis with association results from up to 187,365 European individuals from the Global Lipids Genetics Consortium in a trans-ancestry meta-analysis. This analysis identified (log10Bayes Factor ≥6.1) eight additional novel lipid loci. Among the twelve total loci identified, the index variants at eight loci have demonstrated at least nominal significance with other metabolic traits in prior studies, and two loci exhibited coincident eQTLs (P < 1 × 10-5) in subcutaneous adipose tissue for BPTF and PDGFC. Taken together, these analyses identified multiple novel lipid loci, providing new potential therapeutic targets

Comprehensive Rare Variant Analysis via Whole-Genome Sequencing to Determine the Molecular Pathology of Inherited Retinal Disease

Inherited retinal disease is a common cause of visual impairment and represents a highly heterogeneous group of conditions. Here, we present findings from a cohort of 722 individuals with inherited retinal disease, who have had whole-genome sequencing (n = 605), whole-exome sequencing (n = 72), or both (n = 45) performed, as part of the NIHR-BioResource Rare Diseases research study. We identified pathogenic variants (single-nucleotide variants, indels, or structural variants) for 404/722 (56%) individuals. Whole-genome sequencing gives unprecedented power to detect three categories of pathogenic variants in particular: structural variants, variants in GC-rich regions, which have significantly improved coverage compared to whole-exome sequencing, and variants in non-coding regulatory regions. In addition to previously reported pathogenic regulatory variants, we have identified a previously unreported pathogenic intronic variant in $\textit{CHM}$ in two males with choroideremia. We have also identified 19 genes not previously known to be associated with inherited retinal disease, which harbor biallelic predicted protein-truncating variants in unsolved cases. Whole-genome sequencing is an increasingly important comprehensive method with which to investigate the genetic causes of inherited retinal disease.This work was supported by The National Institute for Health Research England (NIHR) for the NIHR BioResource – Rare Diseases project (grant number RG65966). The Moorfields Eye Hospital cohort of patients and clinical and imaging data were ascertained and collected with the support of grants from the National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre at Moorfields Eye Hospital, National Health Service Foundation Trust, and UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, Moorfields Eye Hospital Special Trustees, Moorfields Eye Charity, the Foundation Fighting Blindness (USA), and Retinitis Pigmentosa Fighting Blindness. M.M. is a recipient of an FFB Career Development Award. E.M. is supported by UCLH/UCL NIHR Biomedical Research Centre. F.L.R. and D.G. are supported by Cambridge NIHR Biomedical Research Centre

The Physics of Star Cluster Formation and Evolution

© 2020 Springer-Verlag. The final publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-020-00689-4.Star clusters form in dense, hierarchically collapsing gas clouds. Bulk kinetic energy is transformed to turbulence with stars forming from cores fed by filaments. In the most compact regions, stellar feedback is least effective in removing the gas and stars may form very efficiently. These are also the regions where, in high-mass clusters, ejecta from some kind of high-mass stars are effectively captured during the formation phase of some of the low mass stars and effectively channeled into the latter to form multiple populations. Star formation epochs in star clusters are generally set by gas flows that determine the abundance of gas in the cluster. We argue that there is likely only one star formation epoch after which clusters remain essentially clear of gas by cluster winds. Collisional dynamics is important in this phase leading to core collapse, expansion and eventual dispersion of every cluster. We review recent developments in the field with a focus on theoretical work.Peer reviewe

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.Peer reviewe

Biosorption of cadmium ions using Pleurotus ostreatus: Growth kinetics, isotherm study and biosorption mechanism

The mycelial growth kinetics, cadmium biosorption capacity and main governing biosorption mechanism of Pleurotus ostreatus (oyster mushroom) have been determined in this study. The fungus mycelium exhibits a sigmoidal (S-shaped) growth curve in which the growth rates for the lag and exponential phases are 0.1 and 0.31 g/L.day, respectively. The grown fungus is subjected to elemental, infra-red and scanning electron microscopy-energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy analyses, while biosorption data are fitted to established adsorption isotherm models, namely, Langmuir, Freundlich and Dubinin-Radushkevich. It is strongly suggested that the main governing mechanism involved is chemisorption due to good fitting of biosorption data to Langmuir and Dubinin-Radushkevich models with possibility of involvement of both ion exchange and complexation. Data presented in the study are very useful for design of future pilot- or industrial-scale biosorption water purification systems

Утримання клієнтів банків у Новій Зеландії

The banking industry is highly competitive, with banks not only competing among each other; but also with non-banks and other financial institutions. Most bank product developments are easy to duplicate and when banks provide nearly identical services, they can only distinguish themselves on the basis of price and quality. Therefore, customer retention is potentially an effective tool that banks can use to gain a strategic advantage and survive in today’s ever-increasing banking competitive environment

Утримання клієнтів банків у Новій Зеландії

The banking industry is highly competitive, with banks not only competing among each other; but also with non-banks and other financial institutions. Most bank product developments are easy to duplicate and when banks provide nearly identical services, they can only distinguish themselves on the basis of price and quality. Therefore, customer retention is potentially an effective tool that banks can use to gain a strategic advantage and survive in today’s ever-increasing banking competitive environment