The 'who' and 'what' of #diabetes on Twitter

Social media are being increasingly used for health promotion, yet the landscape of users, messages and interactions in such fora is poorly understood. Studies of social media and diabetes have focused mostly on patients, or public agencies addressing it, but have not looked broadly at all the participants or the diversity of content they contribute. We study Twitter conversations about diabetes through the systematic analysis of 2.5 million tweets collected over 8 months and the interactions between their authors. We address three questions: (1) what themes arise in these tweets?, (2) who are the most influential users?, (3) which type of users contribute to which themes? We answer these questions using a mixed-methods approach, integrating techniques from anthropology, network science and information retrieval such as thematic coding, temporal network analysis, and community and topic detection. Diabetes-related tweets fall within broad thematic groups: health information, news, social interaction, and commercial. At the same time, humorous messages and references to popular culture appear consistently, more than any other type of tweet. We classify authors according to their temporal 'hub' and 'authority' scores. Whereas the hub landscape is diffuse and fluid over time, top authorities are highly persistent across time and comprise bloggers, advocacy groups and NGOs related to diabetes, as well as for-profit entities without specific diabetes expertise. Top authorities fall into seven interest communities as derived from their Twitter follower network. Our findings have implications for public health professionals and policy makers who seek to use social media as an engagement tool and to inform policy design.Comment: 25 pages, 11 figures, 7 tables. Supplemental spreadsheet available from http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/2055207616688841, Digital Health, Vol 3, 201

Waist-to-Hip Ratio and Woman’s Education Level as Predictors of Breastfeeding Duration

The possible existence of a relationship between breastfeeding duration, educational status and waist-hip ratio (WHR) as a measure of fertility and biological fitness in a sample of the Polish population is examined in this article. Data on age, height, weight, waist and hip circumferences, educational level (as a proxy for socio-economic status), and duration of breast feeding were collected for women using questionnaires in 11 outpatients’ surgeries for healthy children, and in 5 general practices in three districts of Wroclaw, Poland. An ordinal multinominal linear model with logit link was used to determine the extent to which duration of lactation was influenced by maternal WHR and level of education. The best single predictor for the duration of lactation was WHR. While WHR decreases according to increasing duration of lactation for mothers with university or high school education, no such differences were observed among women at the lowest level of education. This study confirms the greater biological fitness of women with low WHR in the Polish population, and shows that this is mediated by level of educational attainment of the women

A Cartesian co-ordinate system for representing the second to fifth metacarpals in the human hand

Description: This is tha authors' PDF version of an article published in Radiography© 2004. The definitive version is available at www.elsevierhealth.comPurpose The use of hand radiographs has both clinical and anthropometric applications. However, a method for converting standard bony points within the metacarpus to Cartesian co-ordinates does not exist. Methods A simple method for converting standard bony points of the second to fifth metacarpals to Cartesian co-ordinates is described for the first time. Results Using a small set of measurements and treating these with equations of known voracity, this method is accurate and allows the metacarpus to be interro¬gated via a much wider range of geometrical techniques than has so far been available. Conclusions This method allows naked-eye assessments to be supported or re¬placed by metrical evaluations. It is likely to have both clinical and anthropometric uses.University of Liverpool research development grant

Mobile Activism, Material Imaginings, and the Ethics of the Edible: Framing Political Engagement through the Buycott App

In this article, we explore the discursive constructions of Buycott, a free mobile app that provides a platform for user-generated ethical consumption campaigns. Unlike other ethical consumption apps, Buycott’s mode of knowledge production positions the app itself as neutral, with app users generating activist campaigns and providing both data and judgment. Although Buycott is not a dedicated food activism app, food features centrally in its campaigns, and the app seems to provide a mobile means of extending, and perhaps expanding, alternative food network (AFN) action across geographies and constituencies. Thus, as a case study, Buycott unveils contemporary possibilities for citizen participation and the formation of activist consumer communities, both local and trans-national, through mobile technologies. Our analysis shows, however, that despite the app’s user-generated format, the forms of activism it enables are constrained by the app’s binary construction of action as non/consumption and its guiding ‘mission’ of ‘voting with your wallet’. Grounded in texts concerning Buycott’s two largest campaigns (Demand GMO Labeling and Long live Palestine boycott Israel), our analysis delineates how Buycott, its campaigns, and its modes of action take shape in user, media, and app developer discourses. We find that, as discursively framed, Buycott campaigns are commodity-centric, invoking an ‘ethics of care’ to be enacted by atomized consumers, in corporate spaces and through mainstream, barcode-bearing, retail products. In user discourses, this corporate spatiality translates into the imagined materializing of issues in products, investing commodities with the substance of an otherwise ethereal cause. This individualized, commodity-centric activism reinforces tenets of the neoliberal market, ultimately turning individual users into consumers not only of products, but also of the app itself. Thus, we suggest, the activist habitus constructed through Buycott is a neoliberal, consumer habitus

Ecological Sensing through Taste and Chemosensation Mediates Inflammation: A Biological Anthropological Approach

Ecological sensing and inflammation have evolved to ensure optima between organism survival and reproductive success in different and changing environments. At the molecular level, ecological sensing consists of many types of receptors located in different tissues that orchestrate integrated responses (immune, neuroendocrine systems) to external and internal stimuli. This review describes emerging data on taste and chemosensory receptors, proposing them as broad ecological sensors and providing evidence that taste perception is shaped not only according to sense epitopes from nutrients but also in response to highly diverse external and internal stimuli. We apply a biological anthropological approach to examine how ecological sensing has been shaped by these stimuli through human evolution for complex interkingdom communication between a host and pathological and symbiotic bacteria, focusing on population-specific genetic diversity. We then focus on how these sensory receptors play a major role in inflammatory processes that form the basis of many modern common metabolic diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, and aging. The impacts of human niche construction and cultural evolution in shaping environments are described with emphasis on consequent biological responsiveness

Homeless street children in Nepal : use of allostatic load to assess the burden of childhood adversity.

As challenges to child well-being through economic disadvantage, family disruption, and migration or displacement escalate world wide, the need for cross-culturally robust understanding of childhood adversity proportionately increases. Toward this end, developmental risk was assessed in four contrasting groups of 107 Nepali children ages 10–14 years that represent distinctive, common conditions in which contemporary children grow up. Relative cumulative burden (allostatic load) indexed by multiple dimensions of physical and psychosocial stress was ascertained among homeless street boys and three family-based groups, from poor urban squatter settlements, urban middle class, and a remote rural village. Biomarkers of stress and vulnerability to stress included growth status, salivary cortisol, antibodies to Epstein–Barr virus, acute phase inflammatory responses (alpha1-antichymotrypsin), and cardiovascular fitness and reactivity (flex heart rate and pressor response). Individual biomarkers of risk and allostatic load differed markedly among groups, were highest in villagers, and varied by components of allostatic load. Such data suggest a need for critical appraisal of homelessness and migration as a risk factor to youth, given prevailing local conditions such as rural poverty, and represents the only multidimensional study of childhood allostatic load and developmental risk in non-Western settings

Mycotoxins and toxigenic fungi in sago starch from Papua New Guinea

Aims: to assay sago starch from Papua New Guinea (PNG) for important mycotoxins and to test fungal isolates from sago for mycotoxin production in culture.\ud \ud Methods and Results: sago starch collected from Western and East Sepik Provinces was assayed for aflatoxins, ochratoxin A, cyclopiazonic acid, sterigmatocystin, citrinin and zearalenone and all 51 samples were negative. Frequently\ud isolated species of Penicillium (13), Aspergillus (five) and Fusarium (one) were cultured on wheat grain, and tested for the production of ochratoxin A, cyclopiazonic acid, sterigmatocystin, citrinin, patulin and penicillic acid. All 12 isolates of P. citrinin and one of two A. flavipes isolates produced citrinin. A single isolate of A. versicolor produced sterigmatocystin. No other mycotoxins\ud were detected in these cultures.\ud \ud Conclusions: no evidence was found of systemic mycotoxin contamination of sago starch. However, the isolation of several mycotoxigenic fungi shows the potential for citrinin and other mycotoxins to be produced in sago stored\ud under special conditions.\ud \ud Significance and Impact of the study: sago starch is the staple carbohydrate in lowland PNG and the absence of mycotoxins in freshly prepared sago starch is a positive finding. However, the frequent isolation of citrinin-producing fungi indicates a potential health risk for sago consumers, and food safety is dependant on promoting good storage practices

Rejuvenation of the term Sarcopenia

It is our viewpoint that the recent consensus definitions of sarcopenia are dysfunctional for clinical and experimental practice as well as in theory. In 1989, the term sarcopenia was introduced to describe the phenomenon of age-related loss of lean body mass (10). Since 2010, six consensus definitions have been presented, and in 2016, it was assigned its own ICD-10 code (1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11). A comparison of the original definition with the new consensus definitions clarifies how the term sarcopenia no longer describes the phenomenon it originally addressed. Rather, the term is now caught in tautological association, which causes confusion and hinders rather than helps understanding of this condition

Late childhood and adolescence growth sensitivity to political transition: the case of South African Cape Coloured schoolchildren during and post-apartheid

South Africa underwent major social and economic change between 1987 and 1995. The release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 proclaimed an end to the political system of apartheid, and the first freely elected non-White government in 1994 instigated social and economic reforms aimed at alleviating the consequences of apartheid. This paper aims to examine the impact of these socio-economic and political changes on height, weight and body mass index (BMI) in childhood and late adolescence. An analysis was carried out of longitudinal data of 258 urban and rural South African Cape Coloured schoolchildren (6-18 years old) across the transitional periods from apartheid between 1987 and 1990, to this transition between 1991 and 1993, and finally to post-apartheid between 1994 and 1995. The anthropometric measures were standardized into age independent Z-scores. Analyses of variance with repeated measures were conducted to examine the growth in height, weight and BMI across these periods. The results show a significant main effect of measurement periods on height, weight and BMI Z-scores. Across time, the subjects increased in overall size, height, weight and BMI. For all the anthropometric measures there was a significant interaction effect between measurement period and sex, but none between measurement period and SES. The average increase in height, weight and BMI across time differed significantly for girls and boys, the average z-scores being greater in girls than in boys. For boys, there was little difference in height, weight and BMI Z-scores according to SES, and little increase across periods. Girls were generally taller, heavier with greater BMI than boys, and their scores increased across the time periods. High SES girls were taller, heavier and had higher BMI than low SES girls. Across the measurement periods, BMI and weight somewhat converged between the high and low SES girls. In the discussion these differences reflecting social sex distinctions are addressed.Madelief G.B.C. Bertens, Stanley Ulijaszek, Slawomir Koziel and Maciej Henneber

Human growth: Assessment and interpretation

No Abstract.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/35105/1/10221_ftp.pd