1,721,264 research outputs found
Challenges for the future
No full textThis chapter discusses sex hormones and challanges for the future. It is part of a collection which brings insight to the treatment and management of infectious diseases; and delineates areas where knowledge is lacking and highlights future avenues of research
Epilogue : future of sex and gender-based studies in infectious diseases
No full textThe topic of male–female differences in disease outcomes continues to receive attention in both the scientific literature and lay press. There is little debate about whether the sexes are behaviorally and biologically different, but how this impacts disease processes and the pipeline for developing drugs, vaccines, medical devices, and policy decisions is highly debated. The current book as well as a previous book (Klein and Roberts 2010) that we published in 2010 illustrates that the sexes differ in their exposure, immune responses, and outcome of diverse infectious diseases and inflammatory conditions. While the intensity and prevalence of infections are often higher for males, the outcome of diseases, including those caused by HIV, influenza, hemorrhagic fever viruses, Toxoplasma gondii, and Borrelia burgdorferi to name a few, can be worse for females. As detailed in Chapter 1 of this book, females tend to mount higher innate and adaptive immune responses, which can result in faster clearance of pathogens, but also may contribute to increased development of immunopathology and inflammatory conditions. Responses to prophylaxis and therapeutic treatments for infectious diseases also differ between the sexes, with females typically experiencing greater adverse reactions than males (Chapter 4). These sex differences can vary by age and reproductive status (Chapters 3 and 10), illustrating that these differences are not fixed, but are variable across the life course. Despite sex being the most evolutionarily well conserved and easily disaggregated variable by which to compare the outcome of diseases and their treatments, it is often ignored in the biomedical sciences. The challenges of including women in clinical trials are in some cases obvious and include the potential of hormonal variations during menstrual cycles and their cessation at menopause. These factors are further complicated due to pregnancy (when hormone levels change and the fetus could be at risk during a trial) or artificial administration of hormones as contraceptives or for hormone replacement therapy. However, the scientific, medical, and ethical cases for including males and females in preclinical and clinical trials are too profound to ignore
Effects of sex and maternal immunity on protozoan and helminth infections
No full textProtozoan and helminth parasites infect billions of people throughout the world and are responsible for significant morbidity and mortality of millions of people annually. Gender and cultural differences account for some dichotomy in the prevalence and intensity of infection between male and female humans. However, intrinsic differences in the biology, including the endocrine and immune systems, of male and female humans exert profound influence on disease pathogenesis. Generally, females are more resistant than males to many parasitic diseases, although exceptions exist, such as some cestode infections and Toxoplasma gondii. However, during pregnancy when a number of hormones are significantly increased and the immune system altered, females tend to be more susceptible than nonpregnant females and males to a number of parasitic infections. This is most notable for infections that rely on a helper T cell type 1 (Th1) response for resolution that is antagonized by the Th2/regulatory T (Treg) environment induced during pregnancy. As a corollary, infections that induce a strong Th1 response can disrupt pregnancy through ablating pregnancy-induced immune alterations. Some evidence is emerging that children born to mothers with parasitic infections can have lesions in their immune systems leading to tolerance or allergy as well as potential psycho-neurological changes leading to disease. There is increasing evidence that pharmacokinetics of drugs including anti-infectives can vary between the sexes. Many drugs used to treat parasitic infection (particularly protozoan infections) are far from ideal and have associated side effects. Tailored optimization of dosing regimens for men, women, and pregnant women for these drugs might be especially beneficial. New interventions optimized for sex and endocrine conditions could have greatest impact on the most disadvantaged groups in terms of susceptibility of disease including men and pregnant women
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Scale-setting, flavour dependence and chiral symmetry restoration
Get PDFWe determine the flavour dependence of the renormalisation-group-invariant running interaction through judicious use of both
unquenched Dyson-Schwinger equation and lattice results for QCD’s gauge-sector two-point functions. An important step is the
introduction of a physical scale setting procedure that enables a realistic expression of the e ect of di erent numbers of active quark
flavours on the interaction. Using this running interaction in concert with a well constrained class of dressed–gluon-quark vertices,
we estimate the critical number of active lighter-quarks above which dynamical chiral symmetry breaking becomes impossible:
ncr
f 9; and hence in whose neighbourhood QCD is plausibly a conformal theory.We are grateful for useful input from S.-X. Qin. Completion of this research was facilitated by "NpQCD16", the 3rd Workshop on Non-perturbative QCD, University of Seville, Seville, Spain, 17-21 October 2016. The results described herein were obtained using the KORE HPC of the Fondazione Bruno Kessler. This research was supported by: U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, contract no. DE-AC02-06CH11357; and Spanish MEYC under grant FPA2014-53631-C-2-P.Ciencias Integrada
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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