Testosterone, Gendered Behavior, and Societal Norms

The role that biological differences between males and females may play in shaping gendered behavior is sharply contested in contemporary social science. This article examines two major works representing contrasting positions in the controversy: Sociologist Cordelia Fine’s Testosterone Rex: Myths of Science, Sex, and Society and evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven’s T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. The essay examines the relevant claims and evidence in each text and situates them within the wider ideological debate over gender inequality. It is concluded that the evidence Hooven marshals on the influence of testosterone on gendered behavior, sexuality, and identity is compelling, while Fine fails to adequately demonstrate what she views as the overwhelming role of socialization

Using the SEIPS Framework to Understand Systems-Level Factors Affecting Obstetric Nurse Decision Making: A Convergent Parallel Mixed Methods Study

The United States has the worst maternal morbidity and mortality in the developed world, with a maternal death rate of 17.3/100,000 live births. Efforts to improve this have not been fruitful. This dissertation suggests that future research with a patient safety focus and human factors framework may improve our understanding of this multifactorial problem and identify new potential solutions for improving this devastating crisis. The first manuscript is a scoping review discussing the use of trigger tools to identify women in labor in need of care escalation. The second manuscript is a realist review describing current approaches to the problem of obstetric failure to rescue. The third manuscript details a convergent parallel mixed methods study looking at the systems-level factors affecting nurses who are caring for women in labor and makes recommendations for systems changes with the potential to improve outcomes

Sympathy for Strangers: Picturesque Aesthetics and the Politics of Feeling in the American Gilded Age

The middle class in both Britain and America has always been a precarious position, its vague economic perimeters and financial vulnerability making it uniquely reliant on cultural and aesthetic values to define its boundaries. In mid- to late-nineteenth century America, the ability to see aesthetically to perceive any object as beautiful or interesting became a definitive feature for a class emerging between increasingly extreme wealth and poverty. The eighteenth-century British tradition of picturesque aesthetics, which prized the rough and the natural, made aesthetic taste a means by which the nascent middle class could define its social position. In America, works by Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman imported picturesque modes of perception and infused them with moral, spiritual, and political significance: to apprehend roughness or dereliction as beautiful became a virtuous act, fundamental to the creation of their radically new nation. The Transcendentalists made the picturesque a means of unification with otherness, a process which allowed moral sentiments to become a primary site of personal agency, and thus to serve as intervention in social problems. Frequent economic crises, mass immigration, and rapid urbanization during the Gilded Age created an urban middle class for whom aestheticizing roughness could foster a cosmopolitan identity; members of the bourgeoisie needed an antidote to their sense of the contingency and unreality of middle-class life, as well as a structure for understanding their obligations toward structurally distanced others. Sketches about the picturesque qualities of urban ghettos, ranging from touristic journalism to reform literature, educated genteel Americans on aesthetic and affective responses to class and ethnic difference. Writers responding to this tradition such as H.C. Bunner, Brander Matthews, Hutchins Hapgood, and especially William Dean Howells use the picturesque to probe their own interest and that of their class in rough people and places. The self-directed irony of their work depicts and interrogates the position of genteel viewers whose sympathy with poorer people is effected primarily through aesthetic products or cross-class spectatorship. These writers forge an important link to contemporary liberal culture, which upholds the social value of moral sentiment but consistently projects an ambivalent and ironic relation to it

Change in hematologic indices over time in pediatric inflammatory bowel disease treated with azathioprine

Azathioprine leads to changes in mean corpuscular volume (MCV) and white blood cell (WBC) indices reflecting efficacy or toxicity. Understanding the interactions between bone marrow stem cells and azathioprine could highlight abnormal response patterns as forerunners for hematologic malig-nancies. This study gives a statistical description of factors influencing the relationship between MCV and WBC in children with inflammatory bowel disease treated with azathioprine. We found that leukopenia preceded macro¬cytosis. Macrocytosis is therefore not a good predictor of leukopenia. Further studies will be necessary to determine the subgroup of patients at increased risk of malignancies based on bone marrow response

School-age effects of the newborn individualized developmental care and assessment program for preterm infants with intrauterine growth restriction: preliminary findings

Background: The experience in the newborn intensive care nursery results in premature infants’ neurobehavioral and neurophysiological dysfunction and poorer brain structure. Preterms with severe intrauterine growth restriction are doubly jeopardized given their compromised brains. The Newborn Individualized Developmental Care and Assessment Program improved outcome at early school-age for preterms with appropriate intrauterine growth. It also showed effectiveness to nine months for preterms with intrauterine growth restriction. The current study tested effectiveness into school-age for preterms with intrauterine growth restriction regarding executive function (EF), electrophysiology (EEG) and neurostructure (MRI). Methods: Twenty-three 9-year-old former growth-restricted preterms, randomized at birth to standard care (14 controls) or to the Newborn Individualized Developmental Care and Assessment Program (9 experimentals) were assessed with standardized measures of cognition, achievement, executive function, electroencephalography, and magnetic resonance imaging. The participating children were comparable to those lost to follow-up, and the controls to the experimentals, in terms of newborn background health and demographics. All outcome measures were corrected for mother’s intelligence. Analysis techniques included two-group analysis of variance and stepwise discriminate analysis for the outcome measures, Wilks’ lambda and jackknifed classification to ascertain two-group classification success per and across domains; canonical correlation analysis to explore relationships among neuropsychological, electrophysiological and neurostructural domains at school-age, and from the newborn period to school-age. Results: Controls and experimentals were comparable in age at testing, anthropometric and health parameters, and in cognitive and achievement scores. Experimentals scored better in executive function, spectral coherence, and cerebellar volumes. Furthermore, executive function, spectral coherence and brain structural measures discriminated controls from experimentals. Executive function correlated with coherence and brain structure measures, and with newborn-period neurobehavioral assessment. Conclusion: The intervention in the intensive care nursery improved executive function as well as spectral coherence between occipital and frontal as well as parietal regions. The experimentals’ cerebella were significantly larger than the controls’. These results, while preliminary, point to the possibility of long-term brain improvement even of intrauterine growth compromised preterms if individualized intervention begins with admission to the NICU and extends throughout transition home. Larger sample replications are required in order to confirm these results

In silico abstraction of zinc finger nuclease cleavage profiles reveals an expanded landscape of off-target sites

Gene-editing nucleases enable targeted modification of DNA sequences in living cells, thereby facilitating efficient knockout and precise editing of endogenous loci. Engineered nucleases also have the potential to introduce mutations at off-target sites of action. Such unintended alterations can confound interpretation of experiments and can have implications for development of therapeutic applications. Recently, two improved methods for identifying the off-target effects of zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs) were described–one using an in vitro cleavage site selection method and the other exploiting the insertion of integration-defective lentiviruses into nuclease-induced double-stranded DNA breaks. However, application of these two methods to a ZFN pair targeted to the human CCR5 gene led to identification of largely non-overlapping off-target sites, raising the possibility that additional off-target sites might exist. Here, we show that in silico abstraction of ZFN cleavage profiles obtained from in vitro cleavage site selections can greatly enhance the ability to identify potential off-target sites in human cells. Our improved method should enable more comprehensive profiling of ZFN specificities

Tracking Official Development Assistance for Reproductive Health in Conflict-Affected Countries

Preeti Patel and colleagues report inequity in the disbursement of official development assistance for reproductive health between countries affected by conflict and those unaffected

A candidate regulatory variant at the TREM gene cluster associates with decreased Alzheimer's disease risk and increased TREML1 and TREM2 brain gene expression

Introduction: We hypothesized that common Alzheimer's disease (AD)-associated variants within the triggering receptor expressed on myeloid (TREM) gene cluster influence disease through gene expression. Methods: Expression microarrays on temporal cortex and cerebellum from ∼400 neuropathologically diagnosed subjects and two independent RNAseq replication cohorts were used for expression quantitative trait locus analysis. Results: A variant within a DNase hypersensitive site 5′ of TREM2, rs9357347-C, associates with reduced AD risk and increased TREML1 and TREM2 levels (uncorrected P = 6.3 × 10−3 and 4.6 × 10−2, respectively). Meta-analysis on expression quantitative trait locus results from three independent data sets (n = 1006) confirmed these associations (uncorrected P = 3.4 × 10−2 and 3.5 × 10−3, Bonferroni-corrected P = 6.7 × 10−2 and 7.1 × 10−3, respectively). Discussion: Our findings point to rs9357347 as a functional regulatory variant that contributes to a protective effect observed at the TREM locus in the International Genomics of Alzheimer's Project genome-wide association study meta-analysis and suggest concomitant increase in TREML1 and TREM2 brain levels as a potential mechanism for protection from AD