768 research outputs found
Does HIV accelerate the aging process? An assessment of clinical, ophthalmic and serum parameters in HIV-infected individuals in South Africa
No full textHIV-infected individuals are at increased risk of age-related non-AIDS morbidity and mortality compared with HIV-uninfected persons. It is speculated that HIV-infected individuals may not only be aging chronologically, but also undergoing accelerated biological aging. This is supported by clinical reports of conditions classically associated with the normal aging process appearing at an earlier age in HIV-infected persons compared to age-matched controls.
Chronological age is an imprecise measure of biological aging due to inter-individual differences in rates of aging and therefore ‘biomarkers of aging’ may be used to assess biological age. The eye may be a uniquely useful site as a model of aging. It is easily accessible for examination and several components can be measured and assessed objectively e.g. lens density, retinal vascular calibre, corneal endothelial cell counts and the retinal nerve fibre layer thickness.
This case-control study of 504 adults recruited from one district in Cape Town, South Africa assessed whether HIV-infected individuals have more advanced ocular aging, systemic frailty and cellular senescence than an HIV-uninfected group of similar age. Accelerated biological aging was demonstrated in HIV-infected individuals compared to their uninfected counterparts. HIV infection was also associated with frailty. Ocular parameters provided evidence of greater aging within the HIV-infected group, particularly objective measurement of retinal vascular calibre and lens density. These data suggest that as well as increased biological aging at a cellular and systemic level, ocular aging occurs as part of the accelerated aging phenotype in HIV infection.
This study provides novel data about accelerated biological aging in sub-Saharan Africa and a platform for addressing future research questions relating to accelerated aging trajectories in HIV infection, the relative contributions of the infection and antiretroviral therapy, and whether biological age is dependent upon the duration of untreated disease or nadir CD4 count. As the HIV-infected population continues to age and expand, accelerated biological aging may have wideranging implications for the burden and management of HIV-related morbidity
Group Development Stages in Open Government Data Engagement Initiatives: A Comparative Case Studies Analysis
No full textCitizens are increasingly using Open Government Data (OGD) and engaging with OGD by designing and developing applications. They often do so by collaborating in groups, for example through self-organized groups or government-induced open data engagement initiatives, such as hackathons. The successful use and engagement of OGD by groups of citizens can greatly contribute to the uptake and adoption of OGD in general. However, little is known regarding how groups of citizens develop in OGD engagement. This study aims at exploring and understanding the development stages of citizen groups in OGD engagement. To attain this objective, we conducted a comparative case study of group development stages in two different types of OGD engagement. Our cases show that leadership and diversity of capabilities significantly contribute to the success of citizen groups in OGD engagement. These findings suggest that connecting citizens having a diversity of expertise prior to the OGD engagement event helps to improve its effectiveness. This research is among the first to apply group development stages model in open data engagement studies and thus opening up new research opportunities concerning group developments in the open data literature.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Information and Communication Technolog
Can simply answering research questions change behaviour? Systematic review and meta analyses of brief alcohol intervention trials.
No full textBACKGROUND: Participant reports of their own behaviour are critical for the provision and evaluation of behavioural interventions. Recent developments in brief alcohol intervention trials provide an opportunity to evaluate longstanding concerns that answering questions on behaviour as part of research assessments may inadvertently influence it and produce bias. The study objective was to evaluate the size and nature of effects observed in randomized manipulations of the effects of answering questions on drinking behaviour in brief intervention trials. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Multiple methods were used to identify primary studies. Between-group differences in total weekly alcohol consumption, quantity per drinking day and AUDIT scores were evaluated in random effects meta-analyses. Ten trials were included in this review, of which two did not provide findings for quantitative study, in which three outcomes were evaluated. Between-group differences were of the magnitude of 13.7 (-0.17 to 27.6) grams of alcohol per week (approximately 1.5 U.K. units or 1 standard U.S. drink) and 1 point (0.1 to 1.9) in AUDIT score. There was no difference in quantity per drinking day. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Answering questions on drinking in brief intervention trials appears to alter subsequent self-reported behaviour. This potentially generates bias by exposing non-intervention control groups to an integral component of the intervention. The effects of brief alcohol interventions may thus have been consistently under-estimated. These findings are relevant to evaluations of any interventions to alter behaviours which involve participant self-report
The Relation between Treated Maternal Urinary Tract Infection and Adverse Maternal, Prenatal Outcomes in Pregnant Women of Ardabil, Iran
No full textBackground and Objective: Urinary tract infection is one of the most common bacterial infections during pregnancy and has also been implicated as a risk factor for adverse maternal and prenatal outcomes. The aim of our study was to determine the relation between maternal urinary tract infection and adverse maternal, prenatal outcomes in pregnant women of Ardabil, Iran.
Material and Methods: This retrospective-case-control study was conducted on prenatal file records of pregnant women in Ardabil (2011). The pregnant women who had a positive urine culture in their prenatal files (N= 211) were considered as a case group and 232 ones without urinary tract infection as a control. Using a research- made questionnaire, the data related to present pregnancy and prenatal information was collected and analyzed by KrusKal Wallis, Chi- Square and Fisher statistical tests.
Results: Maternal age of under 25 (%61.6 vs. 56.5), body mass index of more than 30 (%18.3 vs. 15.6), primigravida (%55 vs. 48.8), hypertension (%2.4 vs. 1.3), hyperemesis Gravidarum (%14.8 vs. 12.6), frequency and dysuria (%1.9 vs. 0.9), low birth weight (%95.4 vs. 93.2), congenital malformation (%3.5 vs. 1.8), artificial milk feeding (%6.5 vs. 2.7), neonatal death (%0.9 vs. 0.0) are higher in urinary infection group, however the differences are not statistically significant. Other maternal and prenatal adverse outcomes such as diabetes, pre-eclampsia , hemoglobin level, prematurity, abortion and stillbirth have not significant relation with urinary infection.
Conclusion: Because of low level of adverse maternal or prenatal outcomes reported in our study, we conclude that screening and treatment of urinary tract infection in Ardabil health service is appropriate; therefore, no change is needed for present screening or treatment processes
The Development of Social Simulation as Reflected in the First Ten Years of JASSS: a Citation and Co-Citation Analysis
No full textSocial simulation is often described as a multidisciplinary and fast-moving field. This can make it difficult to obtain an overview of the field both for contributing researchers and for outsiders who are interested in social simulation. The Journal for Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS) completing its tenth year provides a good opportunity to take stock of what happened over this time period. First, we use citation analysis to identify the most influential publications and to verify characteristics of social simulation such as its multidisciplinary nature. Then, we perform a co-citation analysis to visualize the intellectual structure of social simulation and its development. Overall, the analysis shows social simulation both in its early stage and during its first steps towards becoming a more differentiated discipline.Citation Analysis, Co-Citation Analysis, Lines of Research, Multidisciplinary, Science Studies, Social Simulation
Translation of cultural references in the novel “hour of the wolf” by author-translator andrius tapinas.
No full textThe phenomenon of self-translation is not yet commonly seen in the translation discipline. This thesis examines Andrius Tapinas's fictional novel Vilko Valanda, which the author himself describes as "Vilnius but different". The novel is set in our real world, but it also contains fantasy (steampunk) elements that were not included in the analysis, as this study focused on real culture-specific items, with the exception of proper nouns. This study analyses how author-translator Andrius Tapinas translated his work Hour of the Wolf into English, what translation strategies he used to translate culture-specific items, and whether he took a more detached translator's stance, or took advantage of his own stance as an author to make changes in the translation that translators would avoid. The study used Jurgita Mikutytė's (2005) and Shih Chung-ling's (2010) classifications of culture-specific items and Eirlys Davies' (2003) classification of translation strategies in order to answer the questions posed. A total of 319 culture-specific items were found in the original novel and 312 in the translation, as in some cases it was chosen to omit culture-specific items in the translation. The author-translator concept, the classification of culture-specific items and translation strategies are discussed in this paper. The data found is presented both quantitatively and qualitatively, giving a percentage breakdown of all the culture-specific item groups and the percentage frequency of translation strategies used. Translation within each subgroup of cultural realities is then discussed with examples. Finally, conclusions are presented, answering the questions raised and summarizing the whole study. The results of the study showed that the largest group of cultural realities was proper nouns, and the second largest group was slang and idioms. It was also found that the author-translator most frequently used localization translation strategy, with transformation in second place. A more detailed analysis showed that author-translator Andrius Tapinas followed the translator's stance and did not make any significant changes in the translation and tried to bring new readers closer to the novel by using the translation strategies of localization, transformation and addition. This study may be of interest to translators and writers who are interested in the author-translator phenomenon in the Lithuanian translation community. And a limitation of this study is that for some of the culture-specific item groups examples were not found in the novel, so it may have been better to concentrate on fewer groups and to analyse them in more depth instead
Public understanding of food risks in four European countries: a qualitative study
No full textBackground: In the wake of the ` bovine spongiform encephalopathy ( BSE) crisis' there was renewed interest in how those responsible for public health could take account of public views, both to ` democratize' policy making and to increase the likelihood of information about health risks resonating with public concerns. This study explored how members of the public in four European countries ( Finland, Germany, Italy and the UK) understood food risks in general, and risks arising from BSE in particular. The aims were to identify the sources of knowledge used and trusted by the public and to explore how public views could be accessed for public health information policy.
Methods: Thirty- six focus group interviews were held using a common protocol across the four countries, including people from four lifecycle stages.
Results: The study demonstrated the utility of using focus groups as a relatively efficient method for accessing public views, and the feasibility of cross- national qualitative research on public views. We found that public views of food risks are neither irrational nor naive, but that they do need to be interpreted in the context of everyday food purchasing decisions, in which particular food risks are unlikely to have the same salience as they do for experts.
Conclusions: Focus groups are a feasible method for accessing public knowledge on public health risks to inform information strategies
Unified mathematical treatment of complex cascaded bipartite networks: The case of collections of journal papers
No full textIn this study, a mathematical treatment is proposed for analysis of entities and relations among entities in
complex networks consisting of cascaded bipartite networks. This treatment is applied to the case of
collections of journal papers. In this case, entities are distinguishable objects and concepts, such as papers,
references, paper authors, reference authors, paper journals, reference journals, institutions, terms, and term
definitions. Relations are associations between entity-types such as papers and the references they cite, or
paper authors and the papers they write. An entity-relationship model is introduced that explicitly shows
direct links between entity-types and possible useful indirect relations. From this a matrix formulation and
generalized matrix arithmetic are introduced that allow easy expression of relations between entities and
calculation of weights of indirect links and co-occurrence links. Occurrence matrices, equivalence
matrices, membership matrices and co-occurrence matrices are described. A dynamic model of growth
describes recursive relations in occurrence and co-occurrence matrices as papers are added to the paper
collection. Graph theoretic matrices are introduced to allow information flow studies of networks of papers
linked by their citations. Similarity calculations and similarity fusion are explained. Derivation of feature
vectors for pattern recognition techniques is presented. The relation of the proposed mathematical
treatment to seriation, clustering, multidimensional scaling, and visualization techniques is discussed. It is
shown that most existing bibliometric analysis techniques for dealing with collections of journal papers are
easily expressed in terms of the proposed mathematical treatment: co-citation analysis, bibliographic
coupling analysis, author co-citation analysis, journal co-citation analysis, Braam-Moed-vanRaan (BMV)
co-citation/co-word analysis, latent semantic analysis, hubs and authorities, and multidimensional scaling.
This report discusses an extensive software toolkit that was developed for this research for analyzing and
visualizing entities and links in a collection of journal papers. Additionally, an extensive case study is
presented, analyzing and visualizing 60 years of anthrax research through a collection of journal papers.
When dealing with complex networks that consist of cascaded bipartite networks, the treatment presented
here provides a general mathematical framework for all aspects of analysis of static network structure and
network dynamic growth. As such, it provides a basic paradigm for thinking about and modeling such
networks: computing direct and indirect links, expressing and analyzing statistical distributions of network
characteristics, describing network growth, deriving feature vectors, clustering, and visualizing network
structure and growth
Common variants in ZNF365 are associated with both mammographic density and breast cancer risk.
No full textHigh-percent mammographic density adjusted for age and body mass index is one of the strongest risk factors for breast cancer. We conducted a meta analysis of five genome-wide association studies of percent mammographic density and report an association with rs10995190 in ZNF365 (combined P = 9.6 × 10(-10)). Common variants in ZNF365 have also recently been associated with susceptibility to breast cancer
Population studies on Phytophthora infestans on potatoes and tomatoes in southern Germany
No full textFifty-seven isolates of Phytophthora infestans from blighted potato foliage were collected in 1995 in southern Germany and analysed for mating type and sensitivity to metalaxyl. Fifty-six of them were characterised as A1 and one as A2 mating types. Resistance to metalaxyl was observed frequently: 53 isolates were resistant, three were partially sensitive, and one was sensitive. In a subsequent field study in 1999, 84 isolates collected from blighted potato and tomato foliage were analysed for mating type. Seventy-two were characterised as A1 and twelve as A2 mating types. The response of 76 isolates to metalaxyl and to propamocarb was tested. The majority (42) of the 76 isolates was classified as resistant to metalaxyl; 31 were partially sensitive and only three isolates were sensitive. The results with propamocarb were less discrete; 10 isolates were classified as resistant and three were clearly sensitive. AFLP fingerprinting was used to examine the genetic structure of the southern German P. infestans population collected in 1999 and indicated that the tested population can be sub-divided into a tomato group, a potato group and a mixed group containing isolates collected from both crops. The presence of Ia and IIa mitochondrial DNA haplotypes indicates that the German P. infestans isolates belong to the new pathogen population that has also been reported in neighbouring regions of Europe. The present study indicates that at the beginning of the season only a few genotypes were present, and the population became genetically more variable at the end of the growing season
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