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Food for strength:Nutritional bioactives to enhance vitality and skeletal muscle regeneration
No full textAssociation of Sarcopenia With Toxicity and Survival in Patients With Lung Cancer, a Multi-Institutional Study With External Dataset Validation
No full textIntroduction: Sarcopenia is associated with worse survival in non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), but less studied in association with toxicity. Here, we investigated the association between imaging-assessed sarcopenia with toxicity in patients with NSCLC. Methods: We analyzed a “chemoradiation” cohort (n = 318) of patients with NSCLC treated with chemoradiation, and an external validation “chemo-surgery” cohort (n = 108) who were treated with chemotherapy and surgery from 2002 to 2013 at a different institution. A deep-learning pipeline utilized pretreatment computed tomography scans to estimate SM area at the third lumbar vertebral level. Sarcopenia was defined by dichotomizing SM index, (SM adjusted for height and sex). Primary endpoint was NCI CTCAE v5.0 grade 3 to 5 (G3-5) toxicity within 21-days of first chemotherapy cycle. Multivariable analyses (MVA) of toxicity endpoints with sarcopenia and baseline characteristics were performed by logistic regression, and overall survival (OS) was analyzed using Cox regression. Results: Sarcopenia was identified in 36% and 36% of patients in the chemoradiation and chemo-surgery cohorts, respectively. On MVA, sarcopenia was associated with worse G3-5 toxicity in chemoradiation (HR 2.00, P < .01) and chemo-surgery cohorts (HR 2.95, P = .02). In the chemoradiation cohort, worse OS was associated with G3-5 toxicity (HR 1.42, P = .02) but not sarcopenia on MVA. In chemo-surgery cohort, worse OS was associated with sarcopenia (HR 2.03, P = .02) but not G3-5 toxicity on MVA. Conclusion: Sarcopenia, assessed by an automated deep-learning system, was associated with worse toxicity and survival outcomes in patients with NSCLC. Sarcopenia can be utilized to tailor treatment decisions to optimize adverse events and survival.</p
School nutrition programs in Dubai:a landscape analysis
No full textBACKGROUND: Little is known about the execution of School Nutrition Programs (SNPs) within schools across the public and private sectors in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. This highlights the importance of capturing an inside perspective about the specificities of the SNPs in order to ensure their effective, efficient, and equitable implementation across schools, irrespective of whether they are public or private. OBJECTIVE: The overall purpose of this study was to develop insight into SNPs in Dubai, and to investigate the difference in characteristics of those SNPs, between the public and private sectors. METHODS: This study relied on a quantitative tailor-made survey. The data were analyzed using SPSS; descriptive analysis consisted of computing the proportions for all the variables. In terms of inferential analysis, chi-square test of independence was selected to determine whether there are associations between the categorical variables (i.e., the various characteristics of the SNPs, and whether the corresponding schools are public or private). RESULTS: Out of 75 school representatives who were invited to participate in the current study, 60 responded, of whom 48 school representatives indicated that their respective schools had SNPs. These 48 SNPs had varying implementation scopes and program compositions (i.e., combination of initiatives) of Parents' Involvement, Lunch Box, Educational Curriculum, Hydration, Awareness Activities, School Canteen, and/ or Food Safety and Hygiene. The stakeholders involved in developing and maintaining the respective SNPs and the intended outcomes of those programs also differed across the schools. CONCLUSION: This study highlights, in alignment with Sustainable Development Goals 3, 4, 9 and 17, the importance of the proposed reformation around SNPs in Dubai to take into account the governance structure on the local and national levels, quality assurance measures, stakeholder engagement, and programs' intended outcomes and compositions. It proposes the enactment and maintenance of holistic, school-level healthy living programs that include nutrition as part of a more comprehensive approach to fostering the students' individual and collective wellbeing
Doubly Robust Control Outcome Calibration Approach Estimation of Conditional Effects with Uncontrolled Confounding
No full textDrawing causal conclusions about nonrandomized exposures rests on assuming no uncontrolled confounding, but it is rarely justifiable to rule out all putative violations of this routinely made yet empirically untestable assumption. Alternatively, this assumption can be avoided by leveraging negative control outcomes using the control outcome calibration approach (COCA). The existing COCA estimator of the average causal effect relies on correctly specifying the mean negative control outcome model, with a closed-form solution for the main exposure effect. In this article, we propose a doubly robust COCA estimator of the average causal effect that relaxes this modeling requirement and permits effect modification through covariate-exposure interaction terms. The doubly robust COCA estimator uses correctly specified exposure and focal outcome models to protect against biases from an incorrectly specified negative control outcome model. The ability to obtain unbiased point estimates and inferences is empirically evaluated using a simulation study. We demonstrate doubly robust COCA using a publicly available dataset to evaluate the effect of volunteering on mental health. This method is practical and easy to implement and permits unbiased estimation of causal effects even amid uncontrolled confounding
The euro area carbon bond premium
No full textWe document a positive and significant carbon premium in euro area corporate bonds, reflecting investor demands for compensation due to climate transition risk. The premium is significant for Scope 1, 2, and 3 carbon emissions and is robust to alternative sample selection criteria and measurement methods of the emission variable. A one standard deviation increase in a firm's Scope 1 and 2 emissions raises its yield spread by 26 basis points. This premium, which systematically raises borrowing costs, arises from both preference and risk channels, with the component driven by preferences increasing rapidly from 2020 to early 2022. Firms receiving free EU ETS emission allowances face a 40% lower preference premium, highlighting the impact of carbon pricing on the cost of capital. The premium rises monotonically with bond maturity, signaling investor confidence in sustained carbon pricing
Investigating shared cognitive traits of autism spectrum disorder and picky eating
No full textObjective: Picky eating is common among children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and can lead to nutritional deficiencies with negative health consequences. Because ASD traits and picky eating often co-occur, it remains unclear whether similar cognitive mechanisms underlie picky eating in typically developing children. This study examined whether cognitive traits associated with ASD are also linked to picky eating in typically developing children. It was hypothesized that higher levels of picky eating would be associated with lower cognitive flexibility, less developed theory of mind (ToM), a local processing bias, and higher parent-reported ASD traits. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted with 198 children aged 4-6. The children completed three tasks to measure cognitive flexibility (Dimensional Change Card Sort), ToM, and global-local processing preferences. Receptive vocabulary was measured to control for general cognitive ability. Parents completed the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ-10) and Child Food Rejection Scale (CFRS) to assess ASD traits and picky eating, respectively. Results: Contrary to expectations, no significant relationship was found between picky eating and the cognitive traits studied. However, a small negative correlation was found between ToM and the picky eating subscale, suggesting that higher picky eating levels may be related to lower ToM abilities. Conclusion: These findings suggest that in typically developing children, ASD-related traits are probably not strongly associated with picky eating, with the exception of ToM. Future research is needed to examine if social factors appear to play a more crucial role in picky eating
Detection of hazardous substances in food contact materials:Development and evaluation of an effect-directed screening framework for hazard identification and suspect prioritization
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Explainable AI for automatic heart disease diagnosis using 3DFMMecg features:A novel ECG-based approach
No full textThe electrocardiogram (ECG), a gold standard in cardiac diagnostics, is increasingly combined with Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods to enhance its clinical utility. However, many recent studies have prioritised performance over clinical interpretability by focusing on Deep Learning (DL) techniques, which offer limited explainability since they do not directly correlate with clinical features. This lack of transparency causes mistrust among physicians and hinders adoption in daily clinical practice. We developed novel, self-explainable features from the 3DFMMecg model parametrisation, enabling highly accurate and clinically interpretable ML classifiers for cardiovascular pathology diagnosis from 12-lead ECG signals. We evaluated our approach on PTB-XL+, a widely used dataset of annotated ECG recordings. Our framework outperforms existing feature-based methods in four out of six classification tasks, achieving macro-AUC between 0.88 and 0.95 and weighted macro-AUC between 0.90 and 0.95, comparable to and in some tasks surpassing DL approaches. We further show that the model maintains high diagnostic accuracy when using only three of the standard twelve ECG leads, with less than 6% loss in performance, enabling deployment in mobile, wearable, or resource-constrained environments. Feature importance analyses using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) confirm strong alignment between model predictions and established clinical markers, such as QRS width and T-wave amplitude parameters. These results underscore the potential of 3DFMMecg-based pipelines toward reliable, transparent, and accessible ECG-based diagnostic systems