Cross-sectional relationship between physical fitness components and functional performance in older persons living in long-term care facilities

BACKGROUND: The age-related deterioration of physiological capacities such as muscle strength and balance is associated with increased dependence. Understanding the contribution of physical fitness components to functional performance facilitates the development of adequate exercise interventions aiming at preservation of function and independence of older people. The aim of the study was to investigate the relationship between physical fitness components and functional performance in older people living in long-term care facilities. METHODS: Design cross-sectional study Subjects 226 persons living in long-term care facilities (mean age: 81.6 ± 5.6). Outcome measures Physical fitness and functional performance were measured by performance-based tests. RESULTS: Knee and elbow extension strength were significantly higher in men (difference = 44.5 and 50.0 N, respectively), whereas women were more flexible (difference sit & reach test = 7.2 cm). Functional performance was not significantly different between the genders. In men, motor coordination (eye-hand coordination) and measures of strength were the main contributors to functional performance, whereas in women flexibility (sit and reach test) and motor coordination (tandem stance and eye-hand coordination) played a major role. CONCLUSION: The results of this study show that besides muscle strength, fitness components such as coordination and flexibility are associated with functional performance of older people living in long-term care facilities. This suggests that men and women living in long-term care facilities, differ considerably concerning the fitness factors contributing to functional performance. Women and men may, therefore, need exercise programs emphasizing different fitness aspects in order to improve functional performance

Mapping genomic loci implicates genes and synaptic biology in schizophrenia

Schizophrenia has a heritability of 60-80%1, much of which is attributable to common risk alleles. Here, in a two-stage genome-wide association study of up to 76,755 individuals with schizophrenia and 243,649 control individuals, we report common variant associations at 287 distinct genomic loci. Associations were concentrated in genes that are expressed in excitatory and inhibitory neurons of the central nervous system, but not in other tissues or cell types. Using fine-mapping and functional genomic data, we identify 120 genes (106 protein-coding) that are likely to underpin associations at some of these loci, including 16 genes with credible causal non-synonymous or untranslated region variation. We also implicate fundamental processes related to neuronal function, including synaptic organization, differentiation and transmission. Fine-mapped candidates were enriched for genes associated with rare disruptive coding variants in people with schizophrenia, including the glutamate receptor subunit GRIN2A and transcription factor SP4, and were also enriched for genes implicated by such variants in neurodevelopmental disorders. We identify biological processes relevant to schizophrenia pathophysiology; show convergence of common and rare variant associations in schizophrenia and neurodevelopmental disorders; and provide a resource of prioritized genes and variants to advance mechanistic studies

Mapping genomic loci prioritises genes and implicates synaptic biology in schizophrenia

Schizophrenia has a heritability of 60–80%1, much of which is attributable to common risk alleles. Here, in a two-stage genome-wide association study of up to 76,755 individuals with schizophrenia and 243,649 control individuals, we report common variant associations at 287 distinct genomic loci. Associations were concentrated in genes that are expressed in excitatory and inhibitory neurons of the central nervous system, but not in other tissues or cell types. Using fine-mapping and functional genomic data, we identify 120 genes (106 protein-coding) that are likely to underpin associations at some of these loci, including 16 genes with credible causal non-synonymous or untranslated region variation. We also implicate fundamental processes related to neuronal function, including synaptic organization, differentiation and transmission. Fine-mapped candidates were enriched for genes associated with rare disruptive coding variants in people with schizophrenia, including the glutamate receptor subunit GRIN2A and transcription factor SP4, and were also enriched for genes implicated by such variants in neurodevelopmental disorders. We identify biological processes relevant to schizophrenia pathophysiology; show convergence of common and rare variant associations in schizophrenia and neurodevelopmental disorders; and provide a resource of prioritized genes and variants to advance mechanistic studies

Beneath the Surface: The Aesthetic and Ideological Appropriation of Native American Artwork

ABSTRACT Beneath the Surface: The Aesthetic and Ideological Appropriation of Native American Art during the Arts and Crafts Period, 1880–1920 by Brandon K. Ruud Advisor: Professor Ellen Taylor Baird During the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the first two of the twentieth, progressive reformers concerned themselves with a variety of social issues that seemed to be altering the very fabric of American society and its spirit, among them immigration, industrialization, and urbanization. Ideologues harnessed the Arts and Crafts movement’s message of dignity in labor and a return to handcrafting to advance an agenda of reform that encompassed the fine and decorative arts and was designed to improve health, housing, and immigration. To their minds, art had the power to enact change through the social engineering of society as a whole and especially children, providing a method of redirecting attitudes during a period of seeming upheaval. Expanding on previous scholarship, this study surveys the fine and decorative arts created during this period through the lens of postcolonial theory and examines how artists and critics depicted both Anglo-American and Native American labor in images and words. More to the point, however, the project provides the first thorough analysis of how reform crusaders employed Native American art and lifeways as a guiding force to enact change and control society: Perceived as instinctual and spiritual, indigenous art and craft provided an improving antidote to the perceived degradation of American culture and society. During this period, as the middle class expanded and interior design gained traction as a professional pursuit, domestic shelter magazines rose in popularity. This study provides a careful investigation of both the images and prose in the pages of these journals, considering how they furthered the movement’s reform agenda by co-opting Native American art and culture for an Anglo-American audience. In addition, the project focuses on how artists and architects during this period—from painters such as Thomas Eakins and George de Forest Brush to architects and designers including Susan Frackelton, Gustav Stickley, and Frank Lloyd Wright—adopted the mantle of reformist theories regarding America’s indigenous population, and, as a result, wrestled with incorporating non-Western sources into their creations and justifying their presence

PARTNERS AND ADVERSARIES: The Art of Collaboration

Drawn largely from the Sheldon Museum of Art’s permanent collection, Partners and Adversaries: The Art of Collaboration explores the productive and often ambivalent partnerships that coalesce around artistic practices. These include familial and romantic relationships, where ambitions and successes may clash and collide at the expense of one partner; the mutually dependent yet divergent interests of artists and their dealers; the dance of imitation and distinction between student and teacher; the official sanction of government support, everywhere shadowed by the threat of moralizing censure; and, increasingly in contemporary art, new processes and technologies that empower fabricators whom artists must collaborate with to achieve the results they desire. Partners and adversaries sound like contrasting entities—one desirable, one not. While we may seek out partners, we generally don’t invite adversaries into our lives. We may, however, to our regret, find ourselves confronted by them. The truth, of course, complicates any easy distinction. So if adversaries appear unbidden, from where do they come? If we think about it, we realize that they lie nascent in our existing partnerships, whether at home, work, or in sports: what brings us together can drive us apart. In fact, the word partner itself registers this potential divisiveness. Stemming from Old French, the term builds on its antecedent sense of partition. Division is the precondition to partnership. Partners are defined, therefore, by the negotiation of their differences and the realignment of competing wills. What artistic partnerships have in common is the dynamic of collaboration. As such, they all require negotiations of power: some form of exchange, giving up a measure of authority to gain a benefit of another sort. This volume reviews some of these artistic partnerships in the following four essays. The first, by Jonathan Stuhlman, explores the work of Robert Henri and his role as teacher and mentor, touching on his relationship to several of the artists represented in Sheldon’s collection, including George Bellows, Isabel Bishop, Elsie Driggs, Edward Hopper, and Rockwell Kent. Such relationships are akin to what literary critic Harold Bloom described as “the anxiety of influence” among poets—a tension that every artist grapples with to become independent of his teacher. Brandon Ruud, curator of Partners and Adversaries, contributes two essays. The first trains a sensitive eye on the partnership peculiar to artists and their models. It may seem at times forged from a loving union, as in the example of Harry Callahan, whose muse and primary subject was Eleanor, his obliging wife, or, similarly, of Alfred Stieglitz’s innumerable close-ups of his own wife, Georgia O’Keeffe. Yet always an artist-model dyad implies an exchange of power: one agrees to submit to the other’s creative authority. From the one’s acquiescence, the other extracts value. Ruud’s focus here is on Evelyn Nesbit, a media star of her time, and the sympathetic lens of Gertrude Käsebier’s photographic regard for her. Ruud’s second essay recalls the conflicting experiences artists have had with the federal government, concentrating on Paul Cadmus and Charles White, two among thousands of American artists who enjoyed government support during the Great Depression. At any governmental level, support and censure will reflect the ideologies of those who run or lobby government and reveal, ultimately, the ambivalent relationship people have with art. We sometimes think of government as an abstraction that doesn’t understand us. Of course, government is simply a very complicated instrument for performing the will of very real individuals whose hands pull its seemingly abstract levers. The decisions of these individuals, of course, can at times make or break an artist’s career. Christin Mamiya contributes the fourth essay, which is about Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, lovers who inspired each other for years, subsequently broke up, and refused to speak to each other for a decade. The hostility of a ten-year silence resonates boldly from the adversarial underbelly—or naturally competitive nature—of romantic relationships generally. Lovers are always in contest, whether over love, fidelity, or finances. Perhaps partnerships simply domesticate the adversarial state of nature in which we would otherwise be thrown. Even lovers make a social contract, of sorts. Here also we may find the ideal and model for legitimizing government and civil society, if we follow Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his democratic treatise The Social Contract, this year commemorating the 250th anniversary of its publication. Democratic society runs on the partnership of adversaries—and stalls when the balance is lost. A lesson for our times. The lone artist who creates from inner necessity without regard to social tastes is a Romantic fiction. Real artists’ lives show us that to live in the world is to barter one’s way through myriad relationships. To what degree, therefore, does the rosy word partner dissimulate the adversarial nature inherent in any relationship? Or, even further, to what extent do partnerships create adversaries? These are some of the questions we begin to pose—insights we begin to glean—by learning from the lives of artists. It is, after all, from the sticky substance of lived experience that artists create their work. By formulating questions such as these, we read anew the work of artists and their lasting relevance to our own lives

Presence of nano-sized silica during in vitro digestion of foods containing silica as a food additive.

Item does not contain fulltextThe presence, dissolution, agglomeration state, and release of materials in the nano-size range from food containing engineered nanoparticles during human digestion is a key question for the safety assessment of these materials. We used an in vitro model to mimic the human digestion. Food products subjected to in vitro digestion included (i) hot water, (ii) coffee with powdered creamer, (iii) instant soup, and (iv) pancake which either contained silica as the food additive E551, or to which a form of synthetic amorphous silica or 32 nm SiO(2) particles were added. The results showed that, in the mouth stage of the digestion, nano-sized silica particles with a size range of 5-50 and 50-500 nm were present in food products containing E551 or added synthetic amorphous silica. However, during the successive gastric digestion stage, this nano-sized silica was no longer present for the food matrices coffee and instant soup, while low amounts were found for pancakes. Additional experiments showed that the absence of nano-sized silica in the gastric stage can be contributed to an effect of low pH combined with high electrolyte concentrations in the gastric digestion stage. Large silica agglomerates are formed under these conditions as determined by DLS and SEM experiments and explained theoretically by the extended DLVO theory. Importantly, in the subsequent intestinal digestion stage, the nano-sized silica particles reappeared again, even in amounts higher than in the saliva (mouth) digestion stage. These findings suggest that, upon consumption of foods containing E551, the gut epithelium is most likely exposed to nano-sized silica

Genome-wide association study identifies five new schizophrenia loci

We examined the role of common genetic variation in schizophrenia in a genome-wide association study of substantial size: a stage 1 discovery sample of 21,856 individuals of European ancestry and a stage 2 replication sample of 29,839 independent subjects. The combined stage 1 and 2 analysis yielded genome-wide significant associations with schizophrenia for seven loci, five of which are new (1p21.3, 2q32.3, 8p23.2, 8q21.3 and 10q24.32-q24.33) and two of which have been previously implicated (6p21.32-p22.1 and 18q21.2). The strongest new finding (P = 1.6 × 10(-11)) was with rs1625579 within an intron of a putative primary transcript for MIR137 (microRNA 137), a known regulator of neuronal development. Four other schizophrenia loci achieving genome-wide significance contain predicted targets of MIR137, suggesting MIR137-mediated dysregulation as a previously unknown etiologic mechanism in schizophrenia. In a joint analysis with a bipolar disorder sample (16,374 affected individuals and 14,044 controls), three loci reached genome-wide significance: CACNA1C (rs4765905, P = 7.0 × 10(-9)), ANK3 (rs10994359, P = 2.5 × 10(-8)) and the ITIH3-ITIH4 region (rs2239547, P = 7.8 × 10(-9))

Mendelian randomization integrating GWAS and eQTL data reveals genetic determinants of complex and clinical traits

Abstract Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified thousands of variants associated with complex traits, but their biological interpretation often remains unclear. Most of these variants overlap with expression QTLs, indicating their potential involvement in regulation of gene expression. Here, we propose a transcriptome-wide summary statistics-based Mendelian Randomization approach (TWMR) that uses multiple SNPs as instruments and multiple gene expression traits as exposures, simultaneously. Applied to 43 human phenotypes, it uncovers 3,913 putatively causal gene–trait associations, 36% of which have no genome-wide significant SNP nearby in previous GWAS. Using independent association summary statistics, we find that the majority of these loci were missed by GWAS due to power issues. Noteworthy among these links is educational attainment-associated BSCL2, known to carry mutations leading to a Mendelian form of encephalopathy. We also find pleiotropic causal effects suggestive of mechanistic connections. TWMR better accounts for pleiotropy and has the potential to identify biological mechanisms underlying complex traits