1,721,088 research outputs found
Epidemiology of sarcopenia: Determinants throughout the lifecourse
No full textSarcopenia is an age-related syndrome characterised by progressive and generalised loss of skeletal muscle mass and strength; it is a major contributor to the risk of physical frailty, functional impairment in older people, poor health-related quality of life and premature death. Many different definitions have been used to describe sarcopenia and have resulted in varying estimates of prevalence of the condition. The most recent attempts of definitions have tried to integrate information on muscle mass, strength and physical function and provide a definition that is useful in both research and clinical settings. This review focuses on the epidemiology of the three distinct physiological components of sarcopenia, and highlights the similarities and differences between their patterns of variation with age, gender, geography and time and the individual risk factors that cluster selectively with muscle mass, strength and physical function. Methods used to measure muscle mass, strength and physical functioning and how differences in these approaches can contribute to the varying prevalence rates will also be described. The evidence for this review was gathered by undertaking a systematic search of the literature. The descriptive characteristics of muscle mass, strength and function described in this review point to the urgent need for a consensual definition of sarcopenia incorporating these parameters
The individual and interrelated roles of social environments and physical food environments on the food purchasing and dietary behaviours of adolescents.
No full textPoor dietary behaviours by adolescents are a public health concern because of the negative impacts on their immediate and future health, as well as the health of their future offspring. During adolescence, many young people start making more independent food choices. Evidence suggests that the physical food environments outside of the home and the people adolescents spend time with, their social environment, can affect these decisions. Knowledge of how these environments interact to affect adolescents’ food choice is limited. This thesis addressed this gap by investigating the individual and interacting relationships of the social environment and physical food environment on adolescents’ food purchasing and dietary behaviours. A convergent parallel mixed-methods research design was applied. A total of 108 adolescents participated in the quantitative component, which included completing questionnaires about their dietary behaviours and social networks, as well as using an ecological momentary assessment mobile phone app for one week. This app recorded novel data on adolescents’ GPS tracked journeys, their use of food outlets and details about their independent food purchases. In the qualitative component, 13 focus groups with 45 adolescents were conducted to understand the experiences of young people when purchasing food from different environments. Adolescents who made less healthy purchases had poorer quality diets and this relationship was strongest among adolescents from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Both social environments and physical food environments were shown to be associated with these behaviours. Friends were most strongly associated with making less healthy purchases and parents were shown to have the biggest influence on overall diet quality. Adolescents’ exposure to food outlets during their daily activities was dominated by unhealthy food outlets with 95% of adolescents being exposed to more unhealthy outlets than healthy outlets. Adolescents with greater exposure to healthier food outlets tended to have better quality diets, with the strongest relationship observed among adolescents from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Fast-food outlets, cafes, small supermarkets, and convenience stores were the food outlets used most frequently by young people; when marketing strategies inside these outlets, such as lower price, were present on the foods adolescents purchased, these purchases were more likely to be less healthy. Qualitative findings demonstrated complexity in the interplay between social environments and physical food environments and their relationship with adolescents’ food choices. Adolescents valued the way that food purchases could enhance their social interactions, particularly with their friends. These social interactions often occurred in food environments which heavily promoted unhealthy foods because they offered a welcoming space with affordable, familiar, and popular food. The findings from this thesis provide evidence that adolescents’ social environments and physical food environments adolescents are highly interrelated in their influence on their independent food choices. Future research and policy initiatives to improve adolescent diet should find ways to offer physical food environments that meet adolescents' values and social needs, yet also provide more healthy foods at affordable prices
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Sarcopenia
No full textSarcopenia is a condition which is characterized by loss of muscle mass, muscle strength and muscle functional impairment with ageing. The definition of sarcopenia has been through various permutations, however, an enormous recent breakthrough is the inclusion of the condition in the ICD-10 classification of diseases. This chapter will cover the background issues regarding definition before describing the epidemiology of the disease according to human and environmental factors. It will then provide a practical guide for the assessment of sarcopenia in a clinical setting and finish with advice on present treatment and the exciting frontiers of future therapies
Variations on the Author
Full text link“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
Full text linkWe 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
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe 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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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