Relationship between 1,25‑dihydroxy Vitamin D levels and homeostatic model assessment insulin resistance values in obese subjects

Aim: In this study, our aim is to evaluate the insulin resistance and quality of life in obese subjects and nonobese subjects and to find out the Vitamin D (VD) status and correlations between obesity and control groups and also according to their quality of life scores.Materials and Method: The study was carried out between May and October 2013 which is the period of VD synthesis in Turkey. The participants of this study were volunteering individuals – obese and nonobese individuals defined according to the body mass index (BMI) – that did not receive any VD support in the last 1‑year and did not have any known chronic diseases. 1,25‑OH VD status and homeostatic model assessment insulin resistance (HOMA‑IR) values were evaluated.Results: The study population consisted of 39 individuals with normal weight (23 women, 16 men) and 66 individuals categorized as obese (51 women, 15 men). The difference in HOMA‑IR and VD values between the group of obese individuals and the group of nonobese individuals was significant (P < 0.001 vs. P <0.001). The median value of HOMA‑IR was higher in the obese group than in the nonobese group (P < 0.001) while the median value of VD was higher in the nonobese group than in the obese group (P < 0.001). The results regarding the relationship of BMI with HOMA‑IR and VD show that there was a positive correlation between HOMA‑IR and BMI (rs = 0.507; P < 0.001) and there was a negative correlation between HOMA‑IR and VD (rs = −0.316; P = 0.0001).Conclusion: Given serious diseases associated with low serum VD levels such as diabetes and cardiovascular disorders as well as low side effect incidence and low cost of VD treatment, it would be a reasonable approach to identify routine serum 25(OH) D and/or 1,25‑OH VD levels of obese patients and administer a treatment to patients with low levels of VD.Key words: 1,25‑OH Vitamin D, insulin resistance, obesit

Journey to the Center of the Cookie Ecosystem: Unraveling Actors' Roles and Relationships

Web pages have been steadily increasing in complexity over time, including code snippets from several distinct origins and organizations. While this may be a known phenomenon, its implications on the panorama of cookie tracking received little attention until now. Our study focuses on filling this gap, through the analysis of crawl results that are both large-scale and fine-grained, encompassing the whole set of events that lead to the creation and sharing of around 138 million cookies from crawling more than 6 million webpages. Our analysis lets us paint a highly detailed picture of the cookie ecosystem, discovering an intricate network of connections between players that reciprocally exchange information and include each other's content in web pages whose owners may not even be aware. We discover that, in most webpages, tracking cookies are set and shared by organizations at the end of complex chains that involve several middlemen. We also study the impact of cookie ghostwriting, i.e., a common practice where an entity creates cookies in the name of another party, or the webpage. We attribute and define a set of roles in the cookie ecosystem, related to cookie creation and sharing. We see that organizations can and do follow different patterns, including behaviors that previous studies could not uncover: for example, many cookie ghostwriters send cookies they create to themselves, which makes them able to perform cross-site tracking even for users that deleted third-party cookies in their browsers. While some organizations concentrate the flow of information on themselves, others behave as dispatchers, allowing other organizations to perform tracking on the pages that include their content

Mucinous Cystadenocarcinoma of the Breast with Estrogen Receptor Expression: A Case Report and Review of the Literature

Primary mucinous cystadenocarcinoma (MCA) of the breast was first described by Koenig and Tavassoli in 1998. To our knowledge, only 9 cases of MCA of the breast have been reported. The optimal treatment of MCA could not be defined yet. This article aims to increase the knowledge about this rare variant of breast cancer and to review the literature

Evolution of magnetic fields through cosmological perturbation theory

The origin of galactic and extra-galactic magnetic fields is an unsolved problem in modern cosmology. A possible scenario comes from the idea of these fields emerged from a small field, a seed, which was produced in the early universe (phase transitions, inflation, ...) and it evolves in time. Cosmological perturbation theory offers a natural way to study the evolution of primordial magnetic fields. The dynamics for this field in the cosmological context is described by a cosmic dynamo like equation, through the dynamo term. In this paper we get the perturbed Maxwell's equations and compute the energy momentum tensor to second order in perturbation theory in terms of gauge invariant quantities. Two possible scenarios are discussed, first we consider a FLRW background without magnetic field and we study the perturbation theory introducing the magnetic field as a perturbation. The second scenario, we consider a magnetized FLRW and build up the perturbation theory from this background. We compare the cosmological dynamo like equation in both scenarios

Particle Creation If a Cosmic String Snaps

We calculate the Bogolubov coefficients for a metric which describes the snapping of a cosmic string. If we insist on a matching condition for all times {\it and} a particle interpretation, we find no particle creation.Comment: 10 pages, MRC.PH.17/9

Schwarzschild Atmospheric Processes: A Classical Path to the Quantum

We develop some classical descriptions for processes in the Schwarzschild string atmosphere. These processes suggest relationships between macroscopic and microscopic scales. The classical descriptions developed in this essay highlight the fundamental quantum nature of the Schwarzschild atmospheric processes.Comment: to appear in Gen. Rel. Gra

Fronto-striatal structures related with model-based control as an endophenotype for obsessive–compulsive disorder

Recent theories suggest a shift from model-based goal-directed to model-free habitual decision-making in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). However, it is yet unclear, whether this shift in the decision process is heritable. We investigated 32 patients with OCD, 27 unaffected siblings (SIBs) and 31 healthy controls (HCs) using the two-step task. We computed behavioral and reaction time analyses and fitted a computational model to assess the balance between model-based and model-free control. 80 subjects also underwent structural imaging. We observed a significant ordered effect for the shift towards model-free control in the direction OCD>SIB>HC in our computational parameter of interest. However less directed analyses revealed no shift towards model-free control in OCDs. Nonetheless, we found evidence for reduced model-based control in OCDs compared to HCs and SIBs via 2nd stage reaction time analyses. In this measure SIBs also showed higher levels of model-based control than HCs. Across all subjects these effects were associated with the surface area of the left medial/right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Moreover, correlations between bilateral putamen/right caudate volumes and these effects varied as a function of group: they were negative in SIBs and OCDs, but positive in HCs. Associations between fronto-striatal regions and model-based reaction time effects point to a potential endophenotype for OCD

Tumour stroma-derived lipocalin-2 promotes breast cancer metastasis

Tumour cell-secreted factors skew infiltrating immune cells towards a tumour-supporting phenotype, expressing pro-tumourigenic mediators. However, the influence of lipocalin-2 (Lcn2) on the metastatic cascade in the tumour micro-environment is still not clearly defined. Here, we explored the role of stroma-derived, especially macrophage-released, Lcn2 in breast cancer progression. Knockdown studies and neutralizing antibody approaches showed that Lcn2 contributes to the early events of metastasis in vitro. The release of Lcn2 from macrophages induced an epithelial–mesenchymal transition programme in MCF-7 breast cancer cells and enhanced local migration as well as invasion into the extracellular matrix, using a three-dimensioanl (3D) spheroid model. Moreover, a global Lcn2 deficiency attenuated breast cancer metastasis in both the MMTV–PyMT breast cancer model and a xenograft model inoculating MCF-7 cells pretreated with supernatants from wild-type and Lcn2-knockdown macrophages. To dissect the role of stroma-derived Lcn2, we employed an orthotopic mammary tumour mouse model. Implantation of wild-type PyMT tumour cells into Lcn2-deficient mice left primary mammary tumour formation unaltered, but specifically reduced tumour cell dissemination into the lung. We conclude that stroma-secreted Lcn2 promotes metastasis in vitro and in vivo, thereby contributing to tumour progression. Our study highlights the tumourigenic potential of stroma-released Lcn2 and suggests Lcn2 as a putative therapeutic target