Vulnerability as a heuristic for interdisciplinary research: Assessing the thematic and methodological structure of empirical life-course studies

Changes in human lives are studied in psychology, sociology, and adjacent fields as outcomes of developmental processes, institutional regulations and policies, culturally and normatively structured life courses, or empirical accounts. However, such studies have used a wide range of complementary, but often divergent, concepts. This review has two aims. First, we report on the structure that has emerged from scientific life course research by focusing on abstracts from longitudinal and life course studies beginning with the year 2000. Second, we provide a sense of the disciplinary diversity of the field and assess the value of the concept of 'vulnerability' as a heuristic tool for studying human lives. Applying correspondence analysis to 10,632 scientific abstracts, we find a disciplinary divide between psychology and sociology, and observe indications of both similarities of-and differences between-studies, driven at least partly by the data and methods employed. We also find that vulnerability takes a central position in this scientific field, which leads us to suggest several reasons to see value in pursuing theory development for longitudinal and life course studies in this direction.

Spinal Cord T-Cell Infiltration in the Rat Spared Nerve Injury Model: A Time Course Study.

The immune system is involved in the development of neuropathic pain. In particular, the infiltration of T-lymphocytes into the spinal cord following peripheral nerve injury has been described as a contributor to sensory hypersensitivity. We used the spared nerve injury (SNI) model of neuropathic pain in Sprague Dawley adult male rats to assess proliferation, and/or protein/gene expression levels for microglia (Iba1), T-lymphocytes (CD2) and cytotoxic T-lymphocytes (CD8). In the dorsal horn ipsilateral to SNI, Iba1 and BrdU stainings revealed microglial reactivity and proliferation, respectively, with different durations. Iba1 expression peaked at D4 and D7 at the mRNA and protein level, respectively, and was long-lasting. Proliferation occurred almost exclusively in Iba1 positive cells and peaked at D2. Gene expression observation by RT-qPCR array suggested that T-lymphocytes attracting chemokines were upregulated after SNI in rat spinal cord but only a few CD2/CD8 positive cells were found. A pronounced infiltration of CD2/CD8 positive T-cells was seen in the spinal cord injury (SCI) model used as a positive control for lymphocyte infiltration. Under these experimental conditions, we show early and long-lasting microglia reactivity in the spinal cord after SNI, but no lymphocyte infiltration was found.

Mentors, students, and the undergraduate medical course: a virtuous circle

BACKGROUND: Mentoring Programs have been developed in several medical schools, but few studies have investigated the mentors'perspective. PURPOSES: To explore mentors'perceptions regarding their experience. METHODS: Mentors at a medical school were invited to participate in an in-depth interview including questions on satisfaction, difficulties, and perception of changes resulting from the program. RESULTS: Mentors' satisfaction and difficulties are strongly associated with students'involvement in the activity. Mentors believe changes observed in students were more related to life issues; for some mentors, there is no recognition or awareness of the program. However, most of the mentors acknowledged important changes in relation to themselves: as teachers, faculty members, and individuals. CONCLUSION: Attendance is crucial for both the mentoring relationship and strengthening of the program. Students involved in the activity motivate mentors in teaching and curriculum development, thereby creating a virtuous circle and benefiting undergraduate medical education as a whole.

The development and evaluation of a distance learning system in ophthalmology

INTRODUCTION: Web-based e-learning is a teaching tool increasingly used in many medical schools and specialist fields, including ophthalmology. AIMS: this pilot study aimed to develop internet-based course-based clinical cases and to evaluate the effectiveness of this method within a graduate medical education group. METHODS: this was an interventional randomized study. First, a website was built using a distance learning platform. Sixteen first-year ophthalmology residents were then divided into two randomized groups: one experimental group, which was submitted to the intervention (use of the e-learning site) and another control group, which was not submitted to the intervention. The students answered a printed clinical case and their scores were compared. RESULTS: there was no statistically significant difference between the groups. CONCLUSION: We were able to successfully develop the e-learning site and the respective clinical cases. Despite the fact that there was no statistically significant difference between the access and the non access group, the study was a pioneer in our department, since a clinical case online program had never previously been developed.

Reading Development During Elementary School Years. Evidence from Eye Movements

The present dissertation examined reading development during elementary school years by means of eye movement tracking. Three different but related issues in this field were assessed. First of all, the development of parafoveal processing skills in reading was investigated. Second, it was assessed whether and to what extent sublexical units such as syllables and morphemes are used in processing Finnish words and whether the use of these sublexical units changes as a function of reading proficiency. Finally, the developmental trend in the speed of visual information extraction during reading was examined. With regard to parafoveal processing skills, it was shown that 2nd graders extract letter identity information approx. 5 characters to the right of fixation, 4th graders approx. 7 characters to the right of fixation, and 6th graders and adults approx. 9 characters to the right of fixation. Furthermore, it was shown that all age groups extract more parafoveal information within compound words than across adjectivenoun pairs of similar length. In compounds, parafoveal word information can be extracted in parallel with foveal word information, if the compound in question is of high frequency. With regard to the use of sublexical units in Finnish word processing, it was shown that less proficient 2nd graders use both syllables and morphemes in the course of lexical access. More proficient 2nd graders as well as older readers seem to process words more holistically. Finally, it was shown that 60 ms is enough for 4th graders and adults to extract visual information from both 4-letter and 8-letter words, whereas 2nd graders clearly needed more than 60 ms to extract all information from 8- letter words for processing to proceed smoothly. The present dissertation demonstrates that Finnish 2nd graders develop their reading skills rapidly and are already at an adult level in some aspects of reading. This is not to say that there are no differences between less proficient (e.g., 2nd graders) and more proficient readers (e.g., adults) but in some respects it seems that the visual system used in extracting information from the text is matured by the 2nd grade. Furthermore, the present dissertation demonstrates that the allocation of attention in reading depends much on textual properties such as word frequency and whether words are spatially unified (as in compounds) or not. This flexibility of the attentional system naturally needs to be captured in word processing models. Finally, individual differences within age groups are quite substantial but it seems that by the end of the 2nd grade practically all Finnish children have reached a reasonable level of reading proficiency.

The influence of the season of the year and of dilution on the development of swine manure and wood shaves co-composting

The objective of this research was to study the influence of factors related to the proper management of pig manure (lower dilution) and the season of the year in the progress of the co-composting of pig manure with wood shavings and in the final quality of the compost resulting from the treatments. In the first experiment, two types of swine manure were used: a diluted one (2% Dry Matter - DM), typical from the management usually used in Brazil, and a more concentrated one (6% DM). The manures were incorporated into the wood shavings (6L:1kg) over the course of four weeks. The development of composting was accompanied by monitoring of temperatures inside the piles and the emission of CO2 and CH4 gases during 65 days, including the period of incorporation. The results showed that the diluted manure does not provide the minimum conditions for starting the process. After the incorporation period, any biomass heating was observed and neither the aerobic or anaerobic respiration of the microorganisms, resulting in a compost with low quality. In the second experiment, which evaluated composting in winter and summer during 85 days, it was found that the heat exchange with the environment influences the temperature generated within the piles. The lower temperatures significantly reduced the methanogenesis on the biomass.

A Bridge Builder or a Raconteur? How Japan Manoeuvres the Global Development Discourse within the TICAD Process

Japan has been a major actor in the field of development cooperation for five decades, even holding the title of largest donor of Official Development Assistance (ODA) during the 1990s. Financial flows, however, are subject to pre-existing paradigms that dictate both donor and recipient behaviour. In this respect Japan has been left wanting for more recognition. The dominance of the so called ‘Washington Consensus’ embodied in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank has long circumvented any indigenous approaches to development problems. The Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) is a development cooperation conference that Japan has hosted since 1993 every five years. As the main organizer of the conference Japan has opted for the leading position of African development. This has come in the wake of success in the Asian region where Japan has called attention to its role in the so called ‘Asian Miracle’ of fast growing economies. These aspirations have enabled Japan to try asserting itself as a major player in directing the course of global development discourse using historical narratives from both Asia and Africa. Over the years TICAD has evolved into a continuous process with ministerial and follow-up meetings in between conferences. Each conference has produced a declaration that stipulates the way the participants approach the question of African development. Although a multilateral framework, Japan has over the years made its presence more and more felt within the process. This research examines the way Japan approaches the paradigms of international development cooperation and tries to direct them in the context of the TICAD process. Supplementing these questions are inquiries concerning Japan’s foreign policy aspirations. The research shows that Japan has utilized the conference platform to contest other development actors and especially the dominant forces of the IMF and the World Bank in development discourse debate. Japan’s dominance of the process is evident in the narratives found in the conference documents. Relative success has come about by remaining consistent as shown by the acceptance of items from the TICAD agenda in other forums, such as the G8. But the emergence of new players such as China has changed the playing field, as they are engaging other developing countries from a more equal level.

Skill Development in Music Reading. The Eye-Movement Approach

This dissertation examined skill development in music reading by focusing on the visual processing of music notation in different music-reading tasks. Each of the three experiments of this dissertation addressed one of the three types of music reading: (i) sight-reading, i.e. reading and performing completely unknown music, (ii) rehearsed reading, during which the performer is already familiar with the music being played, and (iii) silent reading with no performance requirements. The use of the eye-tracking methodology allowed the recording of the readers’ eye movements from the time of music reading with extreme precision. Due to the lack of coherence in the smallish amount of prior studies on eye movements in music reading, the dissertation also had a heavy methodological emphasis. The present dissertation thus aimed to promote two major issues: (1) it investigated the eye-movement indicators of skill and skill development in sight-reading, rehearsed reading and silent reading, and (2) developed and tested suitable methods that can be used by future studies on the topic. Experiment I focused on the eye-movement behaviour of adults during their first steps of learning to read music notation. The longitudinal experiment spanned a nine-month long music-training period, during which 49 participants (university students taking part in a compulsory music course) sight-read and performed a series of simple melodies in three measurement sessions. Participants with no musical background were entitled as “novices”, whereas “amateurs” had had musical training prior to the experiment. The main issue of interest was the changes in the novices’ eye movements and performances across the measurements while the amateurs offered a point of reference for the assessment of the novices’ development. The experiment showed that the novices tended to sight-read in a more stepwise fashion than the amateurs, the latter group manifesting more back-and-forth eye movements. The novices’ skill development was reflected by the faster identification of note symbols involved in larger melodic intervals. Across the measurements, the novices also began to show sensitivity to the melodies’ metrical structure, which the amateurs demonstrated from the very beginning. The stimulus melodies consisted of quarter notes, making the effects of meter and larger melodic intervals distinguishable from effects caused by, say, different rhythmic patterns. Experiment II explored the eye movements of 40 experienced musicians (music education students and music performance students) during temporally controlled rehearsed reading. This cross-sectional experiment focused on the eye-movement effects of one-bar-long melodic alterations placed within a familiar melody. The synchronizing of the performance and eye-movement recordings enabled the investigation of the eye-hand span, i.e., the temporal gap between a performed note and the point of gaze. The eye-hand span was typically found to remain around one second. Music performance students demonstrated increased professing efficiency by their shorter average fixation durations as well as in the two examined eye-hand span measures: these participants used larger eye-hand spans more frequently and inspected more of the musical score during the performance of one metrical beat than students of music education. Although all participants produced performances almost indistinguishable in terms of their auditory characteristics, the altered bars indeed affected the reading of the score: the general effects of expertise in terms of the two eye- hand span measures, demonstrated by the music performance students, disappeared in the face of the melodic alterations. Experiment III was a longitudinal experiment designed to examine the differences between adult novice and amateur musicians’ silent reading of music notation, as well as the changes the 49 participants manifested during a nine-month long music course. From a methodological perspective, an opening to research on eye movements in music reading was the inclusion of a verbal protocol in the research design: after viewing the musical image, the readers were asked to describe what they had seen. A two-way categorization for verbal descriptions was developed in order to assess the quality of extracted musical information. More extensive musical background was related to shorter average fixation duration, more linear scanning of the musical image, and more sophisticated verbal descriptions of the music in question. No apparent effects of skill development were observed for the novice music readers alone, but all participants improved their verbal descriptions towards the last measurement. Apart from the background-related differences between groups of participants, combining verbal and eye-movement data in a cluster analysis identified three styles of silent reading. The finding demonstrated individual differences in how the freely defined silent-reading task was approached. This dissertation is among the first presentations of a series of experiments systematically addressing the visual processing of music notation in various types of music-reading tasks and focusing especially on the eye-movement indicators of developing music-reading skill. Overall, the experiments demonstrate that the music-reading processes are affected not only by “top-down” factors, such as musical background, but also by the “bottom-up” effects of specific features of music notation, such as pitch heights, metrical division, rhythmic patterns and unexpected melodic events. From a methodological perspective, the experiments emphasize the importance of systematic stimulus design, temporal control during performance tasks, and the development of complementary methods, for easing the interpretation of the eye-movement data. To conclude, this dissertation suggests that advances in comprehending the cognitive aspects of music reading, the nature of expertise in this musical task, and the development of educational tools can be attained through the systematic application of the eye-tracking methodology also in this specific domain.

Different pathways in the larval development of the crab Ucides cordatus (Decapoda, Ocypodidae) and their relation with high mortality rates by the end of massive larvicultures

One of the most limiting factors affecting the larval rearing of Ucides cordatus in the laboratory is a period of high mortality, which usually occurs late in the course of the larviculture during the metamorphosis from the zoeal to the megalopal phase. The objective of the present research was to analyze the post-embryonic development of U. cordatus on an individual basis and, in particular, to search for patterns linking disturbances in the molting process to the high larval death rates observed in massive larvicultures. A total of 50 larvae were individually reared from hatching to metamorphosis into the megalopal phase under controlled conditions, fed a combination of microalgae and rotifers. The survivorship rate was 70% until zoea V. The 35 surviving zoea V larvae followed two different pathways. Eleven underwent metamorphosis directly to megalopa, eighteen molted to zoea VI and six died as zoea V. In the last molting event, only two zoea VI larvae reached the megalopal stage, while the remaining sixteen died. In further observation under microscope, 13 of the dead zoea VI showed characteristics of the pre-molt stage and pereiopods disproportionably large in relation to the carapace. The observed pattern resembles the Molt Death Syndrome (MDS) described for other decapod species, in which larvae die in the late pre-molt phase of the molting cycle. We suggest that U. cordatus larvae develop disturbances in the molting process similar to the MDS described for other species and that these disturbances are related to a more complex pathway involving the emergence of larval stage zoea VI.

Evaluation of an e-learning course: coercion practices in psychiatric nursing

The goal of the study was to evaluate an e-learning course entitled “Nursing interventions to manage distressed and disturbed patients” and intended for psychiatric nurses, using Kirkpatrick’s evaluation model. The aim was to describe nurses’ reactions, learning, behaviour change and impacts resulting from this e-learning course. This dissertation comprises four papers, and the data were collected 2008-2012 from three different sources; electronic databases, an e-learning platform and psychiatric hospitals. First, a systematic literature review was conducted to understand the effectiveness of e-learning. Second, an RCT study was implemented to investigate the impact of the e-learning course on nurses’ job-satisfaction, knowledge and attitudes (N=158). Third, to complete the picture of nurses views of the e-learning course related to knowledge transfer, the nurses’ perspective was studied (N=33). Lastly, the effects of the e-learning course from nursing managers’ perspective in psychiatric hospital organisations were studied (N=28). The systematic review showed that although the nurses were satisfied with the e-learning, no effects were found in the RCT study of nurses’ job satisfaction. The RCT study showed no effects on nurses’ learning related to knowledge increase, but there was change in attitudes. The managers described the changes in the nurses’ knowledge and attitudes. Among the nurses behaviour changed with knowledge transfer from the e-learning course to practice and they pointed out development issues related to their work. The final impacts of the e-learning course revealed advantages and disadvantages of the e-learning course and its implications for nurses’ work. This dissertation provides new insight into nurses’ reactions, learning, behaviour change and impacts resulting from an e-learning course in their continuing education. In order to improve nurses’ continuing education systematic evaluation is needed, for which Kirkpatrick’s evaluation model is a useful tool.

Spontaneous Focusing on Numerosity in the Development of Early Mathematical Skills

The aim of the present set of longitudinal studies was to explore 3-7-year-old children.s Spontaneous FOcusing on Numerosity (SFON) and its relation to early mathematical development. The specific goals were to capture in method and theory the distinct process by which children focus on numerosity as a part of their activities involving exact number recognition, and individual differences in this process that may be informative in the development of more complex number skills. Over the course of conducting the five studies, fifteen novel tasks were progressively developed for the SFON assessments. In the tasks, confounding effects of insufficient number recognition, verbal comprehension, other procedural skills as well as working memory capacity were aimed to be controlled. Furthermore, how children.s individual differences in SFON are related to their development of number sequence, subitizing-based enumeration, object counting and basic arithmetic skills was explored. The effect of social interaction on SFON was tested. Study I captured the first phase of the 3-year longitudinal study with 39 children. It was investigated whether there were differences in 3-year-old children.s tendency to focus on numerosity, and whether these differences were related to the children.s development of cardinality recognition skills from the age of 3 to 4 years. It was found that the two groups of children formed on the basis of their amount of SFON tendency at the age of 3 years differed in their development of recognising and producing small numbers. The children whose SFON tendency was very predominant developed faster in cardinality related skills from the age of 3 to 4 years than the children whose SFON tendency was not as predominant. Thus, children.s development in cardinality recognition skills is related to their SFON tendency. Studies II and III were conducted to investigate, firstly, children.s individual differences in SFON, and, secondly, whether children.s SFON is related to their counting development. Altogether nine tasks were designed for the assessments of spontaneous and guided focusing on numerosity. The longitudinal data of 39 children in Study II from the age of 3.5 to 6 years showed individual differences in SFON at the ages of 4, 5 and 6 years, as well as stability in children.s SFON across tasks used at different ages. The counting skills were assessed at the ages of 3.5, 5 and 6 years. Path analyses indicated a reciprocal tendency in the relationship between SFON and counting development. In Study III, these results on the individual differences in SFON tendency, the stability of SFON across different tasks and the relationship of SFON and mathematical skills were confirmed by a larger-scale cross-sectional study of 183 on average 6.5-year-old children (range 6;0-7;0 years). The significant amount of unique variance that SFON accounted for number sequence elaboration, object counting and basic arithmetic skills stayed statistically significant (partial correlations varying from .27 to .37) when the effects of non-verbal IQ and verbal comprehension were controlled. In addition, to confirm that the SFON tasks assess SFON tendency independently from enumeration skills, guided focusing tasks were used for children who had failed in SFON tasks. It was explored whether these children were able to proceed in similar tasks to SFON tasks once they were guided to focus on number. The results showed that these children.s poor performance in the SFON tasks was not caused by their deficiency in executing the tasks but on lacking focusing on numerosity. The longitudinal Study IV of 39 children aimed at increasing the knowledge of associations between children.s long-term SFON tendency, subitizing-based enumeration and verbal counting skills. Children were tested twice at the age of 4-5 years on their SFON, and once at the age of 5 on their subitizing-based enumeration, number sequence production, as well as on their skills for counting of objects. Results showed considerable stability in SFON tendency measured at different ages, and that there is a positive direct association between SFON and number sequence production. The association between SFON and object counting skills was significantly mediated by subitizing-based enumeration. These results indicate that the associations between the child.s SFON and sub-skills of verbal counting may differ on the basis of how significant a role understanding the cardinal meanings of number words plays in learning these skills. The specific goal of Study V was to investigate whether it is possible to enhance 3-year old children.s SFON tendency, and thus start children.s deliberate practice in early mathematical skills. Participants were 3-year-old children in Finnish day care. The SFON scores and cardinality-related skills of the experimental group of 17 children were compared to the corresponding results of the 17 children in the control group. The results show an experimental effect on SFON tendency and subsequent development in cardinality-related skills during the 6-month period from pretest to delayed posttest in the children with some initial SFON tendency in the experimental group. Social interaction has an effect on children.s SFON tendency. The results of the five studies assert that within a child.s existing mathematical competence, it is possible to distinguish a separate process, which refers to the child.s tendency to spontaneously focus on numerosity. Moreover, there are significant individual differences in children.s SFON at the age of 3-7 years. Moderate stability was found in this tendency across different tasks assessed both at the same and at different ages. Furthermore, SFON tendency is related to the development of early mathematical skills. Educational implications of the findings emphasise, first, the importance of regarding focusing on numerosity as a separate, essential process in the assessments of young children.s mathematical skills. Second, the substantial individual differences in SFON tendency during the childhood years suggest that uncovering and modeling this kind of mathematically meaningful perceiving of the surroundings and tasks could be an efficient tool for promoting young children.s mathematical development, and thus prevent later failures in learning mathematical skills. It is proposed to consider focusing on numerosity as one potential sub-process of activities involving exact number recognition in future studies.

Role of matrix metalloproteinases in the development of airway inflammation and remodeling

Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are a major group of proteases known to regulate extracellular matrix (ECM) turnover and so they have been suggested to be important in the process of lung disease associated with tissue remodeling. This has led to the concept that modulation of airway remodeling including excessive proteolysis damage to the tissue may be of interest for future treatment. Within the MMP family, macrophage elastase (MMP-12) is able to degrade ECM components such as elastin and is involved in tissue remodeling processes in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease including emphysema. Pulmonary fibrosis has an aggressive course and is usually fatal within an average of 3 to 6 years after the onset of symptoms. Pulmonary fibrosis is associated with deposition of ECM components in the lung interstitium. The excessive airway remodeling as a result of an imbalance in the equilibrium of the normal processes of synthesis and degradation of ECM components could justify anti-protease treatments. Indeed, the correlation of the differences in hydroxyproline levels in the lungs of bleomycin-treated mice strongly suggests that a reduced molar pro-MMP-9/TIMP-1 ratio in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid is associated with collagen deposition, beginning as early as the inflammatory events at day 1 after bleomycin administration. Finally, these observations emphasize that effective treatment of these disorders must be started early during the natural history of the disease, prior to the development of extensive lung destruction and fibrosis.

The time course of ethanol tolerance: associative learning

The effect of different contextual stimuli on different ethanol-induced internal states was investigated during the time course of both the hypothermic effect of the drug and of drug tolerance. Minimitters were surgically implanted in 16 Wistar rats to assess changes in their body temperature under the effect of ethanol. Rat groups were submitted to ethanol or saline trials every other day. The animals were divided into two groups, one receiving a constant dose (CD) of ethanol injected intraperitoneally, and the other receiving increasing doses (ID) during the 10 training sessions. During the ethanol training sessions, conditioned stimuli A (tone) and B (buzzer) were presented at "state +" (35 min after drug injection) and "state -" (170 min after drug injection), respectively. Conditioned stimuli C (bip) and D (white noise) were presented at moments equivalent to stimuli A and B, respectively, but during the saline training sessions. All stimuli lasted 15 min. The CD group, but not the ID group, developed tolerance to the hypothermic effect of ethanol. Stimulus A (associated with drug "state +") induced hyperthermia with saline injection in the ID group. Stimulus B (associated with drug "state -") reduced ethanol tolerance in the CD group and modulated the hypothermic effect of the drug in the ID group. These results indicate that contextual stimuli acquire modulatory conditioned properties that are associated with the time course of both the action of the drug and the development of drug tolerance.

Leptin and adiponectin in the female life course

Adipose tissue secretes a variety of adipokines, including leptin and adiponectin, which are involved in endocrine processes regulating glucose and fatty metabolism, energy expenditure, inflammatory response, immunity, cardiovascular function, and reproduction. The present article describes the fluctuations in circulating leptin and adiponectin as well as their patterns of secretion in women from birth to menopause. During pregnancy, leptin and adiponectin seem to act in an autocrine/paracrine fashion in the placenta and adipose tissue, playing a role in the maternal-fetal interface and contributing to glucose metabolism and fetal development. In newborns, adiponectin levels are two to three times higher than in adults. Full-term newborns have significantly higher leptin and adiponectin levels than preterms, whereas small-for-gestational-age infants have lower levels of these adipokines than adequate-for-gestational-age newborns. However, with weight gain, leptin concentrations increase significantly. Children between 5 and 8 years of age experience an increase in leptin and a decrease in adiponectin regardless of body mass index, with a reversal of the newborn pattern for adiponectin: plasma adiponectin levels at age five are inversely correlated with percentage of body fat. In puberty, leptin plays a role in the regulation of menstrual cycles. In adults, it has been suggested that obese individuals exhibit both leptin resistance and decreased serum adiponectin levels. In conclusion, a progressive increase in adiposity throughout life seems to influence the relationship between leptin and adiponectin in women.

Global microRNA profiles and signaling pathways in the development of cardiac hypertrophy

Hypertrophy is a major predictor of progressive heart disease and has an adverse prognosis. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) that accumulate during the course of cardiac hypertrophy may participate in the process. However, the nature of any interaction between a hypertrophy-specific signaling pathway and aberrant expression of miRNAs remains unclear. In this study, Spague Dawley male rats were treated with transverse aortic constriction (TAC) surgery to mimic pathological hypertrophy. Hearts were isolated from TAC and sham operated rats (n=5 for each group at 5, 10, 15, and 20 days after surgery) for miRNA microarray assay. The miRNAs dysexpressed during hypertrophy were further analyzed using a combination of bioinformatics algorithms in order to predict possible targets. Increased expression of the target genes identified in diverse signaling pathways was also analyzed. Two sets of miRNAs were identified, showing different expression patterns during hypertrophy. Bioinformatics analysis suggested the miRNAs may regulate multiple hypertrophy-specific signaling pathways by targeting the member genes and the interaction of miRNA and mRNA might form a network that leads to cardiac hypertrophy. In addition, the multifold changes in several miRNAs suggested that upregulation of rno-miR-331*, rno-miR-3596b, rno-miR-3557-5p and downregulation of rno-miR-10a, miR-221, miR-190, miR-451 could be seen as biomarkers of prognosis in clinical therapy of heart failure. This study described, for the first time, a potential mechanism of cardiac hypertrophy involving multiple signaling pathways that control up- and downregulation of miRNAs. It represents a first step in the systematic discovery of miRNA function in cardiovascular hypertrophy.