Profiles of ageing in the South of Portugal: education and cognitive functioning in elderly persons living in institutionalized and community contexts

The region of the Algarve shows huge differences between the coastline where population in the urban areas grows, and the inland rural areas, in some cases very isolated, which frequently have high ageing indexes. This general scenario, with an elderly population with very different economic and social conditions, frames the ongoing PhD research designed as a cross-sectional study of an intentional sample of elderly persons. The basic theoretical framework departs from the perspective of developmental psychology of life-span and the model of selection, optimisation and compensation for optimal ageing (Baltes & Baltes, 1990; Freund & Baltes, 2002). The present study is a first step in the analysis of empirical data collected in the PhD sample (N=156; age range 65 to 97 years; M = 80.4 years; SD = 7.2 years). Its purpose is to assess the cognitive functioning of participants, screening for cognitive impairment and examine the relations between the cognitive status of the subjects and a number of selected variables including educational level, age, physical activity and living contexts of the subjects. We accessed the cognitive status of the participants with the Portuguese version of Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) finding a 10.3% prevalence of positive cases with cognitive impairment. The results also show significant relationships between the cognitive status accessed by the MMSE and educational level, professional qualification, age, living arrangement and activity level of the participants. The relationship verified between educational level and cognitive status of the participants was the largest correlation found in the study with the variability in educational level accounting for 44.8% of the variability in MMSE score. This results points in the same direction of several lines of research that corroborate the strong intercorrelation between education and cognitive functioning in old age.

Gene activation and re-expression of a trypanosoma-brucei variant surface glycoptotein

The expression of the Trypanosoma brucei variant surface glycoprotein AnTat 1.1 proceeds by a mechanism that transfers a duplicated gene copy into a new genomic environment, the so-called expression site, where it will be expressed. We have isolated a genomic fragment containing the region spanning the expression site-transposon junction, and the 5' half of the coding sequence. Comparing this DNA segment with its template copy (basic copy) allowed us to identify the exact breaking point and indicated a base sequence which could be involved in initiating the transposition event. Sequencing data also indicated that the co-transposed segment 5' to the coding sequence is 430 bp in length. The extreme 5' end of the mRNA is derived from a region in the expression site not immediately adjacent to the transposed DNA segment. This particular sequence exists in multiple copies in the genome and is common to the mRNA of all variant surface glycoproteins so far analysed.