VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Methodology Challenges in Behavioural Teratology Drug Safety Studies on Depression

Numerous medical conditions in pregnancy require pharmacotherapy. A conflict between optimal maternal treatment and risk of fetal teratogenicity arises if drug safety is not assured. Behavioural teratology, the science of central nervous system impairments due to a variety of prenatal exposures, is an inseparable part of reproductive drug safety studies and addresses the long-term neurodevelopment of exposed children. Research in behavioural teratology is sparse due to lack of funding priorities and methodological obstacles related to statistical power, cost/time effectiveness, and multiple confounders (with the genetics being the most difficult to control for). Implementing an appropriate study design is critical in overcoming these challenges. Depression is the most common psychiatric disorder in women, and up to 16% of pregnant women with depression require pharmacotherapy. Selective transmitter reuptake inhibitors (STRIs) are widely used to control depression in pregnancy. The objectives of this thesis were to define the long-term neurodevelopment of children exposed in utero to STRI antidepressants and to develop an advanced methodology for behavioural teratology in order to achieve the highest possible degree of evidence. Three studies were conducted using different designs. The first study measured the intelligence of three groups of children exposed in utero to either the serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor drug venlafaxine, other STRIs (a disease control), or children of healthy women exposed to non-teratogenic agents. The second study included an additional group of children prenatally exposed to maternal depression, but not pharmacotherapy, in order to separate the effects of maternal depression from the effects of the antidepressant medications. The third study compared long-term neurodevelopmental outcomes of children prenatally exposed to STRIs to their unexposed siblings. It was found that untreated depression is associated with adverse pregnancy outcome and increased rates of postpartum depression. Children of depressed mothers may be at risk of future psychopathology. Factors other than prenatal STRIs strongly predict children's intellect and behaviour. The sibling design was able to better control for genetic and environmental factors, was more cost-effective, and able to achieve more valid results with a much smaller sample size. This novel design should be implemented in behavioural teratology drug safety studies.

Keywords: Antidepressants
Child Development
Depression
Pregnancy
Sibling Design
Advisor: Feldman, Brian M
Environmental Stewardship and Indigenous African Philosophies: Implications for Schooling and Health Education in Africa: A Case of Ghana

In the last 50 years, the pursuance of alternative discourses that would provide alternative solutions to the growing environmental challenges facing the African continent such as pollution poor sanitation, deforestation, desertification, erosion, and degradation have significantly increased. In line with such efforts, the main objective of this project is to identify the prospects and potentials inherent in Indigenous African perspectives on environmental stewardship and their usefulness in mitigating these challenges in Africa. This work, therefore, explores the numerous environmental stewardship ideas contained in proverbs, music, visual arts, adages, 'Ananse' stories and poems, in some Indigenous communities from Ghana; while at the same time, examining the impact of Westernization on the social, political, economic and cultural orientations of Indigenous environmental stewardship practices in traditional communities. The study involved five local communities within the Greater Accra and Eastern regions of Ghana. Over five months, 70 participants from Accra, Amamole, Pantang, Aburi and Nsawam were sampled for the research. Using one-on-one interviews, focus group discussions, semi structured questionnaires and observations; the sampled individuals shared cultural practices, beliefs and norms around environmental stewardship. Results of the study showed that almost all Indigenous communities developed complex systems that guided their existence and well-being. These systems were enshrined in sets of intricate relationships that existed between both humans and non-humans. These relations were regulated by sets of practices, norms and beliefs, which are mostly imbedded in African Traditional Religion (ATR). Thus Indigenous Ghanaian environmental stewardship reflected vital cultural and societal values such as responsibility, accountability, reciprocity, spirituality, and harmony. Three main African environmental ethics were established; first; interconnection and interdependence; second, environmental spirituality; and third, respect for authority. The study concluded with proposed changes in the Ghanaian education and health systems based on these ethics and other important local practices. Significant was the inclusion of local languages and local teaching methodologies in the classroom as well as health institutions. As an exploratory research, the results are capable of producing very well-founded cross-contextual generalities such as localized school curricula, localized health education and policies, which could be adapted for other Indigenous African nations.

Keywords: African epistemology
African Philosophies
Environmental Health
Environmental Stewardship
Ghanaian Environmental Studies
Indigenous African Knowledge
Advisor: Dei, George S
Paul and Diaspora Politics

This dissertation explores Paul's social relationships and identities as an itinerant diaspora figure with localized communities of Christ-believers by applying some tools and insights from diaspora studies. The focus of this study is on three specific issues: (1) Paul's interactions with other Diaspora Jews, especially in the Galatians 2 incident (11-14), (2) Paul's relationship with the nations, specifically his dealings with the Galatians, and (3) Paul's collection project (mentioned in Gal 2:10, 1 Cor 16:1-4, 2 Cor 8-9, Rom 15:25-28). These specific issues serve to illustrate Paul's diasporic identities and social relations in his movements across boundaries. Paul's diaspora existence becomes sharper through the analysis of the concepts of diaspora space, relational space, `home,' ancestral `homeland,' and performance of identities. This dissertation shows the necessity of studying Paul's diaspora politics--that is the organization and messiness of social relationships--within the complexities of first century Diaspora Judaism. The diasporic space Paul occupies is very important to consider in order to understand the ways in which the apostle to the nations struggled between theological ideals and negotiating social realities with different social actors of the early Jesus movement.

Keywords: Diaspora
home/homeland
Identities
Paul
Politics
Relationships
Advisor: Marshall, John W.
Donaldson, Terence L.
Syndromic Management of Chlamydia and Gonorrhea in Women with Vaginal Discharge at the Public Health Sexual Health and Sexually Transmitted Diseases Clinics in Hamilton, Ontario

Background. Canadian guidelines on sexually transmitted infections recommend that women with vaginal discharge and high-risk for STIs be treated for chlamydia and gonorrhea when high quality laboratory testing is not available or follow-up cannot be assured. Hamilton Public Health (HPH) Sexual Health (SH) and Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STD) clinics offer antibiotics for chlamydia and gonorrhea when women present with vaginal discharge or dysuria; however, this approach has never been evaluated. Objectives. To determine the positive predictive value (PPV) of the syndromic approach at the HPH SH and STD clinics; to determine risk factors for chlamydia and gonorrhea in the study population and to retrospectively evaluate whether the addition of one or more risk factors would improve the performance of the syndromic approach at these clinics; to estimate the interval between testing and treatment, and the proportion of chlamydia and gonorrhea cases who did not return for treatment. Methods. A retrospective chart review was conducted. 3700 charts were abstracted from the HPH SH and STD clinics. Time to treatment and data on cases who did not return for treatment were obtained from the Integrated Public Health Information System. Risk factors were analyzed using log-binomial regression, to estimate relative risks of outcomes associated with characteristics of interest. Results. Syndromic management of vaginal discharge and dysuria at HPH clinics had PPVs of 10% and 1% for treating chlamydia and gonorrhea, respectively. Treating these women for chlamydia and gonorrhea based on two or more risk factors for these infections would have resulted in a PPV

Keywords: chlamydia
gonorrhea
sexually transmitted infections
syndromic management
vaginal discharge
Advisor: Millson, Peggy
Lee, Colin
Racial Hybridity and Victorian Nationalism: 1850-1901

This dissertation uniquely uncovers how fictional depictions of the racial hybrid came to impact how facets of British identity were imagined in the nineteenth century. The burgeoning Victorian science of racialism, which was obsessed with ideas of racial hybridity, was allied closely to theories of British national identity in the nineteenth century. This thesis scrutinises the intertwined development of the scientific discourse of racial hybridity, on the one hand, and the emergence of a modern idea of heterogeneous Britishness, on the other, during the Victorian era. I specifically investigate the relationship between fiction and scientific ideologies of race mixing, and I position the novel as an active contributor to a broader discussion regarding "in-between" modalities of British identity. In this project, I place the Victorian racial hybrid--sometimes called the "mulatto," or the "half-caste," and so on--as she or he appears in literature into a history of the construction of aspects of Victorian identity. I begin by examining the complex, and often antithetical, sets of emotive responses that Victorian fiction stages in reaction to hybridized difference. As I read works by Dinah Craik, Wilkie Collins, Rudyard Kipling, and others, I explore how descriptions of bodily hybridity intersect with imaginings of British nationalism, which was viewed frequently as a more complex identificatory category in the context of the empire. In my discussion of Craik's writing, for instance, I examine the ties between literary affect, "mixed" bodies, and British nationality. I trace how her fiction inculcates affective reactions to racial mixing, while her texts simultaneously position reader responses to hybridity in relation to more complex ideas about British race. Furthermore, I investigate how depictions of domesticity and hybridity intertwine in the Victorian novel, such that mixed-race figures--frequently imagined as the insider-outsiders of domestic fiction--index literature's complicated psychical and physical negotiations between empire, race, and the English home. I then consider early twentieth-century representations of imperial whiteness, and I examine how this racial identity might be read in the direct light of the nineteenth century's earlier theories of racially mixed bodies. My work, for the first time, situates the mixed-race figure of Victorian literature within an affective genealogy of heterogeneous British identity.

Keywords: Empire
Hybridity
mixed-race
Nationalism
Race
Victorian
Advisor: Matus, Jill L
Decomposing Identities: Shifting Perceptions of Death and Burial among Jews in Interwar Poland

This study focuses on how the Jews living within the Second Polish Republic (1918-1939) transformed their perceptions and treatment of death and the burial of corpses to suit the modern post-war era and new ideas about the meaning of Jewish identity and selfhood. Following the World War, new relationships between the Jews and the state, along with new forms of personal and collective identity, transformed Jewish rituals for marking the end of life. The changes to Jewish funerary practice were particularly reflected in the construction and functioning of burial institutions in urban centers where the most contentious and innovative modifications were typically found. The rise in Jewish suicide in Poland shortly after the end of the World War was also primarily concentrated in cities. This disturbing trend, a key factor in the way that Jews reevaluated their conceptions of death at this time, was spurred on by financial calamity and changes in Jewish selfhood. Interwar Poland was the scene of a re-imagining of Jewish death rites and the way individuals wanted themselves and their loved ones to be remembered in perpetuity, a major change for a population that had overwhelmingly been traditional and insular even through the beginning of the twentieth century. Additionally, the themes of end-of-life care and burial also indicate how the surrounding majority culture came to influence even the most well-established religious rites. Urban burial practices in the Jewish cemeteries of the Second Polish Republic thus represented the spectrum of belief and practices that mirrored the diversity of the population itself and the wide array of Jewish identities common in the period before the Nazi invasion of Poland.

Keywords: Acculturation
Burial
Death
Modernity
Polish-Jewish Relations
Polish Jewry
Advisor: Penslar, Derek J
Stat3 Enhances Metastatic Dissemination of Pik3ca and Ras-induced Mammary Tumors

Most human breast tumors harbor mutations in the phosphatidylinositol 3' kinase (PI3K) pathway. Recent studies have also highlighted the importance of Signal Transducer and Activator of Transcription 3 (Stat3) protein in breast cancer. Stat3 can be phosphorylated on two sites, and these appear to control alternative functions for the protein - transcription and oxidative phosphorylation. Both Stat3 phosphoforms have been implicated in breast cancer: Stat3 phosphorylation on Y705 has been associated with good prognosis in human breast cancer, whereas Stat3 pS727 is elevated in breast cancer stem-like cells and is associated with poor prognosis. Notably, this paradox has yet to be probed biologically, either in a mouse model or through molecular profiling. Also, the role of S727 phosphorylation has not been tested in an in vivo model for breast cancer. Stat3 phosphosite mutants, involving both tyrosine 705 and serine 727, can be used as a platform to help delineate the role of each phosphorylated species. To this end, I generated an allelic series of mice, ectopically expressing wild type or mutant Stat3 cDNAs in response to Cre-recombinase expression. In this way, I was able to probe the role of Stat3 +/-phosphorylation on Y705 or S727 in Pik3ca-induced breast cancer through targeted expression of wild type and mutant alleles to mammary epithelium by crossing R26-Stat3-C, R26-Stat3Y705F-S727E and R26-Stat3wt mice to MMTV-Cre mice, as well as to R26- Pik3camutant mice. Here, I show that Pik3camutant-induced tumors are dependent on Stat3 signaling, and that they can be induced to metastasize at a low frequency through expression of activated Stat3 (Stat3-C). In contrast, tumors induced by transgenic expression of mutant Pik3ca or Stat3-C plus activated K-Ras are highly metastatic. Overall, I have shown that Stat3 is essential for Pik3ca-induced breast cancer, and that it interacts cooperatively with Ras signaling in metastatic dissemination.

Keywords: cancer
mammary
metastasis
Pik3ca
Ras
Stat3
Advisor: Egan, Sean E
Socioeconomic Status, Diagnostic Interval Length and Outcome in Pediatric Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

Efforts to determine the causes of treatment failure in acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common childhood cancer, have neglected the potential role of socioeconomic status (SES). This thesis aimed to address three key knowledge gaps in the field of SES and pediatric oncology. First, we evaluated the current literature by conducting a systematic review of studies evaluating the impact of SES upon childhood cancer survival. Of the 36 studies identified, we found that low SES was uniformly associated with inferior outcome in low- and middle-income countries. The same association was commonly found in studies conducted in high-income countries. Secondly, as several researchers have proposed that prolonged diagnostic intervals (time between first healthcare access and diagnosis) may serve as a pathway linking low SES and inferior cancer outcome, we developed and validated a novel measure of diagnostic interval length among Ontario children with ALL using population-based health services data. Using this measure, we found that prolonged diagnostic interval (≥4 days) was associated with having a general practitioner (GP) as primary care physician vs. a pediatrician [adjusted odds ratio (OR) 1.60, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.04-2.47; p=0.03]. Socioeconomic and healthcare access variables were not associated with interval length. While prolonged diagnostic intervals were associated with superior event-free survival [hazard ratio (HR) 0.71, 95% CI 0.52-0.98; p=0.04], this association was confounded by disease biology. Finally, we aimed to determine the impact of SES upon Ontario children with ALL. We found that while low SES was not associated with inferior EFS, immigrant status was associated with superior outcome (HR 0.36, 95% CI 0.13- 0.96; p=0.04). These findings have important implications for patients, caregivers, researchers and policymakers. Future studies should use the methodologies developed in this thesis to explore the impact of SES and diagnostic interval length in other malignancies

Keywords: Cancer
Child
Delayed Diagnosis
Health Services Research
Leukemia
Socioeconomic Status
Advisor: Sung, Lillian
Guttmann, Astrid
De mentes, entes y dementes: Critical and Historical Review of Spanish-American Science Fiction (1870-2013)

This thesis has two main objectives. On the one hand, it is a historical and critical study of Spanish-American science fiction; on the other, it shows that the Cartesian mind-body dualism is the leading epistemological foundation of this literature. This research and the literary works examined also reveal the increasing ideological validity of biomedicine and brain studies in our understanding of human nature. . A substantial number of short stories and novels by famous as well as unknown authors is examined. Ultimately, this thesis shows that Spanish-American science fiction has not only been written since the late 19th century, but that it also has intensively (although unevenly) developed since the second part of the twentieth century. The invisibility of these literary works is explained by the contradicting place of enunciation associated with all the Spanish-American science fiction writers. That is, this thesis considers the fact that science fiction written in "underdeveloped" societies has been regarded as a cultural contradiction.

Keywords: Neurociences and literature
Spanish-American science fiction
Advisor: Sarabia, Rosa
"Wandering like a Lost and Starving Dog": Representations of Human and Nonhuman Animal Straying in Victorian Literature and Culture

This dissertation argues that the stray dog is an important figure of itinerancy and inscrutability in the Victorian novel. While literary "pets" are frequently read as figures of sympathy, stray animals have a more unfixed narrative purchase. Their novelistic presence is characterized by brevity, uncertainty, and disruption. When Victorian writers represent stray dogs or liken human characters to stray dogs, they are invoking interpretive instability outside orienting strictures of domesticity, affiliation and ownership, and predictable intention. In moving literary animals beyond the productive but ultimately restrictive lens of sympathy, this dissertation offers a unique insight into an important and highly visible animal presence that has gone largely unacknowledged and certainly underexplored in both the burgeoning field of Victorian animal studies and studies of the Victorian novel more broadly. The readings in this dissertation "stray" among numerous genres and archival sources. These sources-- lost dog notices, periodical accounts of the first homeless animal shelter, rabies control pamphlets and editorials, lost animal autobiographies--are read alongside and against canonical novels such as Charlotte Brontë's

Keywords: Animal Studies
Bronte
Hardy
Novel Studies
Straying
Victorian
Advisor: Matus, Jill
Speculating Social Housing: Mixed-Iicome Public Housing Redevelopment in Toronto's Regent Park and Don Mount Court

This dissertation develops a multi-dimensional critique of the globally popular "socially mixed" public housing redevelopment approach, drawing on tenant experiences in Toronto's Regent Park and Don Mount Court communities. Socially mixed redevelopment involves the demolition of modernist public housing and its replacement with mixed-income, mixed-use communities; usually redesigned in a neo-traditional style and achieved via public-private partnership. This dissertation addresses three research questions and goals. First, it examines the impacts of redevelopment on tenants, who benefit from much-needed investment but endure hardship associated with relocation, gentrification, and displacement. Second, it critically examines core theoretical and planning ideas (`deconcentration' and `social mix') that serve to justify mixed-income redevelopment. These discourses rest on problematic core assumptions, and promote policies that - as I discover in a meta-analysis of nearly 200 empirical studies - do not deliver on their promises. Third, this research offers a political-economic critique of the significance and future impacts of redevelopment, placing tenant experiences in the context of local, state, and global economic restructuring. Redevelopment is presented as an example of what I call "speculative social welfare," a new and increasingly popular approach for financing former welfare state provisions in the context of global neoliberalism. Speculative social welfare replaces state expenditure with profits derived from gentrification and real estate speculation, relies on the market to allocate former welfare state provisions, entails reduced investment, and intensifies existing patterns of socio-spatial polarization. This research is based on qualitative methods, including in-depth interviews, ethnographic participant observation, and textual analysis. My analysis of redevelopment in Toronto reveals that financial motivations drive policy, trumping loftier planning, design, and equity-oriented goals. From pre-move tenant interviews, I develop a counter-narrative that challenges stigmatizing pro-revitalization rhetoric, and highlights `real' problems in Regent Park that redevelopment is ill-suited to address. Post-move interviews reveal that `old' problems are being reproduced in the mixed community, and highlight the negative political and social impacts of gentrification and displacement. My analysis of Don Mount Court points to the paradoxical outcomes of "New Urbanist" design, and challenges the `myth' of the benevolent middle class in a landscape marked by deeply uneven power relations.

Keywords: Don Mount Court
Gentrification
Housing
Redevelopment
Regent Park
Social Housing
Advisor: Walks, Alan