Vitamin D, calcium and dairy intake, and risk of oesophageal adenocarcinoma and its precursor conditions

Evidence is accumulating that vitamin D may be protective against carcinogenesis, although exceptions have been observed for some digestive tract neoplasms. The aim of the present study was to explore the association between dietary vitamin D and related nutrients and the risk of oesophageal adenocarcinoma and its precursor conditions, Barrett's oesophagus and reflux oesophagitis. In an all-Ireland case-control study conducted between March 2002 and July 2005, 218 oesophageal adenocarcinoma patients, 212 Barrett's oesophagus patients, 208 reflux oesophagitis patients and 252 population-based controls completed a 101-item FFQ, and provided lifestyle and demographic information. Multiple logistic regression analysis was applied to examine the association between dietary intake and disease risk. Oesophageal adenocarcinoma risk was significantly greater for individuals with the highest compared with the lowest tertile of vitamin D intake (OR 1·99, 95 % CI 1·03, 3·86; P for trend = 0·02). The direct association could not be attributed to a particular vitamin D food source. Vitamin D intake was unrelated to Barrett's oesophagus and reflux oesophagitis risk. No significant associations were observed for Ca or dairy intake and oesophageal adenocarcinoma, Barrett's oesophagus or reflux oesophagitis development. High vitamin D intake may increase oesophageal adenocarcinoma risk but is not related to reflux oesophagitis and Barrett's oesophagus. Ca and dairy product intake did not influence the development of these oesophageal lesions. These findings suggest that there may be population subgroups at an increased risk of oesophageal adenocarcinoma if advice to improve vitamin D intake from foods is implemented. Limited work has been conducted in this area, and further research is required.

Trait assembly in plant assemblages and its modulation by productivity and disturbance

Understanding how communities assemble is a key challenge in ecology. Conflicting hypotheses suggest that plant traits within communities should show divergence to reflect strategies to reduce competition or convergence to reflect strong selection for the environmental conditions operating. Further hypotheses suggest that plant traits related to productivity show convergence within communities, but those related to disturbance show divergence. Data on functional diversity (FD ) of 12 traits from 30 communities ranging from arable fields, mown and grazed grasslands to moorland and woodland were employed to test this using randomisations tests and correlation and regression analysis. No traits showed consistent significant convergence or divergence in functional diversity. When correlated to measures of the environment, the most common pattern was for functional diversity to decline (7 out of 12 traits) and the degree of convergence (7 out of 12 traits) to increase as the levels of productivity (measured as primary productivity, soil nitrogen release and vegetation C:N) and disturbance increased. Convergence or a relationship between functional diversity and the environment was not seen for a number of important traits, such as LDMC and SLA, which are considered as key predictors of ecosystem function. The analysis indicates that taking into account functional diversity within a system may be a necessary part of predicting the relationship between plant traits and ecosystem function, and that this may be of particular importance within less productive and less disturbed systems. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.

Development and characterization of a lux-modified 2,4-dichlorophenol-degrading Burkholderia sp. RASC

lux-marked biosensors for assessing the toxicity and bioremediation potential of polluted environments may complement traditional chemical techniques. luxCDABE genes were introduced into the chromosome of the 2,4-dichlorophenol (2,4-DCP)-mineralizing bacterium, Burkholderia sp. RASC c2, by biparental mating using the Tn4431 system. Experiments revealed that light output was constitutive and related to cell biomass concentration during exponential growth. The transposon insertion was stable and did not interrupt 2,4-DCP-degradative genes, and expression of luxCDABE did not constitute a metabolic burden to the cell. A bioluminescence response was detectable at sublethal 2,4-DCP concentrations: at <10.26 microg ml(-1), bioluminescence was stimulated (e.g. 218% of control), but at concentrations >60 microg ml(-1) it declined to <1%. Investigating the effect of [14C]-2,4-DCP concentration on the evolution of 14CO2 revealed that, for initial concentrations of 2.5-25 microg ml(-1), approximately equals 55% of the added 14C was mineralized after 24 h compared with

A versatile content addressable memory architecture

In this paper, a novel configurable content addressable memory (CCAM) cell is proposed, to increase the flexibility of embedded CAMs for SoC employment. It can be easily configured as a Binary CAM (BiCAM) or Ternary CAM (TCAM) without significant penalty of power consumption or searching speed. A 64x128 CCAM array has been built and verified through simulation. ©2007 IEEE.

Aflatoxin Exposure May Contribute to Chronic Hepatomegaly in Kenyan School Children

BACKGROUND: Presentation with a firm type of chronic hepatomegaly of multifactorial etiology is common among school-age children in sub-Saharan Africa.

OBJECTIVE: Aflatoxin is a liver toxin and carcinogen contaminating staple maize food. In this study we examined its role in chronic hepatomegaly.

METHODS: Plasma samples collected in 2002 and again in 2004 from 218 children attending two schools in neighboring villages were assayed for aflatoxin exposure using the aflatoxin-albumin adduct (AF-alb) biomarker. Data were previously examined for associations among hepatomegaly, malaria, and schistosomiasis.

RESULTS: AF-alb levels were high in children from both schools, but the geometric mean (95% confidence interval) in year 2002 was significantly higher in Matangini [206.5 (175.5, 243.0) pg/mg albumin] than in Yumbuni [73.2 (61.6, 87.0) pg/mg; p < 0.001]. AF-alb levels also were higher in children with firm hepatomegaly [176.6 (129.6, 240.7) pg/mg] than in normal children [79.9 (49.6, 128.7) pg/mg; p = 0.029]. After adjusting for Schistosoma mansoni and Plasmodium infection, we estimated a significant 43% increase in the prevalence of hepatomegaly/hepatosplenomegaly for every natural-log-unit increase in AF-alb. In 2004, AF-alb levels were markedly higher than in 2002 [539.7 (463.3, 628.7) vs. 114.5 (99.7, 131.4) pg/mg; p < 0.001] but with no significant difference between the villages or between hepatomegaly and normal groups [539.7 (436.7, 666.9) vs. 512.6 (297.3, 883.8) pg/mg], possibly because acute exposures during an aflatoxicosis outbreak in 2004 may have masked any potential underlying relationship.

CONCLUSIONS: Exposure to aflatoxin was associated with childhood chronic hepatomegaly in 2002. These preliminary data suggest an additional health risk that may be related to aflatoxin exposure in children, a hypothesis that merits further testing.

Sample size in studies on diagnostic accuracy in ophthalmology:A literature survey

Aim: To assess the sample sizes used in studies on diagnostic accuracy in ophthalmology. Design and sources: A survey literature published in 2005. Methods: The frequency of reporting calculations of sample sizes and the samples' sizes were extracted from the published literature. A manual search of five leading clinical journals in ophthalmology with the highest impact (Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, Ophthalmology, Archives of Ophthalmology, American Journal of Ophthalmology and British Journal of Ophthalmology) was conducted by two independent investigators. Results: A total of 1698 articles were identified, of which 40 studies were on diagnostic accuracy. One study reported that sample size was calculated before initiating the study. Another study reported consideration of sample size without calculation. The mean (SD) sample size of all diagnostic studies was 172.6 (218.9). The median prevalence of the target condition was 50.5%. Conclusion: Only a few studies consider sample size in their methods. Inadequate sample sizes in diagnostic accuracy studies may result in misleading estimates of test accuracy. An improvement over the current standards on the design and reporting of diagnostic studies is warranted.

A prospective cohort study of obesity and risk of oesophageal and gastric adenocarcinoma in the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study

Objective: The incidence of oesophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC) has increased rapidly over the past 40 years and accumulating evidence suggests that obesity, as measured by body mass index (BMI), is a major risk factor. It remains unclear whether abdominal obesity is associated with EAC and gastric adenocarcinoma.

Design: Cox proportional hazards regression was used to examine associations between overall and abdominal obesity with EAC and gastric adenocarcinoma among 218 854 participants in the prospective NIHeAARP cohort.

Results: 253 incident EAC, 191 gastric cardia adenocarcinomas and 125 gastric non-cardia adenocarcinomas accrued to the cohort. Overall obesity (BMI) was positively associated with EAC and gastric
cardia adenocarcinoma risk (highest ($35 kg/m2) vs referent (18.5e<25 kg/m2); HR 2.11, 95% CI 1.09 to 4.09 and HR 3.67, 95% CI 2.00 to 6.71, respectively). Waist circumference was also positively associated with EAC and gastric cardia adenocarcinoma risk (highest vs referent; HR 2.01, 95% CI 1.35 to 3.00 and HR 2.22, 95% CI 1.43 to 3.47, respectively), whereas waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) was positively associated with EAC risk only (highest vs referent; HR 1.81, 95% CI 1.24 to 2.64) and persisted in patients with normal BMI (18.5e<25 kg/m2). Mutual adjustment of WHR and BMI attenuated
both, but did not eliminate the positive associations for either with risk of EAC. In contrast, the majority of the anthropometric variables were not associated with adenocarcinomas of the gastric non-cardia.

Conclusion Overall obesity was associated with a higher risk of EAC and gastric cardia adenocarcinoma, whereas abdominal obesity was found to be associated with increased EAC risk; even in people with normal BMI

The ParaPhrase Project:Parallel patterns for adaptive heterogeneous multicore systems

This paper describes the ParaPhrase project, a new 3-year targeted research project funded under EU Framework 7 Objective 3.4 (Computer Systems), starting in October 2011. ParaPhrase aims to follow a new approach to introducing parallelism using advanced refactoring techniques coupled with high-level parallel design patterns. The refactoring approach will use these design patterns to restructure programs defined as networks of software components into other forms that are more suited to parallel execution. The programmer will be aided by high-level cost information that will be integrated into the refactoring tools. The implementation of these patterns will then use a well-understood algorithmic skeleton approach to achieve good parallelism. A key ParaPhrase design goal is that parallel components are intended to match heterogeneous architectures, defined in terms of CPU/GPU combinations, for example. In order to achieve this, the ParaPhrase approach will map components at link time to the available hardware, and will then re-map them during program execution, taking account of multiple applications, changes in hardware resource availability, the desire to reduce communication costs etc. In this way, we aim to develop a new approach to programming that will be able to produce software that can adapt to dynamic changes in the system environment. Moreover, by using a strong component basis for parallelism, we can achieve potentially significant gains in terms of reducing sharing at a high level of abstraction, and so in reducing or even eliminating the costs that are usually associated with cache management, locking, and synchronisation. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

Microstructural analysis of non-woven fabrics using scanning electron microscopy and image processing. Part 2:Application to hydroentangled fabrics

The image analysis techniques developed in Part 1 to study microstructural changes in non-woven fabrics are applied to measure the fibre orientation distribution and fibre length distribution of hydroentangled fabrics. The results are supported by strength and modulus measurements using samples from the same fabrics. It is shown that the techniques developed can successfully be used to assess the degree of entanglement of hydroentangled fabrics regardless of their thickness.