Safeguarding children in dentistry: 1. Child protection training, experience and practice of dental professionals with an interest in paediatric dentistry

* Few dental professionals with child protection training have experience of making referrals. * There is a wide gap in practice between recognising signs of child abuse and neglect and responding effectively. * This may indicate missed opportunities to save children from continuing abuse. * There is a need for improved child protection information, support and training for dental professionals. Abstract Following several highly publicised inquiries into the deaths of children from abuse and neglect, there has been much recent interest in the role and responsibility of all health professionals to protect children at risk of maltreatment. The findings of a postal questionnaire, sent in March 2005 to 789 dentists and dental care professionals with an interest in paediatric dentistry working in varied settings in the UK, are presented in a two-part report and discussed in the context of current multi-agency good practice in safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children. This first part explores reported child protection training, experience and practice. There was a significant gap between recognising signs of abuse and responding effectively: 67% of respondents had suspected abuse or neglect of a child patient at some time in their career but only 29% had ever made a child protection referral. The dental profession is alerted to the need to ensure necessary appropriate action to safeguard children is always taken when child abuse or neglect are suspected

Evidence and Ideology in Macroeconomics: The Case of Investment Cycles

The paper reports the principal findings of a long term research project on the description and explanation of business cycles. The research strongly confirmed the older view that business cycles have large systematic components that take the form of investment cycles. These quasi-periodic movements can be represented as low order, stochastic, dynamic processes with complex eigenvalues. Specifically, there is a fixed investment cycle of about 8 years and an inventory cycle of about 4 years. Maximum entropy spectral analysis was employed for the description of the cycles and continuous time econometrics for the explanatory models. The central explanatory mechanism is the second order accelerator, which incorporates adjustment costs both in relation to the capital stock and the rate of investment. By means of parametric resonance it was possible to show, both theoretically and empirically how cycles aggregate from the micro to the macro level. The same mathematical tool was also used to explain the international convergence of cycles. I argue that the theory of investment cycles was abandoned for ideological, not for evidential reasons. Methodological issues are also discussed

Efficient Visual Search from Synchronized Auditory Signals Requires Transient Audiovisual Events

BACKGROUND: A prevailing view is that audiovisual integration requires temporally coincident signals. However, a recent study failed to find any evidence for audiovisual integration in visual search even when using synchronized audiovisual events. An important question is what information is critical to observe audiovisual integration. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Here we demonstrate that temporal coincidence (i.e., synchrony) of auditory and visual components can trigger audiovisual interaction in cluttered displays and consequently produce very fast and efficient target identification. In visual search experiments, subjects found a modulating visual target vastly more efficiently when it was paired with a synchronous auditory signal. By manipulating the kind of temporal modulation (sine wave vs. square wave vs. difference wave; harmonic sine-wave synthesis; gradient of onset/offset ramps) we show that abrupt visual events are required for this search efficiency to occur, and that sinusoidal audiovisual modulations do not support efficient search. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Thus, audiovisual temporal alignment will only lead to benefits in visual search if the changes in the component signals are both synchronized and transient. We propose that transient signals are necessary in synchrony-driven binding to avoid spurious interactions with unrelated signals when these occur close together in time

Naturally Occurring Osmolyte, Trehalose Induces Functional Conformation in an Intrinsically Disordered Activation Domain of Glucocorticoid Receptor

Intrinsically disordered (ID) regions are frequently found in the activation domains of many transcription factors including nuclear hormone receptors. It is believed that these ID regions promote molecular recognition by creating large surfaces suitable for interactions with their specific protein binding partners, which is a critical component of gene regulation by transcription factors. It has been hypothesized that conditional folding of these activation domains may be a prerequisite for their efficient interaction with specific coregulatory proteins, and subsequent transcriptional activity leading to the regulation of target gene(s). In this study, we tested whether a naturally occurring osmolyte, trehalose can promote functionally ordered conformation in glucocorticoid receptor's major activation function domain, AF1, which is found to exist as an ID protein, and requires an efficient interaction with coregulatory proteins for optimal activity. Our data show that trehalose induces an ordered conformation in AF1 such that its interaction with steroid receptor coactivator-1 (SRC-1), a critical coregulator of glucocorticoid receptor's activity, is greatly enhanced

Association of 25-hydroxyvitamin D deficiency with NT-pro BNP levels in patients with acute myocardial infarction: a cross-sectional analysis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Nutritional vitamin D deficiency is an emerging risk factor for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) and heart failure. The association of 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels with N-terminal pro B-type natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP), a robust prognostic marker for post-AMI mortality and heart failure, is unknown and could illuminate a potential pathway for adverse outcomes among post-AMI patients with 25-hydroxyvitamin D deficiency.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In a cross-sectional analysis, we studied 238 AMI patients from 21 U.S. centers to test the association of nutritional vitamin D (25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D]) deficiency with NT-proBNP levels. Levels of 25(OH)D levels were categorized as normal (≥30 ng/mL), insufficient (>20 - <30 ng/mL), deficient (>10 - ≤20 ng/mL), or severely deficient (≤10 ng/mL).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Low 25(OH)D levels were found in 95.7% of AMI patients. No significant trends for higher mean baseline log NT-proBNP levels in severely deficient (6.9 ± 1.3 pg/mL), deficient (6.9 ± 1.2 pg/mL), and insufficient (6.9 ± 0.9 pg/ml) groups were observed as compared with patients having normal (6.1 ± 1.7 pg/mL) levels, <it>P </it>= 0.17. Findings were similar in the subset of patients who had follow-up NT-proBNP levels drawn at one month. In multivariate regression modeling, after adjusting for multiple covariates, 25(OH)D was not associated with NT-proBNP.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Potential associations between nutritional vitamin D deficiency and prognosis in the setting of AMI are unlikely to be mediated through NT-proBNP pathways. Future studies should examine other mechanisms, such as inflammation and vascular calcification, by which 25(OH)D deficiency could mediate adverse outcomes post-AMI.</p

Restricted Attentional Capacity within but Not between Sensory Modalities: An Individual Differences Approach

Background Most people show a remarkable deficit to report the second of two targets when presented in close temporal succession, reflecting an attentional blink (AB). An aspect of the AB that is often ignored is that there are large individual differences in the magnitude of the effect. Here we exploit these individual differences to address a long-standing question: does attention to a visual target come at a cost for attention to an auditory target (and vice versa)? More specifically, the goal of the current study was to investigate a) whether individuals with a large within-modality AB also show a large cross-modal AB, and b) whether individual differences in AB magnitude within different modalities correlate or are completely separate. Methodology/Principal Findings While minimizing differential task difficulty and chances for a task-switch to occur, a significant AB was observed when targets were both presented within the auditory or visual modality, and a positive correlation was found between individual within-modality AB magnitudes. However, neither a cross-modal AB nor a correlation between cross-modal and within-modality AB magnitudes was found. Conclusion/Significance The results provide strong evidence that a major source of attentional restriction must lie in modality-specific sensory systems rather than a central amodal system, effectively settling a long-standing debate. Individuals with a large within-modality AB may be especially committed or focused in their processing of the first target, and to some extent that tendency to focus could cross modalities, reflected in the within-modality correlation. However, what they are focusing (resource allocation, blocking of processing) is strictly within-modality as it only affects the second target on within-modality trials. The findings show that individual differences in AB magnitude can provide important information about the modular structure of human cognition

Phonons in Slow Motion: Dispersion Relations in Ultra-Thin Si Membranes

We report the changes in dispersion relations of hypersonic acoustic phonons in free-standing silicon membranes as thin as \sim 8 nm. We observe a reduction of the phase and group velocities of the fundamental flexural mode by more than one order of magnitude compared to bulk values. The modification of the dispersion relation in nanostructures has important consequences for noise control in nano and micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS/NEMS) as well as opto-mechanical devices.Comment: 5 page