Elections to the European Parliament: what if more people voted?

Can the rise of Eurosceptic and extremist parties be blamed on the mobilisation of people who previously had abstained from the polls? An analysis of the 2009 and 2014 elections to the European Parliament suggests that support for Eurosceptic parties would be largely unaffected by changes in voter turnout, write Uwe Remer-Bollow, Patrick Bernhagen and Richard Rose. Extremist parties would even have lost vote shares if turnout had reached the higher levels observed at national general elections

Intention as an indicator for subjective need: A new pathway in need assessment

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The current analyses focus on the need for services from the perspective of individuals considering preventive measures. A new approach imported from social and health psychology is used for assessing subjective need. This indicator is used for predicting actual health behaviour under field conditions and simultaneously other relevant background variables are taken into account.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A mail survey was conducted prior to the start of a coaching program for teachers. A sample of <it>n </it>= 949 respondents were queried about mental distress and their intention to participate in the program. This intention to participate and actual attendance were taken as outcome variables in logistic regression analyses adjusted for relevant background variables.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Intention and participation in the coaching program three months later were associated with an unadjusted OR of 90.1 (95% CI: 39.2 - 207.0) for male teachers. For female teachers the crude effect was OR = 80.0 (95% CI: 45.7 - 140.1). The positive predictive value (PPV) was 96.4% among males and 94.5% among females. Adjusting for covariates results in higher values. Among female, but not among male teachers, the participation depended on psychological distress as assessed by the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>There is strong evidence for using subjective need as an additional component in assessing the need for services and for predicting actual health behaviour. But it needs to be confined to intended behaviour which is under behavioural control.</p

Development of EBCs and T/EBC multi-layer coatings: Challenges and implications

Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstrac

Acetylcholine content and viability of cholinergic neurons are influenced by the activity of protein histidine phosphatase

Background: The first mammalian protein histidine phosphatase (PHP) was discovered in the late 90s of the last century. One of the known substrates of PHP is ATP-citrate lyase (ACL), which is responsible - amongst other functions - for providing acetyl-CoA for acetylcholine synthesis in neuronal tissues. It has been shown in previous studies that PHP downregulates the activity of ACL by dephosphorylation. According to this our present work focused on the influence of PHP activity on the acetylcholine level in cholinergic neurons. Results: The amount of PHP in SN56 cholinergic neuroblastoma cells was increased after overexpression of PHP by using pIRES2-AcGFP1-PHP as a vector. We demonstrated that PHP overexpression reduced the acetylcholine level and induced cell death. The acetylcholine content of SN56 cells was measured by fast liquid chromatographytandem mass spectrometry method. Overexpression of the inactive H53A-PHP mutant also induced cell damage, but in a significantly reduced manner. However, this overexpression of the inactive PHP mutant did not change the acetylcholine content of SN56 cells significantly. In contrast, PHP downregulation, performed by RNAitechnique, did not induce cell death, but significantly increased the acetylcholine content in SN56 cells. Conclusions: We could show for the first time that PHP downregulation increased the acetylcholine level in SN56 cells. This might be a potential therapeutic strategy for diseases involving cholinergic deficits like Alzheimer’s disease

Measurement of Panic Interpretation Bias Using the Anxiety Interpretation Questionnaire for Children

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the development of a reliable and valid measure for the assessment of panic-relevant interpretations in children. The resulting measure, the Anxiety Interpretation Questionnaire for Children (AIQ-C), presents descriptions of panic-relevant and panic-irrelevant ambiguous scenarios along with several possible interpretations of these scenarios. Child participants are also asked to rate their agreement with various strategies for coping. First, we investigated content validity of this measure by asking a group of experts to rate the relevance of the scenario interpretations. In a second step, reliability and validity of this measure was investigated utilizing a sample of 143 children. In this investigation, the AIQ-C demonstrated good construct, convergent, and discriminate validity as well as adequate internal consistency. The results of this study indicate that the AIQ-C appears to be a reliable and valid measure for the assessment of bodily sensation interpretations associated with panic in children

Characterisation of cultivation of the human cell line AGE1.HN.AAT

Skerhutt EM, Scholz S, Niklas J, et al. Characterisation of cultivation of the human cell line AGE1.HN.AAT. BMC Proceedings. 2011;5(8)