De l'inefficacité du réseau social : des liens sociaux non mobilisés chez les patients atteints de cancer

International audienceDe nombreuses études sur les réseaux sociaux portent sur la question des ressources auxquelles un individu peut avoir accès à travers ses relations sociales. En s'intéressant aux réseaux qui ont « fonctionné », elles tentent alors de spécifier les facteurs ayant permis l'accès aux ressources. Mais peu de travaux se sont penchés sur les réseaux ayant échoué à fournir à l'individu le bien ou le service qu'il recherchait. Cet article se propose de discuter de ces réseaux « inefficaces » à travers le cas de patients atteints de cancer recherchant des informations relatives à leur pathologie. Les résultats indiquent que les causes de l'inefficacité du réseau sont à rechercher dans la non mobilisation des liens de la part des malades rencontrés. Un certain nombre de contraintes pèsent sur ces liens empêchant ainsi leur mobilisation

The 'knowledge politics' of democratic peace theory

How do academic ideas influence US foreign policy, under what conditions and with what consequences? This article traces the rise, ‘securitisation’ and political consequences of democratic peace theory (DPT) in the United States by exploring the work of Doyle, Diamond and Fukuyama. Ideas influence US foreign policy under different circumstances, but are most likely to do either during and after crises when the policy environment permits ‘new thinking’, or when these ideas have been developed through state-connected elite knowledge networks, or when they are (or appear paradigmatically congenial to) foreign policymakers’ mindsets, or, finally, when they become institutionally-embedded. The appropriation of DPT by foreign policymakers has categorised the world into antagonistic blocs – democratic/non-democratic zones of peace/turmoil – as the corollary to a renewed American mission to make the world ‘safer’ through ‘democracy’ promotion. The roles of networked organic intellectuals – in universities and think tanks, for instance – were particularly important in elevating DPT from the academy to national security managers

Who’s funny: Gender stereotypes, humor production, and memory bias

It has often been asserted, by both men and women, that men are funnier. We explored two possible explanations for such a view, first testing whether men, when instructed to be as funny as possible, write funnier cartoon captions than do women, and second examining whether there is a tendency to falsely remember funny things as having been produced by men. A total of 32 participants, half from each gender, wrote captions for 20 cartoons. Raters then indicated the humor success of these captions. Raters of both genders found the captions written by males funnier, though this preference was significantly stronger among the male raters. In the second experiment, male and female participants were presented with the funniest and least funny captions from the first experiment, along with the caption author's gender. On a memory test, both females and males disproportionately misattributed the humorous captions to males and the nonhumorous captions to females. Men might think men are funnier because they actually find them so, but though women rated the captions written by males slightly higher, our data suggest that they may regard men as funnier more because they falsely attribute funny things to them.</p

Serine Protease PRSS23 Is Upregulated by Estrogen Receptor α and Associated with Proliferation of Breast Cancer Cells

Serine protease PRSS23 is a newly discovered protein that has been associated with tumor progression in various types of cancers. Interestingly, PRSS23 is coexpressed with estrogen receptor α (ERα), which is a prominent biomarker and therapeutic target for human breast cancer. Estrogen signaling through ERα is also known to affect cell proliferation, apoptosis, and survival, which promotes tumorigenesis by regulating the production of numerous downstream effector proteins

Dynamic changes in gene expression in vivo predict prognosis of tamoxifen-treated patients with breast cancer

Introduction: Tamoxifen is the most widely prescribed anti-estrogen treatment for patients with estrogen receptor (ER)-positive breast cancer. However, there is still a need for biomarkers that reliably predict endocrine sensitivity in breast cancers and these may well be expressed in a dynamic manner. Methods: In this study we assessed gene expression changes at multiple time points (days 1, 2, 4, 7, 14) after tamoxifen treatment in the ER-positive ZR-75-1 xenograft model that displays significant changes in apoptosis, proliferation and angiogenesis within 2 days of therapy. Results: Hierarchical clustering identified six time-related gene expression patterns, which separated into three groups: two with early/transient responses, two with continuous/late responses and two with variable response patterns. The early/transient response represented reductions in many genes that are involved in cell cycle and proliferation (e.g. BUB1B, CCNA2, CDKN3, MKI67, UBE2C), whereas the continuous/late changed genes represented the more classical estrogen response genes (e.g. TFF1, TFF3, IGFBP5). Genes and the proteins they encode were confirmed to have similar temporal patterns of expression in vitro and in vivo and correlated with reduction in tumour volume in primary breast cancer. The profiles of genes that were most differentially expressed on days 2, 4 and 7 following treatment were able to predict prognosis, whereas those most changed on days 1 and 14 were not, in four tamoxifen treated datasets representing a total of 404 patients. Conclusions: Both early/transient/proliferation response genes and continuous/late/estrogen-response genes are able to predict prognosis of primary breast tumours in a dynamic manner. Temporal expression of therapy-response genes is clearly an important factor in characterising the response to endocrine therapy in breast tumours which has significant implications for the timing of biopsies in neoadjuvant biomarker studies.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe