Background Preterm birth is the leading cause of death among children < 5 years of age. Accurate determination of prematurity is necessary to provide appropriate neonatal care and guide preventive measures. To estimate the most accurate method to identify infants at risk for adverse outcomes, we assessed the validity of two widely available methods—last menstrual period (LMP) and the New Ballard (NB) neonatal assessment—against ultrasound in determining gestational age and preterm birth in highland Guatemala. Methods Pregnant women (n = 188) were recruited with a gestational age < 20 weeks and followed until delivery. Ultrasound was performed by trained physicians and LMP was collected during recruitment. NB was performed on infants within 96 hours of birth by trained study nurses. LMP and NB accuracy at determining gestational age and identifying prematurity was assessed by comparing them to ultrasound. Results By ultrasound, infant mean gestational age at birth was 38.3 weeks (SD = 1.6) with 16% born at less than 37 gestation. LMP was more accurate than NB (mean difference of +0.13 weeks for LMP and +0.61 weeks for NB). However, LMP and NB estimates had low agreement with ultrasound-determined gestational age (Lin’s concordance < 0.48 for both methods) and preterm birth (κ < 0.29 for both methods). By LMP, 18% were judged premature compared with 6% by NB. LMP underestimated gestational age among women presenting later to prenatal care (0.18 weeks for each additional week). Gestational age for preterm infants was overestimated by nearly one week using LMP and nearly two weeks using NB. New Ballard neuromuscular measurements were more predictive of preterm birth than those measuring physical criteria. Conclusion In an indigenous population in highland Guatemala, LMP overestimated prematurity by 2% and NB underestimated prematurity by 10% compared with ultrasound estimates. New, simple and accurate methods are needed to identify preterm birth in resource-limited settings worldwide.
by
Wooseong Kim;
Wenpeng Zhu;
Gabriel Lambert Hendricks;
Daria Van Tyne;
Andrew D. Steele;
Colleen E. Keohane;
Nico Fricke;
Annie L. Conery;
Steven Shen;
Wen Pan;
Kiho Lee;
Rajmohan Rajamuthiah;
Beth Burgwyn Fuchs;
Petia M. Vlahovska;
William Wuest;
Micheal S. Gilmore;
Huajian Gao;
Frederick M. Ausubel;
Eleftherios Mylonakis
A challenge in the treatment of Staphylococcus aureus infections is the high prevalence of methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) strains and the formation of non-growing, dormant € persister' subpopulations that exhibit high levels of tolerance to antibiotics and have a role in chronic or recurrent infections. As conventional antibiotics are not effective in the treatment of infections caused by such bacteria, novel antibacterial therapeutics are urgently required. Here we used a Caenorhabditis elegans-MRSA infection screen to identify two synthetic retinoids, CD437 and CD1530, which kill both growing and persister MRSA cells by disrupting lipid bilayers. CD437 and CD1530 exhibit high killing rates, synergism with gentamicin, and a low probability of resistance selection. All-atom molecular dynamics simulations demonstrated that the ability of retinoids to penetrate and embed in lipid bilayers correlates with their bactericidal ability. An analogue of CD437 was found to retain anti-persister activity and show an improved cytotoxicity profile. Both CD437 and this analogue, alone or in combination with gentamicin, exhibit considerable efficacy in a mouse model of chronic MRSA infection. With further development and optimization, synthetic retinoids have the potential to become a new class of antimicrobials for the treatment of Gram-positive bacterial infections that are currently difficult to cure.
Primates form strong social bonds and depend on social relationships and networks that provide shared resources and protection critical for survival. Social deficits such as those present in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and other psychiatric disorders hinder the individual's functioning in communities. Given that early diagnosis and intervention can improve outcomes and trajectories of ASD, there is a great need for tools to identify early markers for screening/diagnosis, and for translational animal models to uncover biological mechanisms and develop treatments. One of the most widely used screening tools for ASD in children is the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS), a quantitative measure used to identify individuals with atypical social behaviors. The SRS has been adapted for use in adult rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta)-a species very close to humans in terms of social behavior, brain anatomy/ connectivity and development-but has not yet been validated or adapted for a necessary downward extension to younger ages matching those for ASD diagnosis in children. The goal of the present study was to adapt and validate the adult macaque SRS (mSRS) in juvenile macaques with age equivalent to mid-childhood in humans. Expert primate coders modified the mSRS to adapt it to rate atypical social behaviors in juvenile macaques living in complex social groups at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. Construct and face validity of this juvenile mSRS (jmSRS) was determined based on well-established and operationalized measures of social and non-social behaviors in this species using traditional behavioral observations. We found that the jmSRS identifies variability in social responsiveness of juvenile rhesus monkeys and shows strong construct/predictive validity, as well as sensitivity to detect atypical social behaviors in young male and female macaques across social status. Thus, the jmSRS provides a promising tool for translational research on macaque models of children social disorders.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Recent evidence suggests that grammatical aspect can bias how individuals perceive criminal intentionality during discourse comprehension. Given that criminal intentionality is a common criterion for legal definitions (e.g., first-degree murder), the present study explored whether grammatical aspect may also impact legal judgments. In a series of four experiments participants were provided with a legal definition and a description of a crime in which the grammatical aspect of provocation and murder events were manipulated. Participants were asked to make a decision (first- vs. second-degree murder) and then indicate factors that impacted their decision. Findings suggest that legal judgments can be affected by grammatical aspect but the most robust effects were limited to temporal dynamics (i.e., imperfective aspect results in more murder actions than perfective aspect), which may in turn influence other representational systems (i.e., number of murder actions positively predicts perceived intentionality). In addition, findings demonstrate that the influence of grammatical aspect on situation model construction and evaluation is dependent upon the larger linguistic and semantic context. Together, the results suggest grammatical aspect has indirect influences on legal judgments to the extent that variability in aspect changes the features of the situation model that align with criteria for making legal judgments.