Release of Mast Cell Tryptase into Saliva: A Tool to Diagnose Food Allergy by a Mucosal Challenge Test?

Background: Our aim was to examine whether measurement of the saliva mast cell tryptase (MCT) concentrations before and after a mucosal challenge test with the offending food would be helpful in diagnosing food allergy. Methods: We performed a retrospective analysis of 44 food challenge tests performed in 38 patients between 2006 and 2009. Patients with a suspected history of food allergy chewed the food until they developed symptoms or until the amount of time known from the patients' history to usually be required for the provocation of symptoms had passed. In 5 patients, saliva samples for the measurement of MCT were collected at minutes 0, 1, 4, 8, 11, and 16 after the first onset of symptoms. The remainder of the patients only had samples taken before chewing and 4 min after the end of the test period. Results: During repeated measurements, MCT peaked about 4 min after the onset of symptoms (p = 0.028). During 33 of the 44 tests (75.0%), we observed oral symptoms during testing; after 25 of the 33 (75.8%) tests evoking symptoms, the saliva MCT concentration increased. The MCT increase was negative in all other tests where no oral symptoms could be provoked. Conclusions: The measurement of saliva MCT 4 min after the onset of symptoms may be helpful to diagnose food allergy. Because of numerous confounding variables, however, a negative saliva MCT increase does not exclude food allergy. Copyright (C) 2011 S. Karger AG, Base

A Cross-Sectional Study of People with Epilepsy and Neurocysticercosis in Tanzania: Clinical Characteristics and Diagnostic Approaches.

Neurocysticercosis (NCC) is a major cause of epilepsy in regions where pigs are free-ranging and hygiene is poor. Pork production is expected to increase in the next decade in sub-Saharan Africa, hence NCC will likely become more prevalent. In this study, people with epilepsy (PWE, n=212) were followed up 28.6 months after diagnosis of epilepsy. CT scans were performed, and serum and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of selected PWE were analysed. We compared the demographic data, clinical characteristics, and associated risk factors of PWE with and without NCC. PWE with NCC (n=35) were more likely to be older at first seizure (24.3 vs. 16.3 years, p=0.097), consumed more pork (97.1% vs. 73.6%, p=0.001), and were more often a member of the Iraqw tribe (94.3% vs. 67.8%, p=0.005) than PWE without NCC (n=177). PWE and NCC who were compliant with anti-epileptic medications had a significantly higher reduction of seizures (98.6% vs. 89.2%, p=0.046). Other characteristics such as gender, seizure frequency, compliance, past medical history, close contact with pigs, use of latrines and family history of seizures did not differ significantly between the two groups. The number of NCC lesions and active NCC lesions were significantly associated with a positive antibody result. The electroimmunotransfer blot, developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was more sensitive than a commercial western blot, especially in PWE and cerebral calcifications. This is the first study to systematically compare the clinical characteristics of PWE due to NCC or other causes and to explore the utility of two different antibody tests for diagnosis of NCC in sub-Saharan Africa

Innovator resilience potential: A process perspective of individual resilience as influenced by innovation project termination

Innovation projects fail at an astonishing rate. Yet, the negative effects of innovation project failures on the team members of these projects have been largely neglected in research streams that deal with innovation project failures. After such setbacks, it is vital to maintain or even strengthen project members’ innovative capabilities for subsequent innovation projects. For this, the concept of resilience, i.e. project members’ potential to positively adjust (or even grow) after a setback such as an innovation project failure, is fundamental. We develop the second-order construct of innovator resilience potential, which consists of six components – self-efficacy, outcome expectancy, optimism, hope, self-esteem, and risk propensity – that are important for project members’ potential of innovative functioning in innovation projects subsequent to a failure. We illustrate our theoretical findings by means of a qualitative study of a terminated large-scale innovation project, and derive implications for research and management

Visualizing sound emission of elephant vocalizations: evidence for two rumble production types

Recent comparative data reveal that formant frequencies are cues to body size in animals, due to a close relationship between formant frequency spacing, vocal tract length and overall body size. Accordingly, intriguing morphological adaptations to elongate the vocal tract in order to lower formants occur in several species, with the size exaggeration hypothesis being proposed to justify most of these observations. While the elephant trunk is strongly implicated to account for the low formants of elephant rumbles, it is unknown whether elephants emit these vocalizations exclusively through the trunk, or whether the mouth is also involved in rumble production. In this study we used a sound visualization method (an acoustic camera) to record rumbles of five captive African elephants during spatial separation and subsequent bonding situations. Our results showed that the female elephants in our analysis produced two distinct types of rumble vocalizations based on vocal path differences: a nasally- and an orally-emitted rumble. Interestingly, nasal rumbles predominated during contact calling, whereas oral rumbles were mainly produced in bonding situations. In addition, nasal and oral rumbles varied considerably in their acoustic structure. In particular, the values of the first two formants reflected the estimated lengths of the vocal paths, corresponding to a vocal tract length of around 2 meters for nasal, and around 0.7 meters for oral rumbles. These results suggest that African elephants may be switching vocal paths to actively vary vocal tract length (with considerable variation in formants) according to context, and call for further research investigating the function of formant modulation in elephant vocalizations. Furthermore, by confirming the use of the elephant trunk in long distance rumble production, our findings provide an explanation for the extremely low formants in these calls, and may also indicate that formant lowering functions to increase call propagation distances in this species'

Smoking and health-related quality of life in English general population: Implications for economic evaluations

Copyright @ 2012 Vogl et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Background: Little is known as to how health-related quality of life (HRQoL) when measured by generic instruments such as EQ-5D differ across smokers, ex-smokers and never-smokers in the general population; whether the overall pattern of this difference remain consistent in each domain of HRQoL; and what implications this variation, if any, would have for economic evaluations of tobacco control interventions. Methods: Using the 2006 round of Health Survey for England data (n = 13,241), this paper aims to examine the impact of smoking status on health-related quality of life in English population. Depending upon the nature of the EQ-5D data (i.e. tariff or domains), linear or logistic regression models were fitted to control for biology, clinical conditions, socio-economic background and lifestyle factors that an individual may have regardless of their smoking status. Age- and gender-specific predicted values according to smoking status are offered as the potential 'utility' values to be used in future economic evaluation models. Results: The observed difference of 0.1100 in EQ-5D scores between never-smokers (0.8839) and heavy-smokers (0.7739) reduced to 0.0516 after adjusting for biological, clinical, lifestyle and socioeconomic conditions. Heavy-smokers, when compared with never-smokers, were significantly more likely to report some/severe problems in all five domains - mobility (67%), self-care (70%), usual activity (42%), pain/discomfort (46%) and anxiety/depression (86%) -. 'Utility' values by age and gender for each category of smoking are provided to be used in the future economic evaluations. Conclusion: Smoking is significantly and negatively associated with health-related quality of life in English general population and the magnitude of this association is determined by the number of cigarettes smoked. The varying degree of this association, captured through instruments such as EQ-5D, may need to be fed into the design of future economic evaluations where the intervention being evaluated affects (e.g. tobacco control) or is affected (e.g. treatment for lung cancer) by individual's (or patients') smoking status

Parent-of-origin-specific allelic associations among 106 genomic loci for age at menarche.

Age at menarche is a marker of timing of puberty in females. It varies widely between individuals, is a heritable trait and is associated with risks for obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer and all-cause mortality. Studies of rare human disorders of puberty and animal models point to a complex hypothalamic-pituitary-hormonal regulation, but the mechanisms that determine pubertal timing and underlie its links to disease risk remain unclear. Here, using genome-wide and custom-genotyping arrays in up to 182,416 women of European descent from 57 studies, we found robust evidence (P < 5 × 10(-8)) for 123 signals at 106 genomic loci associated with age at menarche. Many loci were associated with other pubertal traits in both sexes, and there was substantial overlap with genes implicated in body mass index and various diseases, including rare disorders of puberty. Menarche signals were enriched in imprinted regions, with three loci (DLK1-WDR25, MKRN3-MAGEL2 and KCNK9) demonstrating parent-of-origin-specific associations concordant with known parental expression patterns. Pathway analyses implicated nuclear hormone receptors, particularly retinoic acid and γ-aminobutyric acid-B2 receptor signalling, among novel mechanisms that regulate pubertal timing in humans. Our findings suggest a genetic architecture involving at least hundreds of common variants in the coordinated timing of the pubertal transition

Quasinormal modes of massive charged flavor branes

We present an analysis and classification of vector and scalar fluctuations in a D3/D7 brane setup at finite termperature and baryon density. The system is dual to an N=2 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory with SU(N_c) gauge group and N_f hypermultiplets in the fundamental representation in the quenched approximation. We improve significantly over previous results on the quasinormal mode spectrum of D7 branes and stress their novel physical interpretation. Amongst our findings is a new purely imaginary scalar mode that becomes tachyonic at sufficiently low temperature and baryon density. We establish the existence of a critical density above which the scalar mode stays in the stable regime for all temperatures. In the vector sector we study the crossover from the hydrodynamic to the quasiparticle regime and find that it moves to shorter wavelengths for lower temperatures. At zero baryon density the quasinormal modes move toward distinct discrete attractor frequencies that depend on the momentum as we increase the temperature. At finite baryon density, however, the trajectories show a turning behavior such that for low temperature the quasinormal mode spectrum approaches the spectrum of the supersymmetric zero temperature normal modes. We interpret this as resolution of the singular quasinormal mode spectrum that appears at the limiting D7 brane embedding at vanishing baryon density.Comment: 56 pages, 40 figure

Can preferential credit programs speed up the adoption of low-carbon agricultural systems in Mato Grosso, Brazil? Results from bioeconomic microsimulation

The need to balance agricultural production and environmental protection shifted the focus of Brazilian land-use policy toward sustainable agriculture. In 2010, Brazil established preferential credit lines to finance investments into low-carbon integrated agricultural systems of crop, livestock and forestry. This article presents a simulation-based empirical assessment of integrated system adoption in the state of Mato Grosso, where highly mechanized soybean–cotton and soybean–maize doublecrop systems currently prevail. We employ bioeconomic modeling to explicitly capture the heterogeneity of farm level costs and benefits of adoption. By parameterizing and validating our simulations with both empirical and experimental data, we evaluate the effectiveness of the ABC Integration credit through indicators such as land-use change, adoption rates and budgetary costs of credit provision. Alternative scenarios reveal that specific credit conditions might speed up the diffusion of low-carbon agricultural systems in Mato Grosso

Caveolin-1 protects B6129 mice against Helicobacter pylori gastritis.

Caveolin-1 (Cav1) is a scaffold protein and pathogen receptor in the mucosa of the gastrointestinal tract. Chronic infection of gastric epithelial cells by Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) is a major risk factor for human gastric cancer (GC) where Cav1 is frequently down-regulated. However, the function of Cav1 in H. pylori infection and pathogenesis of GC remained unknown. We show here that Cav1-deficient mice, infected for 11 months with the CagA-delivery deficient H. pylori strain SS1, developed more severe gastritis and tissue damage, including loss of parietal cells and foveolar hyperplasia, and displayed lower colonisation of the gastric mucosa than wild-type B6129 littermates. Cav1-null mice showed enhanced infiltration of macrophages and B-cells and secretion of chemokines (RANTES) but had reduced levels of CD25+ regulatory T-cells. Cav1-deficient human GC cells (AGS), infected with the CagA-delivery proficient H. pylori strain G27, were more sensitive to CagA-related cytoskeletal stress morphologies ("humming bird") compared to AGS cells stably transfected with Cav1 (AGS/Cav1). Infection of AGS/Cav1 cells triggered the recruitment of p120 RhoGTPase-activating protein/deleted in liver cancer-1 (p120RhoGAP/DLC1) to Cav1 and counteracted CagA-induced cytoskeletal rearrangements. In human GC cell lines (MKN45, N87) and mouse stomach tissue, H. pylori down-regulated endogenous expression of Cav1 independently of CagA. Mechanistically, H. pylori activated sterol-responsive element-binding protein-1 (SREBP1) to repress transcription of the human Cav1 gene from sterol-responsive elements (SREs) in the proximal Cav1 promoter. These data suggested a protective role of Cav1 against H. pylori-induced inflammation and tissue damage. We propose that H. pylori exploits down-regulation of Cav1 to subvert the host's immune response and to promote signalling of its virulence factors in host cells