Kramersigmon5972
Objective Attention difficulties are commonly reported by caregivers in school-aged children born moderate-to-late preterm (MLPT; 32-36 weeks' gestation). We aimed to assess distinct aspects of attentional functioning (i.e. orienting, alerting and executive attention, processing speed and behavioral components) in children born MLPT and full term (FT), profiles of attentional functioning, and associated risk factors such as preterm birth. Methods Participants were 170 (87 MLPT and 83 FT) children, evaluated on cognitive and behavioral attention aspects at 6 years of age. We used a variable-centered approach to compare attentional functioning of children born MLPT and FT at group level, and a person-centered approach to identify profiles of attentional functioning. Neonatal and demographic characteristics of these profiles were compared. Results The variable-centered approach showed that at group level children born MLPT had poorer orienting attention and processing speed, and behavioral attention than children born FT. The person-centered approach revealed four profiles (a) normal attentional functioning, (b) overall poorer attention, (c) poorer cognitive attention, and (d) behavioral attention problems. Children born MLPT were overrepresented in each of the suboptimal attention profiles, and were more dispersed across profiles than children born FT. Conclusions Children born MLPT are at increased risk of difficulties in some attention aspects, but at group level differences with children born FT are small. However, children born MLPT show considerable variation in the nature of attention difficulties and are twice as likely to show a suboptimal attention profile, indicating a cumulation of poorer attention scores.The concept of trade-offs permeates our thinking about adaptive evolution because they are exhibited at every level of biological organization, from molecular and cellular processes to organismal and ecological functions. Trade-offs inevitably arise because different traits do not occur in isolation, but instead are imbedded within complex, integrated systems that make up whole organisms. The genetic and mechanistic underpinning of trade-offs can be found in the pleiotropic nodes that occur in the biological pathways shared between traits. Yet, often trade-offs are only understood as statistical correlations, limiting the ability to evaluate the interplay between how selection and constraint interact during adaptive evolution. Here, we first review the classic paradigms in which physiologists and evolutionary biologists have studied trade-offs and highlight the ways in which network and molecular pathway approaches unify these paradigms. We discuss how these approaches allow researchers to evaluate why trade-offs arise and how selection can act to overcome trait correlations and evolutionary constraints. We argue that understanding how the conserved molecular pathways are shared between different traits and functions provides a conceptual framework for evolutionary biologists, physiologists, and molecular biologists to meaningfully work together towards the goal of understanding why correlations and trade-offs occur between traits. We briefly highlight the melanocortin system and the hormonal control of osmoregulation as two case studies where an understanding of shared molecular pathways reveals why trade-offs occur between seemingly unrelated traits. While we recognize that applying such approaches poses challenges and limitations particularly in the context of natural populations, we advocate for the view that focusing on the biological pathways responsible for trade-offs provides a unified conceptual context accessible to a broad range of integrative biologists.Atypical frontotemporal lobar degeneration with ubiquitin-positive inclusions (aFTLD-U) is an uncommon cause of frontotemporal dementia characterized by fused in sarcoma-positive inclusions. It is classified as a subtype of frontotemporal lobar degeneration with FUS pathology. Cases with aFTLD-U pathology typically display an early onset of symptoms and severe psychobehavioral changes in the absence of significant aphasia, cognitive-intellectual dysfunction or motor features. This phenotype is regarded as being sufficiently unusual and consistent as to allow antemortem diagnosis with a high degree of accuracy. In this report, we describe 2 cases with aFTLD-U pathology that broaden the associated phenotype to include later age of onset, milder behavioral abnormalities and early memory and language impairment.Several brain disorders exhibit sex differences in onset, presentation, and prevalence. Increased understanding of the neurobiology of sex-based differences in variability across the lifespan can provide insight into both disease vulnerability and resilience. In n = 3069 participants, from 8 to 95 years of age, we found widespread greater variability in males compared with females in cortical surface area and global and subcortical volumes for discrete brain regions. In contrast, variance in cortical thickness was similar for males and females. These findings were supported by multivariate analysis accounting for structural covariance, and present and stable across the lifespan. Additionally, we examined variability among brain regions by sex. We found significant age-by-sex interactions across neuroimaging metrics, whereby in very early life males had reduced among-region variability compared with females, while in very late life this was reversed. Overall, our findings of greater regional variability, but less among-region variability in males in early life may aid our understanding of sex-based risk for neurodevelopmental disorders. In contrast, our findings in late life may provide a potential sex-based risk mechanism for dementia.Purpose Menopause is a crucial physiological transition during a woman's life, and it occurs with growing risks of health issues like osteoporosis. To identify postmenopausal osteoporosis-related genes, we performed transcriptome-wide expression analyses for human peripheral blood monocytes (PBMs) using Affymetrix 1.0 ST arrays in 40 Caucasian postmenopausal women with discordant bone mineral density (BMD) levels. Bortezomib cost Methods We performed multiscale embedded gene coexpression network analysis (MEGENA) to study functionally orchestrating clusters of differentially expressed genes in the form of functional networks. Gene sets net correlations analysis (GSNCA) was applied to assess how the coexpression structure of a predefined gene set differs in high and low BMD groups. Bayesian network (BN) analysis was used to identify important regulation patterns between potential risk genes for osteoporosis. A small interfering ribonucleic acid (siRNA)-based gene silencing in vitro experiment was performed to validate the findings from BN analysis.