Effects of vinasse irrigation on effluent ionic concentration in Brazilian Oxisols.

The irrigation with vinasse can improve soil fertility. However, this use should take into account the characteristics of each soil because the vinasse has unbalanced amounts of mineral and organic elements which might lead to leach the ions, especially nitrate and potassium. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impacts of vinasse irrigation on effluent ionic concentrations in Brazilian Ferralsols from two areas in Central Brazil: a sugarcane field, and a natural undisturbed savannah area. Soil samples from the two sites were placed into PVC columns with 120 cm height × 25 cm diameter with sugarcane. Undiluted vinasse was applied once on the surface of the soil columns at doses equivalent to 0, 300, 600 and 1200 m3 ha-1. After 0, 60, 90 and 120 days of irrigation, samples of the effluent were collected and the concentrations of dissolved organic matter (DOM), Cl, Ca, Mg, Na, K, total Fe, NH4 +, NO3 -, SO4 2- as well as pH were determined. The ions concentration data were modeled in the chemical equilibrium model Visual Minteq v. 3.0. Results revealed vinasse?s dose, days after irrigation and land use had a relevant effect on most nutrients effluent concentration. Contrasting pH values were observed for both soils and in the savannah soil was observed a decrease in pH at high vinasse doses. This paper thus revealed leaching of the DOM was strongly time dependent. High vinasse doses may lead to increase nutrient leaching and soil dispersion regardless the land use and time after irrigation

Ergodic properties of quasi-Markovian generalized Langevin equations with configuration dependent noise and non-conservative force

We discuss the ergodic properties of quasi-Markovian stochastic differential equations, providing general conditions that ensure existence and uniqueness of a smooth invariant distribution and exponential convergence of the evolution operator in suitably weighted $L^{\infty}$ spaces, which implies the validity of central limit theorem for the respective solution processes. The main new result is an ergodicity condition for the generalized Langevin equation with configuration-dependent noise and (non-)conservative force

High-resolution magnetic resonance imaging reveals nuclei of the human amygdala: manual segmentation to automatic atlas

Available online 4 May 2017The amygdala is composed of multiple nuclei with unique functions and connections in the limbic system and to the rest of the brain. However, standard in vivo neuroimaging tools to automatically delineate the amygdala into its multiple nuclei are still rare. By scanning postmortem specimens at high resolution (100–150 µm) at 7 T field strength (n = 10), we were able to visualize and label nine amygdala nuclei (anterior amygdaloid, cortico-amygdaloid transition area; basal, lateral, accessory basal, central, cortical medial, paralaminar nuclei). We created an atlas from these labels using a recently developed atlas building algorithm based on Bayesian inference. This atlas, which will be released as part of FreeSurfer, can be used to automatically segment nine amygdala nuclei from a standard resolution structural MR image. We applied this atlas to two publicly available datasets (ADNI and ABIDE) with standard resolution T1 data, used individual volumetric data of the amygdala nuclei as the measure and found that our atlas i) discriminates between Alzheimer's disease participants and age-matched control participants with 84% accuracy (AUC=0.915), and ii) discriminates between individuals with autism and age-, sex- and IQ-matched neurotypically developed control participants with 59.5% accuracy (AUC=0.59). For both datasets, the new ex vivo atlas significantly outperformed (all p < .05) estimations of the whole amygdala derived from the segmentation in FreeSurfer 5.1 (ADNI: 75%, ABIDE: 54% accuracy), as well as classification based on whole amygdala volume (using the sum of all amygdala nuclei volumes; ADNI: 81%, ABIDE: 55% accuracy). This new atlas and the segmentation tools that utilize it will provide neuroimaging researchers with the ability to explore the function and connectivity of the human amygdala nuclei with unprecedented detail in healthy adults as well as those with neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders.This work was supported by the PHS grant DA023427 and NICHD/ NIH grant F32HD079169 (Z.M.S); Feodor Lynen Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (D.K.); R21(MH106796), R21 (AG046657) and K01AG28521 (J.C.A.), the National Cancer Institute (1K25CA181632-01) as well as the Genentech Foundation (M.R.); the European Union's Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 654911 (project ”THALAMODEL”) and ERC Starting Grant agreement No 677697 (project “BUNGEE-TOOLS”); and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) reference TEC2014-51882-P (J.E.I.); and the NVIDIA hardware award (M.R. and J.E.I.). Further support for this research was provided in part by the National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (P41EB015896, R01EB006758, R21EB018907, R01EB019956, R01- EB013565), the National Institute on Aging (5R01AG008122, R01AG016495), the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (1-R21-DK-108277-01), the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke (R01NS0525851, R21NS072652, R01NS070963, R01NS083534, 5U01NS086625), the Massachusetts ADRC (P50AG005134) and was made possible by the resources provided by Shared Instrumentation Grants 1S10RR023401, 1S10RR019307, and 1S10RR023043. Additional support was provided by the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research (5U01-MH093765), part of the multi-institutional Human Connectome Project. In addition, BF has a financial interest in CorticoMetrics, a company whose medical pursuits focus on brain imaging and measurement technologies. BF's interests were reviewed and are managed by Massachusetts General Hospital and Partners HealthCare in accordance with their conflict of interest policies. The collection and sharing of the ADNI MRI data used in the evaluation was funded by the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) (National Institutes of Health Grant U01 AG024904) and DOD ADNI (Department of Defense award number W81XWH-12-2- 0012). ADNI is funded by the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, and through generous contributions from the following: Alzheimer's Association; Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation; BioClinica, Inc.; Biogen Idec Inc.; Bristol-Myers Squibb Company; Eisai Inc.; Elan Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Eli Lilly and Company; F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd and its affiliated company Genentech, Inc.; GE Healthcare; Innogenetics, N.V.; IXICO Ltd.; Janssen Alzheimer Immunotherapy Research & Development, LLC.; Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development LLC.; Medpace, Inc.; Merck & Co., Inc.; Meso Scale Diagnostics, LLC.; NeuroRx Research; Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation; Pfizer Inc.; Piramal Imaging; Servier; Synarc Inc.; and Takeda Pharmaceutical Company. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research is providing funds to support ADNI clinical sites in Canada. Private sector contributions are facilitated by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (www. fnih.org). The grantee organization is the Northern California Institute for Research and Education, and the study is coordinated by the Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study at the University of California, San Diego. ADNI data are disseminated by the Laboratory for Neuro Imaging at the University of Southern California

Anthropometric and reproductive factors and risk of esophageal and gastric cancer by subtype and subsite: results from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) cohort

Obesity has been associated with upper gastrointestinal cancers; however, there are limited prospective data on associations by subtype/subsite. Obesity can impact hormonal factors, which have been hypothesized to play a role in these cancers. We investigated anthropometric and reproductive factors in relation to esophageal and gastric cancer by subtype and subsite for 476,160 participants from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition cohort. Multivariable hazard ratios (HRs) and 95%-confidence intervals (CIs) were estimated using Cox models. During a mean follow-up of 14 years, 220 esophageal adenocarcinomas (EA), 195 esophageal squamous cell carcinomas, 243 gastric cardia (GC) and 373 gastric non-cardia (GNC) cancers were diagnosed. Body mass index (BMI) was associated with EA in men (BMI≥30 vs 18.5-25kg/m2: HR=1.94, 95%-CI: 1.25-3.03) and women (HR=2.66, 95%-CI: 1.15-6.19); however, adjustment for waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) attenuated these associations. WHR and waist circumference (WC) were associated with EA in men (HR=3.47, 95%-CI: 1.99-6.06 for WHR >0.96 vs 98 vs 0.82 vs 83 vs 2 vs 0) and age at first pregnancy and GNC (HR=0.54, 95%-CI: 0.32-0.91; >26 vsPeer reviewe

Food processing and cancer risk in Europe: results from the prospective EPIC cohort study

Background Food processing has been hypothesised to play a role in cancer development; however, data from large-scale epidemiological studies are scarce. This study investigated the association between dietary intake according to amount of food processing and risk of cancer at 25 anatomical sites using data from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) study. Methods This study used data from the prospective EPIC cohort study, which recruited participants between March 18, 1991, and July 2, 2001, from 23 centres in ten European countries. Participant eligibility within each cohort was based on geographical or administrative boundaries. Participants were excluded if they had a cancer diagnosis before recruitment, had missing information for the NOVA food processing classification, or were within the top and bottom 1% for ratio of energy intake to energy requirement. Validated dietary questionnaires were used to obtain information on food and drink consumption. Participants with cancer were identified using cancer registries or during follow-up from a combination of sources, including cancer and pathology centres, health insurance records, and active follow-up of participants. We performed a substitution analysis to assess the effect of replacing 10% of processed foods and ultra-processed foods with 10% of minimally processed foods on cancer risk at 25 anatomical sites using Cox proportional hazard models. Findings 521 324 participants were recruited into EPIC, and 450 111 were included in this analysis (318 686 [70·8%] participants were female individuals and 131 425 [29·2%] were male individuals). In a multivariate model adjusted for sex, smoking, education, physical activity, height, and diabetes, a substitution of 10% of processed foods with an equal amount of minimally processed foods was associated with reduced risk of overall cancer (hazard ratio 0·96, 95% CI 0·95–0·97), head and neck cancers (0·80, 0·75–0·85), oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma (0·57, 0·51–0·64), colon cancer (0·88, 0·85–0·92), rectal cancer (0·90, 0·85–0·94), hepatocellular carcinoma (0·77, 0·68–0·87), and postmenopausal breast cancer (0·93, 0·90–0·97). The substitution of 10% of ultra-processed foods with 10% of minimally processed foods was associated with a reduced risk of head and neck cancers (0·80, 0·74–0·88), colon cancer (0·93, 0·89–0·97), and hepatocellular carcinoma (0·73, 0·62–0·86). Most of these associations remained significant when models were additionally adjusted for BMI, alcohol and dietary intake, and quality. Interpretation This study suggests that the replacement of processed and ultra-processed foods and drinks with an equal amount of minimally processed foods might reduce the risk of various cancer types. Funding Cancer Research UK, l'Institut National du Cancer, and World Cancer Research Fund International

Self-reported sex differences in high-functioning adults with autism: a meta-analysis

Background: Sex differences in autistic symptomatology are believed to contribute to the mis- and missed diagnosis of many girls and women with an autism spectrum condition (ASC). Whilst recent years have seen the emergence of clinical and empirical reports delineating the profile of young autistic girls, recognition of sex differences in symptomatology in adulthood is far more limited. Methods: We chose here to focus on symptomatology as reported using a screening instrument, the Ritvo Autism Asperger Diagnostic Scale-Revised (RAADS-R). In a meta-analysis, we pooled and analysed RAADS-R data from a number of experimental groups. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) searched for the presence of main effects of Sex and Diagnosis and for interactions between these factors in our sample of autistic and non-autistic adults. Results: In social relatedness and circumscribed interests, main effects of Diagnosis revealed that as expected, autistic adults reported significantly greater lifetime prevalence of symptoms in these domains; an effect of Sex, in circumscribed interests, also suggested that males generally reported more prevalent symptoms than females. An interaction of Sex and Diagnosis in language symptomatology revealed that a normative sex difference in language difficulties was attenuated in autism. An interaction of Sex and Diagnosis in the sensorimotor domain revealed the opposite picture: a lack of sex differences between typically-developing men and women and a greater prevalence of sensorimotor symptoms in autistic women than autistic men. Conclusions: We discuss the literature on childhood sex differences in relation to those which emerged in our adult sample. Where childhood sex differences fail to persist in adulthood, several interpretations exist, and we discuss, for example, an inherent sampling bias that may mean that only autistic women most similar to the male presentation are diagnosed. The finding that sensorimotor symptomatology is more highly reported by autistic women is a finding requiring objective confirmation, given its potential importance in diagnosis

High-resolution magnetic resonance imaging reveals nuclei of the human amygdala: manual segmentation to automatic atlas

The amygdala is composed of multiple nuclei with unique functions and connections in the limbic system and to the rest of the brain. However, standard in vivo neuroimaging tools to automatically delineate the amygdala into its multiple nuclei are still rare. By scanning postmortem specimens at high resolution (100-150µm) at 7T field strength (n = 10), we were able to visualize and label nine amygdala nuclei (anterior amygdaloid, cortico-amygdaloid transition area; basal, lateral, accessory basal, central, cortical medial, paralaminar nuclei). We created an atlas from these labels using a recently developed atlas building algorithm based on Bayesian inference. This atlas, which will be released as part of FreeSurfer, can be used to automatically segment nine amygdala nuclei from a standard resolution structural MR image. We applied this atlas to two publicly available datasets (ADNI and ABIDE) with standard resolution T1 data, used individual volumetric data of the amygdala nuclei as the measure and found that our atlas i) discriminates between Alzheimer's disease participants and age-matched control participants with 84% accuracy (AUC=0.915), and ii) discriminates between individuals with autism and age-, sex- and IQ-matched neurotypically developed control participants with 59.5% accuracy (AUC=0.59). For both datasets, the new ex vivo atlas significantly outperformed (all p < .05) estimations of the whole amygdala derived from the segmentation in FreeSurfer 5.1 (ADNI: 75%, ABIDE: 54% accuracy), as well as classification based on whole amygdala volume (using the sum of all amygdala nuclei volumes; ADNI: 81%, ABIDE: 55% accuracy). This new atlas and the segmentation tools that utilize it will provide neuroimaging researchers with the ability to explore the function and connectivity of the human amygdala nuclei with unprecedented detail in healthy adults as well as those with neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders

Anthropometric and reproductive factors and risk of esophageal and gastric cancer by subtype and subsite: results from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) cohort

Obesity has been associated with upper gastrointestinal cancers; however, there are limited prospective data on associations by subtype/subsite. Obesity can impact hormonal factors, which have been hypothesized to play a role in these cancers. We investigated anthropometric and reproductive factors in relation to esophageal and gastric cancer by subtype and subsite for 476,160 participants from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition cohort. Multivariable hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were estimated using Cox models. During a mean follow‐up of 14 years, 220 esophageal adenocarcinomas (EA), 195 esophageal squamous cell carcinomas, 243 gastric cardia (GC) and 373 gastric noncardia (GNC) cancers were diagnosed. Body mass index (BMI) was associated with EA in men (BMI ≥30 vs. 18.5–25 kg/m2: HR = 1.94, 95% CI: 1.25–3.03) and women (HR = 2.66, 95% CI: 1.15–6.19); however, adjustment for waist‐to‐hip ratio (WHR) attenuated these associations. After mutual adjustment for BMI and HC, respectively, WHR and waist circumference (WC) were associated with EA in men (HR = 3.47, 95% CI: 1.99–6.06 for WHR >0.96 vs. 98 vs. 0.82 vs. 84 vs. 2 vs. 0) and age at first pregnancy and GNC (HR = 0.54, 95% CI: 0.32–0.91; >26 vs. <22 years); whereas bilateral ovariectomy was positively associated with GNC (HR = 1.87, 95% CI: 1.04–3.36). These findings support a role for hormonal pathways in upper gastrointestinal cancers