Please die during office hours : periodicity of cardiovascular events in switzerland between 1969 and 2007

Purpose: to evaluate and compare the periodical patterns of death from cardiovascular disease (CVD), including acute myocardial infarction (AMI) and stroke in the Swiss population between the years 1969 and 2007.¦Methods: Swiss mortality database for the period of 1969- 2007 (2'362'430 deaths overall). The number of deaths due to CVD, AMI and stroke according to the time of day, day of the week and month were assessed, overall and after dividing the events according to gender and age (< 65 or ≥65 years old).¦Results: In general and for all four subgroups according to age and sex, there is a daily variation in the number of deaths with a first peak in the morning (8h00 -12h00) and a smaller second peak in the late afternoon (14h - 18h). Both males and females have similar hourly patterns, although the magnitude of the difference diminishes in older patients particularly for people who die from stroke. For the weekly variation, there seems to be a significant trend only in the younger population with the lowest mortality rates on Sunday and the highest on Mondays for all diseases. When it comes to seasonal variation according to month, the trend is more significant in the elder patients with the highest death rates during the winter months (+31%) and the lowest in the summer (July/August).¦Conclusion: There is a timely pattern for CVD, AMI and stroke deaths in Switzerland. This pattern changes according to the age and sex of the patients. Knowing this trend, its triggering factors and consequences, perhaps there could be measures put in place to prevent, diagnose and treat the population which is the most vulnerable at certain times

Trade-offs between personal immunity and reproduction in the burying beetle, N. vespilloides

We know that parental investment and immune investment are costly processes, but it is unclear which trait will be prioritised when both may be required. Here we address this question using the burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides, carrion breeders that exhibit biparental care of young. Our results show that immunosuppression occurs during provision of parental care. We measured Phenoloxidase (PO) on Day 1-8 of the breeding bout and results show a clear decrease in PO immediately from presentation of the breeding resource onwards. Having established baseline immune investment during breeding we then manipulated immune investment at different times by applying a wounding challenge. Beetles were wounded prior to and during the parental care period and reproductive investment quantified. Different effects on reproductive output occur depending on the timing of wounding. Challenging the immune system with wounding prior to breeding does not affect reproductive output and subsequent Lifetime Reproductive Success (LRS). LRS is also unaffected by applying an immune elicitor prior to breeding, though different arms of the immune system are up/downregulated, perhaps indicating a trade-off between cellular and humoral immunity. In contrast, wounding during breeding reduces reproductive output and to the greatest extent if the challenge is applied early in the breeding bout. Despite being immunosuppressed, breeding beetles can still respond to wounding by increasing PO, albeit not to pre-breeding levels. This upregulation of PO during breeding may affect parental investment, resulting in a reduction in reproductive output. The potential role of juvenile hormone in controlling this trade-off is discussed

Recursive Hardware-as-a-Service (rHaaS) and Fast Provisioning

Hardware as a Service (HaaS) is a new service being developed by the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) to allow physical servers to be allocated to clients in the same way that virtual servers are in existing IaaS clouds. This poster describes the new recursive HaaS project and the fast provisioning customization we are developing. Recursive HaaS allows a HaaS service to be layered on top of an existing one. It will allow testing of new features at performance and scale without affecting the production service. It will also allow clients to host their own HaaS on top of a base HaaS to provide, potentially customized, services to their users. An example customization we are developing is a fast provisioning service that can be used between tenants that have some degree of trust in each other. It will allow nodes to be moved between customers (and a service installed) in seconds, rather than the minutes required by base HaaS

Biomarkers of chemical exposure: state of the art.

Establishing associations between environmental agents and disease presents challenges to both epidemiologists and toxicologists, particularly in cases of complex gene-environment interactions and when there is a long latency between exposure and disease. Biologic markers, physiological signals that reflect exposure, early cellular response, or inherent or acquired susceptibilities, provide a new strategy for resolving some of these problems. Biomarker research assumes that toxicant-induced diseases are progressive and that injury proceeds from entry of the toxicant into target cells, which induces subcellular biochemical events, to cell- and organ-level events that eventually induce irreversible or persistent organism dysfunction. The epidemiologic value of a biomarker lies in its ability to predict backward toward exposure and forward toward risk of clinical outcome, which is largely unknown. Research in mechanistic toxicology will advance the range of useful biomarkers in epidemiology and clinical medicine

Social immunity of the family: parental contributions to a public good modulated by brood size.

Social immunity refers to any immune defence that benefits others, besides the individual that mounts the response. Since contributions to social immunity are known to be personally costly, they are contributions to a public good. However, individuals vary in their contributions to this public good and it is unclear why. Here we investigate whether they are responding to contributions made by others with experiments on burying beetle (Nicrophorus vespilloides) families. In this species, females, males and larvae each contribute to social immunity through the application of antimicrobial exudates upon the carrion breeding resource. We show experimentally that mothers reduce their contributions to social immunity when raising large broods, and test two contrasting hypotheses to explain why. Either mothers are treating social immunity as a public good, investing less in social immunity when their offspring collectively contribute more, or mothers are trading off investment in social immunity with investment in parental care. Overall, our experiments yield no evidence to support the existence of a trade-off between social immunity and other parental care traits: we found no evidence of a trade-off in terms of time allocated to each activity, nor did the relationship between social immunity and brood size change with female condition. Instead, and consistent with predictions from models of public goods games, we found that higher quality mothers contributed more to social immunity. Therefore our results suggest that mothers are playing a public goods game with their offspring to determine their personal contribution to the defence of the carrion breeding resource.AD was supported by NERC grant NE/H019731/1 to RMK. ODeG was supported by the Cambridge Trust and the Mexican Council for Science and Technology (CONACyT). RMK was supported in part by ERC Consolidators grant 310785 BALDWINIAN_BEETLES. SCC was supported by a NERC fellowship (NE/H014225/2), CER was supported by a Department for Employment and Learning PhD studentship. We thank A. Backhouse for help in maintaining the burying beetle population. We thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on the manuscript.This is the final version of the article. It was first available from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10682-015-9806-

"Zip me up, and cool me down": Molar narratives and molecular intensities in 'helicopter' mental health services

Experiences of the space–time dimensions of contemporary mental health services are shaped according to what we describe here as a ‘helicopter service’, where professionals drop down into service users' lives for short, often pre-determined bursts of time. This can create a system where users' experiences are observed and assessed from a more distanced and circumscribed perspective. This paper considers the implications of these systemic changes, using interviews with current UK service users. To help in the exploration of the complexities faced by service users', we use Deleuze and Guatarri's (1987) distinction between molar and molecular forms of organisation. A process oriented thematic analysis discusses: a) Affording narratives of distress: Molarity, monitoring and space in service interactions and b) Narratives in therapy: Compartmentalising the distressed self. Multiple aspects of the relationship between space and distress are explored. An understanding of experiences of distress beyond the boundaries of the molar, which considers its intensive, molecular and transformative nature, may help to open up engagement with the affective and emotional dimensions of mental health

Where Have All the Teachers Gone? A Gendered Analysis of the Teaching Occupation

The status of the teaching occupation is at a critical juncture. Across the United States, school districts are scrambling to fill teaching positions as the number of people entering the occupation declines. This shortage has made urgent the need to better understand why teachers enter the occupation and why they remain in teaching. Women constitute a vast majority of the teaching force and are therefore the primary subjects of studies on teacher recruitment and retention. Despite this fact, current literature largely ignores the importance of gender in the teaching occupation. In this study, I examine how the occupational crowding of women into teaching has impacted the occupation itself. I ask, “What is the socio-political significance of teaching for women and how has this changed across time?” My research consists of semi-structured interviews with nine female teachers across two separate age groups. I analyze how women articulate their own motivations to teach and their perceptions of the teaching occupation. By situating these responses in the larger socio-political significance of the teaching occupation for women my study offers a more robust examination of the causes of the current teacher shortage

Seeking fluid possibility and solid ground: Space and movement in mental health service users' experiences of ‘crisis’

Since the closure of the UK asylums, ‘the community’ has become short hand for describing a variety of disparate and complex spaces, in which service users manage their experiences of distress. An examination of such spaces here forms the basis of an analysis of the way in which service users move through and within space, to establish agency and dis/order while distressed. Seventeen participants, with various experiences of mental distress took part in a qualitative study, and a further textual analysis was conducted on eight published autobiographies. In the context of the interviews, participants presented drawings of the spaces they occupy during times of crisis, wellbeing and recovery. All texts were analysed using a thematic approach, informed by theories of embodiment and relational space. In this paper, the focus is directed towards two key patterns of movement, in order to explore ways in which participants experiencing various forms of mental health crisis used space in order to maintain and manage feelings of agency. Firstly, incidents where participants described moving towards fluid, outside spaces are explored, with agency being established through seeking, and utilising, greater possibilities for action and engaging others. In addition, the opposite pattern of movement is also explored, using incidents where participants described moving indoors, using the private space of the home to establish order and restore feelings of agency and strength, in contrast to overwhelming experiences in public space. Connections between these patterns of movement and particular forms of distress are discussed. It is argued that community and private spaces are integral to the ways in which selfhood, agency and action is experienced in mental distress, which in turn has implications for policy, treatment and community action