Impact of an integrated nutrition intervention on nutrient intakes, morbidity and growth of rural Burkinabe preschool children

Iron deficiency and undernutrition often co-exist among children and the prevalence in sub-Saharan African is high. In Burkina Faso, 92% of children under the age of five years were anaemic and 39% were stunted in 2003 according to Demographics and health survey. Risk factors include inadequate dietary intakes and infections that often occur concomitantly. Orphans and vulnerable children who are already atincreased risk for poor psycho-emotional development due to their social status are particularly susceptible to malnutrition. Therefore, there is a challenge to develop effective interventions that address the multiple risk factors of nutritional deficiencies in these children. An integrated nutrition intervention including dietary modification and changes in hygiene practices was implemented targeting a group of preschoolorphans and vulnerable children living in group foster homes. The amount of iron-rich foods particularly goat meat and condiments as well as citrus fruits were increased in the diet. The hygiene component of the intervention focused on handwashing, eating in individual plates, food storage and stool disposal. All members of the foster homesat large benefitted from the activities of the intervention; however, measurements and impact evaluation focused on preschool children (12 - 72 months). Energy and nutrient intakes, anthropometric indices and morbidity including diarrhoea, fever, vomiting and respiratory infections were assessed at baseline and after 18 weeks. Mean bioavailable iron intake was increased from 0.4 to 0.9 mg/d. The intervention resulted in a decrease in the prevalence of inadequate intakes for energy, proteins and most micronutrients. The intervention increased the meat-fish-poultry contribution to energy and iron intakes from 1.6 to 3.5% and from 5.2 to 7.9%, respectively. There was also a decrease in the incidence of infection (from 73 to 9%, p<0.01) and overall orbidity (from 39 to 15%, p<0.05) most likely due to deworming and improvementsin hygiene behaviours. Contrary to baseline, helminths such as Hymelolepis nana,Strongylo�des stercoralis and Necator americanus that often cause blood loss were rarely found at the end of the intervention. The overall changes resulted in improvements in height-for-age z-score (-1.63 to -1.27, p<0.01) and weight-for-age zscore (-1.22 to -1.06, p<0.05). In conclusion, an intervention that targets bioavailableiron and hygiene behaviours improved child growth, iron status and overall morbidity in areas of high incidence of infection

Assessing the Multiple Dimensions of the Self-Concept of Young Children: A Focus on Latinos

This study was designed to provide psychometric and developmental information for a caregiver report and observational measure of young children\u27s self-concept. The Caregiver Inventory of Self-Concept (elsC) and the Tasks for Observation of Self-Concept (lOSe) assess six domains: self-recognition, self-representation, selfdescription, self-assertion, self-evaluation, self-regulation. Mothers of 290 children aged 6 to 66 months reported on the presence of self-concept behaviors, and 75 of these children, aged 15 to 48 months, were observed. Coefficient alpha, an index of item-objective congruence, and factor analysis provided evidence for the reliability and validity of both measures. Between- and within-domain analyses found that the development of self-concept in young children followed the hypothesized progression (self-recognition, self-representation, self-description, self-assertion, selfevaluation, and self-regulation) on the ClSC but not on the TOSC

Directed acyclic graphs: An under-utilized tool for child maltreatment research

Background: Child maltreatment research involves modeling complex relationships between multiple interrelated variables. Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are one tool child maltreatment researchers can use to think through relationships among the variables operative in a causal research question and to make decisions about the optimal analytic strategy to minimize potential sources of bias. Objective: The purpose of this paper is to highlight the utility of DAGs for child maltreatment research and to provide a practical resource to facilitate and support the use of DAGs in child maltreatment research. Results: We first provide an overview of DAG terminology and concepts relevant to child maltreatment research. We describe DAG construction and define specific types of variables within the context of DAGs including confounders, mediators, and colliders, detailing the manner in which each type of variable can be used to inform study design and analysis. We then describe four specific scenarios in which DAGs may yield valuable insights for child maltreatment research: (1) identifying covariates to include in multivariable models to adjust for confounding; (2) identifying unintended effects of adjusting for a mediator; (3) identifying unintended effects of adjusting for multiple types of maltreatment; and (4) identifying potential selection bias in data specific to children involved in the child welfare system. Conclusions: Overall, DAGs have the potential to help strengthen and advance the child maltreatment research and practice agenda by increasing transparency about assumptions, illuminating potential sources of bias, and enhancing the interpretability of results for translation to evidence-based practice

Biomass thermal conversion research at SERI

SERI's involvement in the thermochemical conversion of biomass to fuels and chemicals is reviewed. The scope and activities of the Biomass Thermal Conversion and Exploratory Branch are reviewed. The current status and future plans for three tasks are presented: (1) Pyrolysis Mechanisms; (2) High Pressure O/sub 2/ Gasifier; and (3) Gasification Test Facility

Response to Harcombe

The crux of Dr. Harcombe’s critique is her assertion that our study design was inappropriate for our research objective, which was to investigate whether maternal carbohydrate restriction before conception was associated with neural tube defects (NTDs) in the National Birth Defects Prevention Study (NBDPS), a population-based case-control study of birth defects (Desrosiers, Siega-Riz, Mosley, Meyer, & The National Birth Defects Prevention Study, 2018). In her Letter, Dr. Harcombe claims that our study is fundamentally flawed because “cases should have been women who restrict carbohydrates and the controls should have been women who don’t and the outcome measure should have been NTD-affected pregnancies.” Despite her confusing (mis)use of the terms case and control, what Dr. Harcombe appears to be describing is a cohort study

Response to Camacho

We appreciate Dr. Camacho’s interest in our article (Desrosiers, Siega-Riz, Mosley, Meyer, & National Birth Defects Prevention Study, 2018), and welcome the opportunity to respond. As Dr. Camacho emphasizes, the association between folic acid and neural tube defects (NTDs) is well established (Viswanathan et al., 2017). What is less certain are factors potentially related to folate insufficiency among women of reproductive age, and even more so, among women who meet the U.S. Preventative Health Task Force’s recommendation of 0.4–0.8 mg/day of supplemental folic acid (Tinker, Hamner, Qi, & Crider, 2015; US Preventive Services Task Force, 2017). Understanding the reasons for folate insufficiency could help prevent some cases of birth defects in the future and is thus a worthy research pursuit. One theory expressed in the literature is whether avoidance of carbohydrate-rich foods such as enriched grains (fortified with folic acid) and beans (high in natural folate) could lead to meaningful reductions in folate status, which could in turn lead to an increased risk for some women of having an NTD-affected pregnancy (Mills, 2017; Quinlivan & Gregory, 2007)

Supersymmetric Many-particle Quantum Systems with Inverse-square Interactions

The development in the study of supersymmetric many-particle quantum systems with inverse-square interactions is reviewed. The main emphasis is on quantum systems with dynamical OSp(2|2) supersymmetry. Several results related to exactly solved supersymmetric rational Calogero model, including shape invariance, equivalence to a system of free superoscillators and non-uniqueness in the construction of the Hamiltonian, are presented in some detail. This review also includes a formulation of pseudo-hermitian supersymmetric quantum systems with a special emphasis on rational Calogero model. There are quite a few number of many-particle quantum systems with inverse-square interactions which are not exactly solved for a complete set of states in spite of the construction of infinitely many exact eigen functions and eigenvalues. The Calogero-Marchioro model with dynamical SU(1,1|2) supersymmetry and a quantum system related to short-range Dyson model belong to this class and certain aspects of these models are reviewed. Several other related and important developments are briefly summarized.Comment: LateX, 65 pages, Added Acknowledgment, Discussions and References, Version to appear in Jouranl of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical (Commissioned Topical Review Article

Determinantal process starting from an orthogonal symmetry is a Pfaffian process

When the number of particles $N$ is finite, the noncolliding Brownian motion (BM) and the noncolliding squared Bessel process with index $\nu > -1$ (BESQ$^{(\nu)}$) are determinantal processes for arbitrary fixed initial configurations. In the present paper we prove that, if initial configurations are distributed with orthogonal symmetry, they are Pfaffian processes in the sense that any multitime correlation functions are expressed by Pfaffians. The $2 \times 2$ skew-symmetric matrix-valued correlation kernels of the Pfaffians processes are explicitly obtained by the equivalence between the noncolliding BM and an appropriate dilatation of a time reversal of the temporally inhomogeneous version of noncolliding BM with finite duration in which all particles start from the origin, $N \delta_0$, and by the equivalence between the noncolliding BESQ$^{(\nu)}$ and that of the noncolliding squared generalized meander starting from $N \delta_0$.Comment: v2: AMS-LaTeX, 17 pages, no figure, corrections made for publication in J.Stat.Phy

Dendritic Cell-Mediated, DNA-Based Vaccination Against Hepatitis C Induces the Multi-Epitope-Specific Response of Humanized, HLA Transgenic Mice

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is the etiologic agent of chronic liver disease, hepatitis C. Spontaneous resolution of viral infection is associated with vigorous HLA class I- and class II-restricted T cell responses to multiple viral epitopes. Unfortunately, only 20% of patients clear infection spontaneously, most develop chronic disease and require therapy. The response to chemotherapy varies, however; therapeutic vaccination offers an additional treatment strategy. To date, therapeutic vaccines have demonstrated only limited success. Vector-mediated vaccination with multi-epitope-expressing DNA constructs alone or in combination with chemotherapy offers an additional treatment approach. Gene sequences encoding validated HLA-A2- and HLA-DRB1-restricted epitopes were synthesized and cloned into an expression vector. Dendritic cells (DCs) derived from humanized, HLA-A2/DRB1 transgenic (donor) mice were transfected with these multi-epitope-expressing DNA constructs. Recipient HLA-A2/DRB1 mice were vaccinated s.c. with transfected DCs; control mice received non-transfected DCs. Peptide-specific IFN-γ production by splenic T cells obtained at 5 weeks post-immunization was quantified by ELISpot assay; additionally, the production of IL-4, IL-10 and TNF-α were quantified by cytokine bead array. Splenocytes derived from vaccinated HLA-A2/DRB1 transgenic mice exhibited peptide-specific cytokine production to the vast majority of the vaccine-encoded HLA class I- and class II-restricted T cell epitopes. A multi-epitope-based HCV vaccine that targets DCs offers an effective approach to inducing a broad immune response and viral clearance in chronic, HCV-infected patients