Impact of resistance exercise on ribosome biogenesis is acutely regulated by post-exercise recovery strategies

Muscle hypertrophy occurs following increased protein synthesis, which requires activation of the ribosomal complex. Additionally, increased translational capacity via elevated ribosomal RNA (rRNA) synthesis has also been implicated in resistance training-induced skeletal muscle hypertrophy. The time course of ribosome biogenesis following resistance exercise (RE) and the impact exerted by differing recovery strategies remains unknown. In the present study, the activation of transcriptional regulators, the expression levels of pre-rRNA, and mature rRNA components were measured through 48 h after a single-bout RE. In addition, the effects of either low-intensity cycling (active recovery, ACT) or a cold-water immersion (CWI) recovery strategy were compared. Nine male subjects performed two bouts of high-load RE randomized to be followed by 10 min of either ACT or CWI. Muscle biopsies were collected before RE and at 2, 24, and 48 h after RE. RE increased the phosphorylation of the p38-MNK1-eIF4E axis, an effect only evident with ACT recovery. Downstream, cyclin D1 protein, total eIF4E, upstream binding factor 1 (UBF1), and c-Myc proteins were all increased only after RE with ACT. This corresponded with elevated abundance of the pre-rRNAs (45S, ITS-28S, ITS-5.8S, and ETS-18S) from 24 h after RE with ACT. In conclusion, coordinated upstream signaling and activation of transcriptional factors stimulated pre-rRNA expression after RE. CWI, as a recovery strategy, markedly blunted these events, suggesting that suppressed ribosome biogenesis may be one factor contributing to the impaired hypertrophic response observed when CWI is used regularly after exercise.

Canadian Stroke Best Practice Recommendations: Mood, Cognition and Fatigue Following Stroke practice guidelines, update 2015

Every year, approximately 62 000 people with stroke and transient ischemic attack are treated in Canadian hospitals, and the evidence suggests one-third or more will experience vascular-cognitive impairment, and/or intractable fatigue, either alone or in combination. The 2015 update of the Canadian Stroke Best Practice Recommendations: Mood, Cognition and Fatigue Module guideline is a comprehensive summary of current evidence-based recommendations for clinicians in a range of settings, who provide care to patients following stroke. The three consequences of stroke that are the focus of the this guideline (poststroke depression, vascular cognitive impairment, and fatigue) have high incidence rates and significant impact on the lives of people who have had a stroke, impede recovery, and result in worse long-term outcomes. Significant practice variations and gaps in the research evidence have been reported for initial screening and in-depth assessment of stroke patients for these conditions. Also of concern, an increased number of family members and informal caregivers may also experience depressive symptoms in the poststroke recovery phase which further impact patient recovery. These factors emphasize the need for a system of care that ensures screening occurs as a standard and consistent component of clinical practice across settings as stroke patients transition from acute care to active rehabilitation and reintegration into their community. Additionally, building system capacity to ensure access to appropriate specialists for treatment and ongoing management of stroke survivors with these conditions is another great challenge.

Reengaging, reenacting and reenvisaging discourses of disaster through public space performance: Austerity, art, and the art of protest

This paper offers a mediation on disaster, recovery, resilience, and restoration of balance, in both a material and a metaphorical sense, when ‘disaster’ befalls not the body politic of the nation but the body personal. In the past few decades, of course, artists, activists and scholars have deliberately tried to avoid describing personal, physical and phenomenological experiences of the disabled body in terms of difficulty and disaster. This has been part of a political move, from a medical model, in which disability, disease and illness are positioned as personal catastrophes, to a social model, in which disability is positioned as a social construct that comes from systems, institutions and infrastructure designed to exclude different bodies. It is a move that is responsible for a certain discomfort people with disabilities, and artists with disabilities, today feel towards performances that deploy disability as a metaphor for disaster, from Hijikata, to Theatre Hora. In the past five years, though, this particular discourse has begun rising again, particularly as people with disabilities fact their own anything but natural disasters as a result of the austerity measures now widespread across the US, UK, Europe and elsewhere. Measures that threaten people’s ability to live, and take part in social and institutional life, in any meaningful way. Measures that, as artist Katherine Araniello notes, also bring additional difficulty, danger, and potential for disaster as they ripple outwards across the tides of familial ties, threatening family, friends, and careers who become bound up in the struggle to do more with less. In this paper, I consider how people with disabilities use performance, particularly public space interventionalist performance, to reengage, renact and reenvisage the discourse of national, economic, environmental or other forms of disaster, the need for austerity, the need to avoid providing people with support for desires and interests as well as basic daily needs, particularly when fraud and corruption is so right, and other such ideas that have become an all too unpleasant reality for many people. Performances, for instance, like Liz Crow’s Bedding Out, where she invited people into her bed – for people with disabilities a symbolic space, which necessarily becomes more a public living room restaurant, office and so forth than a private space when poor mobility means they spend much time it in – to talk about their lives, their difficulties, and dealing with austerity. Or, for instance, like the Bolshy Divas, who mimic public and political policy, reports and advertising paranoia to undermine their discourses about austerity. I examine the effects, politics and ethics of such interventions, including examination of the comparative effect of highly bodied interventions (like Crow’s) and highly disembodied interventions (like the Bolshy Diva’s) in discourses of difficulty, disaster and austerity on a range of target spectator communities.