Short- and Long-Term Weight Loss Among Women Is Unrelated to Completed Exercise Within an Obesity Intervention Focused on Self-Regulation

Introduction: The aim of this study was to evaluate 1) if completed exercise amounts were associated with short- and long-term weight loss within a cognitive behavioral intervention and 2) if changes in theory-based psychosocial factors significantly explained weight change. Methods: A total of 110 women with obesity participated in a yearlong treatment focused on self-regulation and were grouped based on their amount of completed exercise and assessed on changes in weight, self-regulation, and self-efficacy. Results: There were significant overall improvements in all study measures from baseline–month 6 and baseline–month 12. Overall weight loss means (–5.8 and –5.3 kg, respectively) did not significantly differ across groups averaging the equivalent of \u3c 2.5; 2.6–4.5; 4.6–7.0; and \u3e 7.0 moderate-intensity exercise sessions per week. Similarly, psychosocial improvements did not significantly differ by exercise amount grouping. Increase in exercise self-regulation significantly predicted eating self-regulation gains over both 6 and 12 months. Over the same time periods, the significant prediction of weight loss by eating self-regulation increase was mediated by change in eating self-efficacy. Conclusion: Results suggest attainment of government-recommended amounts of exercise are not associated with significantly greater weight loss than lower amounts of exercise within an intervention focused on self-regulation. Associations of exercise with psychosocial correlates of weight loss should be a treatment consideration

Short-Training Damage Detection Method for Axially Loaded Beams Subject to Seasonal Thermal Variations

Vibration-based damage features are widely adopted in the field of structural health monitoring (SHM), and particularly in the monitoring of axially loaded beams, due to their high sensitivity to damage-related changes in structural properties. However, changes in environmental and operating conditions often cause damage feature variations which can mask any possible change due to damage, thus strongly affecting the effectiveness of the monitoring strategy. Most of the approaches proposed to tackle this problem rely on the availability of a wide training dataset, accounting for the most part of the damage feature variability due to environmental and operating conditions. These approaches are reliable when a complete training set is available, and this represents a significant limitation in applications where only a short training set can be used. This often occurs when SHM systems aim at monitoring the health state of an already existing and possibly already damaged structure (e.g., tie-rods in historical buildings), or for systems which can undergo rapid deterioration. To overcome this limit, this work proposes a new damage index not affected by environmental conditions and able to properly detect system damages, even in case of short training set. The proposed index is based on the principal component analysis (PCA) of vibration-based damage features. PCA is shown to allow for a simple filtering procedure of the operating and environmental effects on the damage feature, thus avoiding any dependence on the extent of the training set. The proposed index effectiveness is shown through both simulated and experimental case studies related to an axially loaded beam-like structure, and it is compared with a Mahalanobis square distance-based index, as a reference. The obtained results highlight the capability of the proposed index in filtering out the temperature effects on a multivariate damage feature composed of eigenfrequencies, in case of both short and long training set. Moreover, the proposed PCA-based strategy is shown to outperform the benchmark one, both in terms of temperature dependency and damage sensitivity

The evolutionary history of a mammal species with a highly fragmented range: the phylogeography of the European snow vole.

The European snow vole Chionomys nivalis has a patchy distribution restricted to rocky habitats across southern Europe and the Near and Middle East. We carried out a phylogeographic study to provide a biogeographic scenario, based on molecular data, outlining the major processes that determined the current distribution of the species. The samples include 26 snow voles from 14 different populations across the entire species range from Spain to Anatolia and Israel. Nearly complete sequences (1037 bp) of the mitochondrial gene for cytochrome b were sequenced. Relationships among haplotypes were inferred with neighbourjoining, maximum likelihood, maximum parsimony analyses and minimum spanning network. An analysis of mismatch distribution was used to cast light on past demographic expansion. We found 22 different haplotypes that fall into six distinct lineages, all but one is supported by high bootstrap values with all methods. Four lineages are allopatric (Tatra Mts., Iberia, Balkans and Middle East) while divergent haplotypes from two lineages show sympatry in the Alps and the Apennines. The basal relationships of these lineages could not be established by any tree. The mean pairwise genetic distance between lineages ranges from 2.4 to 4.2%. The shape of the mismatch distribution indicated a past expansion event dating back to between 158 000 and 84 000 years ago. These data can be interpreted with the existence of southern glacial refugia (Iberia, Balkans, Middle East and Italy) and one additional northern glacial refugium. The lack of phylogenetic resolution among lineages and the shape of mismatch distribution are indicative of a simultaneous and rapid splitting due to a relatively fast initial expansion of populations. Moreover, the analysis supports the hypothesis of the European origin of C. nivalis and its subsequent eastward dispersion during the Middle Pleistocene

School air quality related to dry cough, rhinitis and nasal patency in children

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919 Thunderstorm asthma in the mediterranean area: seasonal weather and effect on health for outdoor workers

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Sex and gender differences in tobacco smoking among adolescents in French secondary schools

Aim. We investigated the relationship between sex (genetic/biological) and gender (environmental/ cultural) factors in relation to adolescent tobacco smoking. Methods. A representative sample of 11,582 students from French secondary public schools participated in the study by completing a self-administered, standardised questionnaire. Results. Using the WHO classification for smoking in the youth, 15.6% of the adolescents were regular smokers, 7.7% occasional smokers, 17.9% experimental smokers and 4.8% ex-smokers, with no statistically significant gender difference. Taking non-smoking as a reference, puberty had a much greater effect on the likelihood of being a regular smoker [OR=18.0 (95% Confidence Interval: 9.6- 32)] than of being an experimental/occasional smoker [OR=3.7 (2.9-4.6)] among girls. For boys, the effect of puberty was not as great [OR=4.7 (3.5-6.5)] for regular vs. [OR=2.1 (1.8-2.5)] for experimental/occasional smokers). Similarly, illicit drug use had a larger effect on the likelihood of being regular smoker vs. non-smoker [OR=15.0 (12.0-20.0) in boys and 12 (8.8-16.0) in girls] than of being experimental/occasional smoker vs. a non-smoker [OR=4.8 (3.7-6.1) and 2.9 (2.1-3.9) respectively]. Other factors related to regular smoking were exposure to passive smoking and regular alcohol consumption. Living with both parents was a protective factor for life and regular smoking in both genders. Conclusions. Our results show that influential factors of sex-related (puberty), gender-specific (environmental tobacco smoking, alcohol consumption, drug abuse) or sex/gender (regular sexual intercourse) are related to the smoking behaviour in French adolescents

Development of bioactive electrospun scaffolds suitable to support skin fibroblasts and release Lucilia sericata maggot excretion/secretion

Larval therapy has been reported to exert beneficial actions upon chronic wound healing by promoting granulation tissue formation, antimicrobial activity and degrading necrotic tissue. However, the use of live maggots is problematic for patient acceptance, and thus there is a need to develop materials which can adsorb and release therapeutic biomolecules from maggot secretions. Here we describe the fabrication of a novel bioactive scaffold that can be loaded with Lucilia sericata maggot excretion/secretion (L. sericata maggot E/S) for wound therapy, and which also provides structural stability for mammalian cell-growth and migration. We show that electrospun scaffolds can be prepared from polycaprolactone-poly (ethylene glycol)–block copolymer (PCL-b-PEG) blended with PCL, to form fibres with average diameters of ~4 μm. We further demonstrate that the fibres are able to be loaded with L. sericata maggot E/S, in order to influence fibroblast migration through protease activity. Finally, we show that after 21 days, the cumulative amount of released L. sericata maggot E/S was ~14 μg/mL from PCL-b-PEG/PCL scaffolds and that the protease activity of L. sericata maggot E/S was preserved when PCL-b-PEG/PCL scaffolds were used as the release platform