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The Application of Olive-Derived Polyphenols on Exercise-Induced Inflammation: A Scoping Review
No full textBackground/Objectives: There is current scientific interest pertaining to the therapeutic effects of olive-derived polyphenols (ODPs), in particular their associated anti-inflammatory properties, following the wealth of research surrounding the physiological impact of the Mediterranean Diet (MD). Despite this association, the majority of the current literature investigates ODPs in conjunction with metabolic diseases. There is limited research focusing on ODPs and acute inflammation following exercise, regardless of the knowledge surrounding the elevated inflammatory response during this time. Therefore, the aim of this scoping review is to understand the impact ODPs may have on exercise-induced inflammation. Methods: This scoping review was undertaken in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScRs). The literature searches were conducted in PubMed and EBSCOhost and considered for review if records reported original data, examined olives, olive-derived nutrients, food sources, or ODPs in conjunction with exercise-induced inflammation (including known causes, associations, and proxy measures). Results: Seven studies investigated ODPs and exercise-induced inflammation, providing commentary on reduced oxidative stress, inflammatory biomarkers, and immune biomarkers, enhanced antioxidant defenses and modulations in mitochondrial function, albeit in low numbers. An average of 100.9 mg∙d−1 ODPs were supplemented for an average of 40 days, with hydroxytyrosol (HT) being the primary ODP investigated. Six studies employed individual aerobic exercise as their stimulus, whilst one study investigated the impact of an acute dose of ODP. Conclusions: There is a limited consensus on the direction of isolated HT in human models, whereas animal models suggest a reduced inflammatory response following ≥2 weeks HT supplementation in conjunction with chronic exercise. Future research should initially investigate the inflammatory response of ODP, with particular focus on HT, and aim to identify an optimum dose and time course for supplementation surrounding exercise to support acute recovery and exercise adaptations.</p
Poverty, mad dogs and culling: dogs and entitlement to poor relief in England, c. 1750-1834
No full textDuring the old poor law, people were struck off relief lists for owning dogs. While authorities justified this by saying that they were curtailing the spread of rabies or helping the poor to budget better, it became an important, discretionary reason why people were viewed as entitled to poor relief or not. This aspect of welfare has received little attention from historians, but it formed a vital part of many peoples’ experiences of the poor law. People were attached to their dogs and were made to decide between killing them or accepting help that they desperately needed. In looking at this topic, this article advances our understanding of entitlement to poor relief, as well as the history of medicine and rabies, human-animal relations and societal views on the poor.</p
Life satisfaction around the world: measurement invariance of the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) across 65 nations, 40 languages, gender identities, and age groups
No full textThe Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) is a widely used self-report measure of subjective well-being, but studies of its measurement invariance across a large number of nations remain limited. Here, we utilised the Body Image in Nature (BINS) dataset – with data collected between 2020 and 2022 – to assess measurement invariance of the SWLS across 65 nations, 40 languages, gender identities, and age groups (N = 56,968). All participants completed the SWLS under largely uniform conditions. Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis indicated that configural and metric invariance was upheld across all nations, languages, gender identities, and age groups, suggesting that the unidimensional SWLS model has universal applicability. Full scalar invariance was achieved across gender identities and age groups. Based on alignment optimisation methods, partial scalar invariance was achieved across all but three national groups and across all languages represented in the BINS. There were large differences in latent SWLS means across nations and languages, but negligible-to-small differences across gender identities and age groups. Across nations, greater life satisfaction was significantly associated with greater financial security and being in a committed relationship or married. The results of this study suggest that the SWLS largely assesses a common unidimensional construct of life satisfaction irrespective of respondent characteristics (i.e., national group, gender identities, and age group) or survey presentation (i.e., survey language). This has important implications for the assessment of life satisfaction across nations and provides information that will be useful for practitioners aiming to promote subjective well-being internationally.</p
Association of weight change with cardiovascular events and all-cause mortality in obese participants with cardiovascular disease: a prospective cohort study
No full textBackgroundStudies have examined the association between weight change and risk of cardiovascular (CV) outcomes in the general population. However, very few literature reported the association among obese people with established CV disease (CVD) and the factors associated with weight change are not clear. We sought to investigate this using the UK Biobank data.MethodsIn this large prospective population-based cohort study, absolute interval change scores in weight were calculated between weight measurements at baseline and the follow-up. The estimated HRs with 95% CIs were obtained from the Cox regression models to assess the association between weight change and the risk of CV death, cerebrovascular and ischaemic heart diseases and all-cause mortality.ResultsOf the 8297 obese participants who had CVD with repeated weight measurements, 43.1% were female. The mean age was 56.6 (SD: 7.2) years. The overall median follow-up of the study was 13.9 (IQR: 13.1–14.6) years. 52.7% of the participants had stable weight change (weight loss or gain</p
Should Capitalism be Deemed Psychopathic and Criminalised? A reply to ‘Psychopathy Incorporated'
No full textPurpose: A recent paper “Psychopathy Incorporated” concludes that capitalism should be criminalised because it is psychopathic. This current paper aims to assess each of the main points made in “Psychopathy Incorporated” relative to what is known about psychopaths in corporate settings and to discuss whether capitalism should be criminalised.
Design: From the existing literature on corporate psychopaths, an analysis of each of the main points made in “Psychopathy Incorporated” is undertaken and discussed to establish whether each point is supported by the literature.
Findings: An analysis of the corporate psychopathy literature supports most of the points raised in ‘Psychopathy Incorporated.’ The literature agrees with the symptoms, but not the proposed remedy. Some of capitalism is now essentially run along psychopathic lines and it can compellingly be argued that this has taken us to a tipping point of environmental destruction. Therefore, there are grounds for agreeing that something needs to change. Nonetheless, and regardless of its feasibility, the conclusion that capitalism should be criminalised is not agreed with. This is because personality exists independently of ideology, and psychopaths tend to get to the top under any ideological or political system.
Societal Implications: It may be concluded, therefore, that the problem is not capitalism, it is those psychopathic leaders who have been allowed to appropriate capitalism for their own ends. Populism and other purportedly alternative systems of societal organization are unwarranted and unable to solve the problem of psychopathic capitalism. Communism led by the psychopathic would be no better than capitalism led by the psychopathic.
Originality: This is the first paper to reply to the idea that capitalism is psychopathic and needs replacing.</p
ChiGa-Net: A genetically optimized neural network with refined deeply extracted features using χ2 statistical score for trustworthy Parkinson’s disease detection
No full textAutomated neurodegenerative disease detection systems that integrate computer vision and machine learning (ML) provide non-invasive, cost-effective tools to assist neurologists in diagnosing and monitoring disorders like Parkinson’s disease (PD). Handwriting analysis plays a crucial role in the automated assessment of PD. Although many ML methods utilizing either automated or hand-crafted features – or a combination of both – have shown promising results in PD detection, they often suffer from overestimation bias and struggle to produce consistent results when tested on new, unseen datasets. To address these challenges, we propose a method that extracts more representative features, ensuring both trustworthiness and generalizability for real-time applications. We introduce ChiGa-Net, a novel framework that integrates the statistical score-based refined deep feature extraction with a genetically optimized neural network. To provide more practical results, this framework was trained and validated on a specific dataset, namely NewHandPD, and then rigorously tested on a new, unseen dataset, HandPD. Numerical experiments confirm the trustworthiness and generalizability of ChiGa-Net. For spiral images, the proposed approach achieves 92.56% balanced accuracy, 85.13% sensitivity, and 100% specificity during external testing. These results demonstrate superior performance compared to previously published methods and ML systems based on either deep learning or hand-crafted features. These findings suggest that the developed method yields reliable and generalizable results across diverse datasets, making it a robust and trustworthy tool for real-world clinical applications.</p
Evaluating ChatGPT for converting clinic letters into patient-friendly language
No full textBackgroundPrevious research has shown that communication with patients in language they understand leads to greater comprehension of treatment and diagnoses but can be time consuming for clinicians.AimHere we sought to investigate the utility of ChatGPT to translate clinic letters into language patients understood, without loss of clinical information and to assess what impact this had on patients understanding of letter content.Design & settingSingle blinded quantitative study using objective and subjective analysis of language complexity.MethodTwenty-three clinic letters were provided by consultants across 8 specialties. Letters were inputted into ChatGPT with a prompt related to improve understanding for patients. Patient representatives were then asked to rate their understanding of the content of letters.ResultsTranslation of letters by ChatGPT resulted in no loss of clinical information, but did result in significant increase in understanding, satisfaction and decrease in the need to obtain medical help to translate the letter contents by patient representatives compared with clinician written originals.ConclusionOverall, we conclude that ChatGPT can be used to translate clinic letters into patient friendly language without loss of clinical content, and that these letters are preferred by patients.</p
Women’s Sociodemographic Characters and Antenatal Care Services in Rwanda: A Secondary Analysis of Rwanda Demographic Health Survey 2019–2020
No full textBackground and Objectives:
Rwanda, a country in Sub-Saharan Africa, is among the most underprivileged nations. Women in Rwanda face significant challenges in achieving good health and well-being. This study aims to explore the impact of various sociodemographic factors on the utilization of antenatal care (ANC) services in Rwanda.
Methodology:
This study is based on secondary research using data extracted from the Rwanda Demographic Health Survey conducted in 2019–2020. 14,634 women were interviewed, and their data were analyzed using SPSS 24.0. The statistical significance level was set at 5% and a confidence interval of 95% was used in the analysis.
Results:
The average age of the survey respondents was 29. Over 87% of them visited ANC before their 5th month of pregnancy, and only a very small percentage (0.04%) had more than six visits. The logistic regression analysis results showed that women aged over 45 years were twice as likely to visit the clinic as women aged 15–30 years (odds ratio (OR): 2.022, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.241–3.293, P = 0.005). Women who completed primary education were 4.2 times more likely to use ANC clinics than uneducated women (OR: 4.190, 95%CI: 1.230–2.653, P = 0.003). Pregnant women who read the newspaper at least once a week were 1.4 times more likely to visit the clinic than those who did not read the newspaper at all (OR: 1.148, 95%CI: 1.097–2.028, P = 0.014).
Conclusions:
The utilization of antenatal care ANC services is significantly influenced by sociodemographic factors. Therefore, these elements should be considered when developing strategies to improve antenatal services in Rwanda.</p
Electronic Patient Reported Outcome Measures and quality of life in cancer (E-PROMISE): systematic review of the evidence and meta-analysis
No full textObjectiveThe objective of this systematic review and meta-analysis (SRMA) was to evaluate the impact of electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePROs) on health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in patients with cancer.DesignWe performed SRMA of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) comparing ePRO interventions with usual care in patients with cancer. The primary outcome was HRQoL. We used a random effects model a priori due to the anticipated clinical heterogeneity. Subgroup analyses and meta-regressions were performed to explore sources of heterogeneity. After assessing the risk of bias using risk-of-bias tool (RoB V.2), we rated the evidence certainty using the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluations framework.Eligibility criteriaWe included studies meeting the following criteria: (1) RCTs; (2) patients diagnosed with any type of cancer, undergoing or having completed treatment; (3) comparing ePROs with usual care without ePRO interventions; (4) assessing the effect on HRQoL.Information sourcesWe systematically searched PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials up to April 2024.ResultsWe screened 7706 records to include 36 RCTs with 9608 patients. ePRO interventions showed a standardised mean difference (SMD) of 0.35; 95% CI 0.18 to 0.51 compared with usual care. Patients receiving ongoing therapy had an SMD of 0.39 (95% CI 0.21 to 0.58), while those who had completed therapy had an SMD of 0.12 (95% CI 0.01 to 0.22), with a significant subgroup difference (p=0.01). No statistically significant differences were observed across the method of ePRO assessment, cancer site, metastasis status, therapy status, average age or duration of ePRO use. The results remained consistent with Bayesian and other sensitivity analyses.ConclusionsePRO interventions improve HRQoL more than usual care in patients with cancer, with greater effect in those currently undergoing therapy. This improvement is independent of cancer type, duration of ePRO use or patient age. Future research should address sources of heterogeneity, explore long-term impacts and develop strategies to increase patient engagement and adherence to ePRO systems.PROSPERO registration numberCRD42024531708.</p
Lending a helping hand to preterm infants: randomized controlled trial of the impact of ‘sticky mittens’ on exploratory behavior and later development
No full textResearch with 3-month-old infants from the general population has shown benefits to their exploratory behavior from play involving ‘sticky mittens’. Sticky mittens are Velcro-covered mittens that are used with Velcro-covered toys to enable pre-reaching infants to grab and move toys simply by swatting at them. Our randomized controlled trial examined whether sticky mittens play, supervised by parents in the home environment, could similarly improve the exploratory behavior and later development of preterm infants. Participants (N = 62, 25-33 weeks of gestation) were recruited at 3 months of age corrected for prematurity and assigned randomly to either an intervention or active control group. For up to 5-10 minutes per day for three weeks, the intervention group used sticky mittens regularly while the control group instead watched their caregiver move the toys. Object-oriented exploratory behavior was evaluated immediately before and after the intervention, and caregivers completed questionnaires about their infant’s development until 15 months’ corrected age. Results showed that the intervention group made significantly greater gains than the control group in mouthing, F = 9.24, p = .004, ηp2 = .13, and bimanual exploration of the toys at or near the mouth, F = 8.07, p = .006, ηp2 = .12. However, the groups showed equivalent development over the next year as gauged by parent-report questionnaires p’s > .05. While the sticky mittens intervention has immediate benefits for preterm infants’ exploratory behavior, more research is needed before conclusions can be drawn regarding the longer-term impact on their development.</p
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