bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The regulation of central and peripheral circadian clocks in humans
Authors: Cermakian N. , Boivin D. B. 
Published: October 2009

SummaryMany circadian rhythms are controlled by the central clock of the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus, as well as clocks located in other brain regions and most peripheral tissues. These central and peripheral clocks are based on clock genes and their protein products. In recent years, the expression of clock genes has started to be investigated in human samples, primarily white blood cells, but also skin, oral mucosa, colon cells, adipose tissue as well as post‐mortem brain tissue. The expression of clock genes in those peripheral tissues offers a way to monitor human peripheral clocks and to compare their function and regulation with those of the central clock, which is followed by markers such as melatonin, cortisol and core body temperature. We have recently used such an approach to compare central and peripheral rhythms in subjects under different lighting conditions. In particular, we have monitored the entrainment of the clock of blood cells in subjects undergoing a simulated night shift protocol with bright light treatment, known to efficiently reset the central clock. This line of research will be helpful for learning more about the human circadian system and to find ways to alleviate health problems of shift workers, and other populations experiencing altered circadian rhythms.
Delta sleep‐inducing peptide and glucocorticoid‐induced leucine zipper: potential links between circadian mechanisms and obesity?
Authors: Gimble J. M. , Ptitsyn A. A. , Goh B. C. , Hebert T. , Yu G. , Wu X. , Zvonic S. , Shi X.‐M. , Floyd Z. E. 
Published: October 2009

SummaryAs the obesity pandemic has accelerated, investigators have begun to explore alternative mechanisms linking circadian biology and sleep to adipose tissue metabolism and obesity. This manuscript reviews recent findings in murine and human models demonstrating the oscillatory expression of the mRNAs encoding the core circadian regulatory proteins in adipose tissue. Comparative transcriptomic analyses of circadian oscillating genes have been used to identify the ‘delta sleep‐inducing peptide immunoreactor’, also known as ‘glucocorticoid‐induced leucine zipper (GILZ)’, as a potential link in this chain. The GILZ gene has been found to differentially regulate stromal stem cell adipogenic and osteogenic differentiation in a reciprocal manner. In adipose and other metabolically active tissues, the circadian oscillation of GILZ expression is subject to entrainment by external stimuli. Together, these observations suggest that GILZ is an attractive candidate for future studies evaluating the role of circadian mechanisms in adipose tissue physiology and pathology.
The role of melanocortin neuronal pathways in circadian biology: a new homeostatic output involving melanocortin‐3 receptors?
Authors: Begriche K. , Sutton G. M. , Fang J. , Butler A. A. 
Published: October 2009

SummaryObesity, insulin resistance and increased propensity for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease result from an imbalance between energy intake and expenditure. The cloning of genes involved in energy homeostasis produced a simple feedback model for the homeostatic regulation of adipose mass. Serum leptin secreted from adipocytes signals nutrient sufficiency, curbing appetite and supporting energy expenditure. A rapid decline in leptin during nutrient scarcity instigates adaptive mechanisms, including increased appetite and reduced energy expenditure. Hypothalamic melanocortin neurons are important mediators of this response, integrating inputs of energy status from leptin with other peripheral signals. While this feedback response prolongs survival during fasting, other mechanisms allowing the prediction of nutrient availability also confer a selective advantage. This adaptation has been commonly studied in rodents using restricted feeding paradigms constraining food intake to limited periods at 24‐h intervals. Restricted feeding rapidly elicits rhythmic bouts of activity and wakefulness anticipating food presentation. While the response exhibits features suggesting a clock‐like mechanism, the neuromolecular mechanisms governing expression of food anticipatory behaviours are poorly understood. Here we discuss a model whereby melanocortin neurons regulating the homeostatic adaptation to variable caloric availability also regulate inputs into neural networks governing anticipatory rhythms in wakefulness, activity and metabolism.
Reduced sleep as an obesity risk factor
Authors: Patel S. R. 
Published: October 2009

SummaryPoor sleep has increasingly gained attention as a potential contributor to the recent obesity epidemic. The increased prevalence of obesity in Western nations over the past half‐century has been paralleled by a severe reduction in sleep duration. Physiological studies suggest reduced sleep may impact hormonal regulation of appetite. Prospective studies suggest reduced habitual sleep duration as assessed by self‐report is an independent risk factor for an increased rate of weight gain and incident obesity. Cross‐sectional studies have demonstrated that the association between reduced sleep and obesity persists when sleep habits are measured objectively, that the association is as a result of elevations in fat and not muscle mass and that this association is not related to sleep apnoea. Thus, reduced sleep appears to represent a novel, independent risk factor for increased weight gain. Further research is needed to determine whether interventions aimed at increasing sleep may be useful in combating obesity.
Circadian biology and sleep: missing links in obesity and metabolism?
Authors: Gimble J. M. , Bray M. S. , Young A. 
Published: October 2009

SummaryThis supplement highlights key talks presented at the Pennington Symposium. The collected papers provide a state of the art review of circadian biology at the basic and clinical levels in the context of nutrition, obesity and sleep medicine. Investigators from multiple disciplines attempted to translate new information concerning molecular mechanisms into practical clinical applications, as well as foster new research hypotheses and directions to this exciting field of science and medicine. Furthermore, we hope to spark the interest and attention of the next generation of scientists who will tackle the questions presented by the changing interface between technology, lifestyle and biological rhythms.
Embodied responsibilities: pregnancy in the eyes of Japanese ob‐gyns
Authors: Tsipy Ivry 
Published: October 2009

AbstractThis article explores the correlation between the social, cultural and political setting in which Japanese women gestate their babies and the kind of maternal responsibilities they are expected to exercise. By focusing on prenatal care, I look at ways in which Japanese gynaecologists formulate ideas about women's accountability for pregnancy outcomes and show how these ideas shape the practical strategies through which pregnancy is managed in medical institutions. While interrogating the perspectives these professionals bring into play, I am interested in the relationships between biomedicine, culture and the embodiment of women's roles. My findings reveal a broad range of physiological phenomena for which women are held accountable and a host of instructions they are expected to follow once they engage in prenatal care. Medical narratives render the pregnant body as the physical and mental environment that creates the foetus and highlights women's behaviour and health (rather than genes and chromosomes) as the major factors of foetal health. I show how the embodied mode of maternal responsibilities expected of women is mutually constituted by four interconnected realms of discourse and practice: the medical realm, cultural conceptions of self, national reproductive politics and the gendered division of labour.
Adaptive regulation or governmentality: patient safety and the changing regulation of medicine
Authors: Waring Justin 
Published: October 2009

AbstractThis paper explores how current ‘patient safety’ reforms offer to change the regulation of medicine. Drawing on existing literature, it is argued that this policy agenda represents a new frontier in medical/managerial relations, introducing a disciplinary expertise within the health service that provides managers with the knowledge and legitimacy to survey and scrutinise medical performance, made real through procedures for incident reporting and root‐cause analysis. The extent of regulatory change is investigated, drawing on an ethnographic case study of one hospital. It is shown that, as with other organisational and managerial reforms, doctors are resisting managerial prerogatives through seeking to subvert and ‘capture’ components of reform. I describe this as ‘adaptive regulation’ to account for how doctors seek to maintain their regulatory monopoly and limit managerial encroachment. It is speculated, however, that this process could signal the future ‘modernisation’ of medical professionalism where emerging managerial discourses, within the wider context of public sector reform, are increasingly internalised with medical practice and culture. This leads to new and rearticulated forms of self‐surveillance, self‐management or ‘governmentality’, ultimately negating the need for external groups to explicitly manage or regulate professional practice.
Entangled evidence: knowledge making in systematic reviews in healthcare
Authors: Moreira Tiago 
Published: October 2009

AbstractAs the volume of biomedical information escalates and its uses diversify, systematic reviews and meta‐analyses – the compilation, selection and statistical analysis of pooled results from similar studies – are becoming an increasingly accepted method in the evaluation of healthcare technologies and interventions. We thus observe a proliferation of laboratories conducting this type of research. How is knowledge constructed in systematic reviews and meta‐analysis in healthcare? Drawing on ethnographic data collected during 18 months of fieldwork in a research centre devoted to the development of evidence‐based clinical‐practice guidelines and systematic reviews, the paper argues that knowledge construction in secondary research in healthcare is structured upon a parallel process of disentanglement and qualification of data. In disentanglement, knowledge practices attempt to extricate data from the milieus in which they are commonly found (databases, texts, other research centres, etc.). In qualification, the focus of activities is on endowing data with new qualities – such as precision, unbiasness or ‘fairness’– through the use of templates, graphical platforms and techno‐political debates. The accomplishment of these two processes is fundamental to establishing the persuasive power that meta‐analyses appear to have in contemporary healthcare politics.
‘Trusting blindly can be the biggest risk of all’: organised resistance to childhood vaccination in the UK
Authors: Hobson‐West Pru 
Published: October 2009

AbstractSociological interest in vaccination has recently increased, largely in response to media coverage of concerns over the safety of the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine. The resulting body of research highlights the importance of risk and trust in understanding parental and professional engagement with vaccination. To date, only limited attention has been paid to organised parental groups that campaign against aspects of vaccination policy. This paper reports findings from a qualitative study of contemporary groups in the UK, and develops three main lines of argument. First, these actors are best analysed as ‘Vaccine Critical groups’ and include Radical and Reformist types. Second, Vaccine Critical groups discursively resist vaccination through a reframing that constructs risk as unknown and non‐random. Third, trust as faith is negatively contrasted with the empowerment that is promised to result from taking personal responsibility for health and decision‐making. Whilst representing a challenge to aspects of vaccination policy, this study confirms that the groups are involved in the articulation and promotion of other dominant discourses. These findings have implications for wider sociological debates about risk and trust in relation to health.
A birth centre's encounters with discourses of childbirth: how resistance led to innovation
Authors: Walsh Denis J. 
Published: October 2009

AbstractAn ethnographic study of a free‐standing birth centre uncovered a site of intense contestation. Two prominent childbirth discourses attempting to inscribe their orthodoxies on staff and women users encountered stern and persistent resistance. Using postmodern theory, this resistance is conceptualised as nomadic activity, as space is made at the margins of discourse for a difference and diversity to manifest. The relationship between discourse and women's agency is layered and non‐linear as the presence of dissonant data indicates. The birth centre, however, actualises a number of contrasting ways of ‘being’ and ‘doing’ that appear to serve the interests of staff and women well. In particular, ‘nomadic’ midwifery practice and a ‘care as gift’ orientation challenges the biomedical model that defines the parameters of normal and the ‘vigil of care’ discourse that regulates the professional/patient relationship. Birth centres may encourage novel and eclectic ways of providing childbirth care.
Age, SES, and health: a population level analysis of health inequalities over the lifecourse
Authors: Prus Steven G. 
Published: October 2009

AbstractThis paper tests two competing hypotheses on the relationship between age, SES, and health inequality at the cohort/population level. The accumulation hypothesis predicts that the level of SES‐based health inequality, and consequently the overall level of health inequality, within a cohort progressively increases as it ages. The divergence‐convergence hypothesis predicts that these inequalities increase only up to early‐old age then decrease. Data from a Canadian national health survey are used in this study, and are adjusted for SES‐biases in mortality. Bootstrap methods are employed to assess the statistical precision and significance of the results. The Gini coefficient is used to estimate change in the overall level of health inequality with age, and the Concentration coefficient estimates the contribution of SES‐based health inequalities to this change. Health is measured using the Health Utilities Index, and income and education provide the measure of SES. First, the findings show that the Gini coefficient progressively increases from 0.048 (95% CI: 0.045, 0.051) at ages 15–29 to 0.147 (95% CI: 0.131, 0.163) at ages 80+. Second, the data reveal that health inequalities between SES groups (Concentration coefficients for income and education) tend to follow a similar pattern of divergence. Together these findings provide support for the accumulation hypothesis. A notable implication of the study's findings is that the level of health inequality increases when compensating for age‐specific socio‐economic differences in mortality. These selective effects of mortality should be considered in future research on health inequalities and the lifecourse.
Linguistic Pitch Analysis Using Functional Principal Component Mixed Effect Models
Authors: Aston John A. D. , Chiou Jeng-Min , Evans Jonathan P. 
Published: October 2009

SummaryFundamental frequency (F0, broadly ‘pitch’) is an integral part of spoken human language; however, a comprehensive quantitative model for F0 can be a challenge to formulate owing to the large number of effects and interactions between effects that lie behind the human voice’s production of F0, and the very nature of the data being a contour rather than a point. The paper presents a semiparametric functional response model for F0 by incorporating linear mixed effects models through the functional principal component scores. This model is applied to the problem of modelling F0 in the tone language Qiang, a language in which relative pitch information is part of each word’s dictionary entry.
Multivariate Non-Linear Time Series Modelling of Exposure and Risk in Road Safety Research
Authors: Bijleveld Frits , Commandeur Jacques , Koopman Siem Jan , Montfort Kees van 
Published: October 2009

SummaryA multivariate non-linear time series model for road safety data is presented. The model is applied in a case-study into the development of a yearly time series of numbers of fatal accidents (inside and outside urban areas) and numbers of kilometres driven by motor vehicles in the Netherlands between 1961 and 2000. The model accounts for missing entries in the disaggregated numbers of kilometres driven although the aggregated numbers are observed throughout. We consider a multivariate non-linear time series model for the analysis of these data. The model consists of dynamic unobserved factors for exposure and risk that are related in a non-linear way to the number of fatal accidents. The multivariate dimension of the model is due to its inclusion of multiple time series for inside and outside urban areas. Approximate maximum likelihood methods based on the extended Kalman filter are utilized for the estimation of unknown parameters. The latent factors are estimated by extended smoothing methods. It is concluded that the salient features of the observed time series are captured by the model in a satisfactory way.
Visualizing Uncertainty in Reliability Functions with Application to Aero Engine Overhaul
Authors: Ebden Mark , Stranjak Armin , Roberts Stephen 
Published: October 2009

SummaryWe propose an approach for estimating the date of lost confidence of jet engines, which are devices with multiple components subject to disruption. A mixed Weibull distribution is estimated from a large data set subject to censoring at various times. Parametric uncertainty is derived analytically and mapped visually onto the functions of use in reliability theory, including the hazard function. We demonstrate the use of the method on a database of disruption times for components in 325 jet engines.
Nonconcordance between subclinical atherosclerosis and the calculated Framingham risk score in HIV‐infected patients: relationships with serum markers of oxidation and inflammation
Authors: Parra S , Coll B , Aragonés G , Marsillach J , Beltrán R , Rull A , Joven J , Alonso‐Villaverde C , Camps J 
Published: October 2009

ObjectivesHIV‐infected patients show an increased cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk resulting, essentially, from metabolic disturbances related to chronic infection and antiretroviral treatments. The aims of this study were: (1) to evaluate the agreement between the CVD risk estimated using the Framingham risk score (FRS) and the observed presence of subclinical atherosclerosis in HIV‐infected patients; (2) to investigate the relationships between CVD and plasma biomarkers of oxidation and inflammation.MethodsAtherosclerosis was evaluated in 187 HIV‐infected patients by measuring the carotid intima‐media thickness (CIMT). CVD risk was estimated using the FRS. We also measured the circulating levels of interleukin‐6, monocyte chemoattractant protein‐1 (MCP‐1) and oxidized low‐density lipoprotein (LDL), and paraoxonase‐1 activity and concentration.ResultsThere was a weak, albeit statistically significant, agreement between FRS and CIMT (κ=0.229, P<0.001). A high proportion of patients with an estimated low risk had subclinical atherosclerosis (n=66; 56.4%). In a multivariate analysis, the presence of subclinical atherosclerosis in this subgroup of patients was associated with age [odds ratio (OR) 1.285; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.084–1.524; P=0.004], body mass index (OR 0.799; 95% CI 0.642–0.994; P=0.044), MCP‐1 (OR 1.027; 95% CI 1.004–1.050; P=0.020) and oxidized LDL (OR 1.026; 95% CI 1.001–1.051; P=0.041).ConclusionFRS underestimated the presence of subclinical atherosclerosis in HIV‐infected patients. The increased CVD risk was related, in part, to the chronic oxidative stress and inflammatory status associated with this patient population.
Haloarchaeal diversity in 23, 121 and 419 MYA salts
Authors: PARK J. S. , VREELAND R. H. , CHO B. C. , LOWENSTEIN T. K. , TIMOFEEFF M. N. , ROSENZWEIG W. D. 
Published: October 2009

AbstractDNA was extracted from surface‐sterilized salt of different geological ages (23, 121, 419 million years of age, MYA) to investigate haloarchaeal diversity. Only Haloarcula and Halorubrum DNA was found in 23 MYA salt. Older crystals contained unclassified groups and Halobacterium. The older crystals yielded a unique 55‐bp insert within the 16S rRNA V2 region. The secondary structure of the V2 region completely differed from that in haloarchaea of modern environments. The DNA demonstrates that unknown haloarchaea and the Halobacterium were key components in ancient hypersaline environments. Halorubrum and Haloarcula appear to be a dominant group in relatively modern hypersaline habitats.
Antenatal Care Utilization in a Conflict‐Affected District of Northern Sri Lanka
Authors: Sivaganesh Subramaniam , Senarath Upul 
Published: October 2009

ABSTRACT
Objectives: To assess utilization of antenatal care (ANC) and its determinants in a conflict‐affected area in Northern Sri Lanka.Design and Sample: A cross‐sectional study was conducted among pregnant mothers who had completed 36 weeks of gestation, and were admitted or referred to 2 leading hospitals in Vavuniya district.Measures: Data were collected from 392 mothers using an interviewer‐administered questionnaire.Results: 55% of the respondents reported that their families were affected directly by conflict. Approximately 68% of mothers were registered by public health midwife (PHM) for ANC; 31.4% were registered before 12 weeks of gestation; 38.5% were visited at home by PHM; 37.8% had the first clinic visit before 12 weeks; and 90.1% made at least 4 clinic visits. The average number of antenatal visits to specialist clinics (5.34, 95%CI: 5.03–5.65) was significantly higher than field clinics (2.97, 95%CI: 2.69–3.25). On average, a pregnant woman was seen by PHM at home 1.47 times. ANC utilization was significantly poor in women whose families were affected by conflict, living in active conflict areas and urban regions, had a lower education level, and were not involved in decision making on ANC.Conclusion: Provision of field antenatal clinics, early entry to ANC, and domiciliary care by PHM need improvement.
Retracted:Effects of Exercise Program on Physical Fitness, Depression, and Self‐Efficacy of Low‐Income Elderly Women in South Korea
Authors: Shin Kyung Rim , Kang Younhee , Park Hyo Jung , Heitkemper Margaret 
Published: October 2009

ABSTRACT
Objective: This study aimed to examine the effects of exercise programs on physical fitness, depression, and self‐efficacy in low‐income elderly women (age≥75).Design and Sample: A pretest‐posttest experimental research design with a control group was used. The sample consisted of 26 women in the exercise group and 22 women in the wait‐list control group in Seoul, Korea.Measures: The measures of physical fitness included body mass index, cardiopulmonary endurance (blood pressure and heart rate), muscle strength (hand grip strength), flexibility (degree of bending of the upper body), and balance (duration of time for which the subject could stand on one foot). Depression and self‐efficacy were measured by the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression scale and a modified form of Lee's scale, respectively. All measures were obtained twice: at baseline and at the completion of the exercise program.Intervention: The exercise program consisted of 4 weeks of education along with 8 weeks of physical exercise.Results: After the intervention, significant improvements were found in depression, self‐efficacy, and all measures of physical fitness, except heart rate and flexibility, in the experimental group.Conclusion: The exercise program may be recommended as a method to maintain and promote the health of low‐income elderly women.