•Relapse narratives on social media indirectly impact public perception.•Emotions mediate effects of relapse narratives on destigmatization.•Compassion reduces stigmatization and pity increases ...it.•Anger has a more complex relationship with stigmatization.•Findings inform content strategies for social media and health communication.
The disclosure of recovery journeys on social media by individuals with substance use is a growing trend, but its impact on public attitudes toward stigmatized groups is not well-understood. To address this gap, an experiment was conducted with 1,438 U.S. adults who viewed a series of Instagram posts about a person’s recovery journey. Participants were randomly assigned to view posts that either included a relapse episode or not. Structural equation modeling was used for data analyses. The results revealed that presenting a relapse narrative increased feelings of compassion, anger, and pity. In addition, mediation analyses provided evidence supporting the role these emotions played in mediating the effects of a relapse narrative on stigma beliefs and desire for social distance. These findings prompt a reevaluation of digital storytelling practices in health communication strategies, aiming for a balanced representation that can effectively reduce stigma and promote community support for those navigating substance use recovery. It is recommended to incorporate the study’s insights into educational content, therapeutic interventions, and policy formulations to foster a more supportive and understanding environment for individuals in recovery.
Scholars have examined two types of emotions, namely, incidental and integral emotions, in health communication on the basis of the source of elicitation. Despite numerous studies on the independent ...effects of these two types of emotions, limited research exists on how emotions may interact to influence health communication outcomes, including support for health-improving policies. To augment current knowledge, this study conducted a 2 (incidental: compassion vs. anger) × 2 (integral: compassion vs. anger) between-subjects factorial experiment in the context of the human health effects of pollution. Results showed a main effect of the incidental compassion (vs. anger) condition on protective policy support, which was mediated by self-reported compassion. In addition, this main effect was moderated by political ideology such that it was found among moderates and conservatives, but not liberals. No interaction effects were observed. These findings contribute to the literature by exploring how incidental and integral emotions may or may not interact and by complementing existing research on the moderating effect of political ideology regarding environment-related messaging.
Mechanisms that lead to different quantities of hydrocarbon accumulation in complex fault blocks are a major subject that impacts further development plans of oil and gas fields. To better understand ...such mechanisms, fault activity has been interpreted along with existing electron micrographs from the fault zone, petrophysical data, and the occurrence of the seismic pump. This enabled us to investigate the controlling mechanisms of the growth faults and other associated faults with the main growth fault in the Wang Guantun area that could have impacted hydrocarbon distribution. The results showed that the activity of Kongdong growth fault is periodic and intermittent, which produced strong seismic pumping action. Furthermore, a series of secondary faults were generated in adjacent strata due to the fault activity, which could have led to the formation of a secondary seismic pump source. A combination of these two incidents is believed to influence the differential distribution of hydrocarbons in the area, in fault-associated reservoirs. Ultimately, we correlated the activity of the growth fault to the strength of the pumping force causing the distribution of hydrocarbons in the active parts of the faults (pump source position) on the horizontal plane and vertically located reservoirs to be more dominant.
The ecosystem of the human gastrointestinal (GI) tract traverses a number of environmental, chemical, and physical conditions because it runs from the oral cavity to the anus. These differences in ...conditions along with food or other ingested substrates affect the composition and density of the microbiota as well as their functional roles by selecting those that are the most suitable for that environment. Previous studies have mostly focused on Bacteria, with the number of studies conducted on Archaea, Eukarya, and Viruses being limited despite their important roles in this ecosystem. Furthermore, due to the challenges associated with collecting samples directly from the inside of humans, many studies are still exploratory, with a primary focus on the composition of microbiomes. Thus, mechanistic studies to investigate functions are conducted using animal models. However, differences in physiology and microbiomes need to be clarified in order to aid in the translation of animal model findings into the context of humans. This review will highlight Bacteria, Archaea, Fungi, and Viruses, discuss differences along the GI tract of healthy humans, and perform comparisons with three common animal models: rats, mice, and pigs.
Risk Factors and Preventions of Breast Cancer Sun, Yi-Sheng; Zhao, Zhao; Yang, Zhang-Nv ...
International journal of biological sciences,
01/2017, Volume:
13, Issue:
11
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer deaths among women. The development of breast cancer is a multi-step process involving multiple cell types, and its prevention remains challenging ...in the world. Early diagnosis of breast cancer is one of the best approaches to prevent this disease. In some developed countries, the 5-year relative survival rate of breast cancer patients is above 80% due to early prevention. In the recent decade, great progress has been made in the understanding of breast cancer as well as in the development of preventative methods. The pathogenesis and tumor drug-resistant mechanisms are revealed by discovering breast cancer stem cells, and many genes are found related to breast cancer. Currently, people have more drug options for the chemoprevention of breast cancer, while biological prevention has been recently developed to improve patients' quality of life. In this review, we will summarize key studies of pathogenesis, related genes, risk factors and preventative methods on breast cancer over the past years. These findings represent a small step in the long fight against breast cancer.
Abstract
Volumetric functional imaging is widely used for recording neuron activities in vivo, but there exist tradeoffs between the quality of the extracted calcium traces, imaging speed, and laser ...power. While deep-learning methods have recently been applied to denoise images, their applications to downstream analyses, such as recovering high-SNR calcium traces, have been limited. Further, these methods require temporally-sequential pre-registered data acquired at ultrafast rates. Here, we demonstrate a supervised deep-denoising method to circumvent these tradeoffs for several applications, including whole-brain imaging, large-field-of-view imaging in freely moving animals, and recovering complex neurite structures in
C. elegans
. Our framework has 30× smaller memory footprint, and is fast in training and inference (50–70 ms); it is highly accurate and generalizable, and further, trained with only small, non-temporally-sequential, independently-acquired training datasets (∼500 pairs of images). We envision that the framework will enable faster and long-term imaging experiments necessary to study neuronal mechanisms of many behaviors.
Professional association football is a game of talent. The success of a professional club hinges largely on its ability of assembling the best team. Building on a dataset of player transfer records ...among more than 400 clubs in 24 world-wide top class leagues from 2011 to 2015, this study aims to relate a club's success to its activities in the player transfer market from a network perspective. We confirm that modern professional football is indeed a money game, in which larger investment spent on the acquisition of talented players generally yields better team performance. However, further investigation shows that professional football clubs can actually play different strategies in surviving or even excelling this game, and the success of strategies is strongly associated to their network properties in the football player transfer network.
Robust and accurate behavioral tracking is essential for ethological studies. Common methods for tracking and extracting behavior rely on user adjusted heuristics that can significantly vary across ...different individuals, environments, and experimental conditions. As a result, they are difficult to implement in large-scale behavioral studies with complex, heterogenous environmental conditions. Recently developed deep-learning methods for object recognition such as Faster R-CNN have advantages in their speed, accuracy, and robustness. Here, we show that Faster R-CNN can be employed for identification and detection of Caenorhabditis elegans in a variety of life stages in complex environments. We applied the algorithm to track animal speeds during development, fecundity rates and spatial distribution in reproductive adults, and behavioral decline in aging populations. By doing so, we demonstrate the flexibility, speed, and scalability of Faster R-CNN across a variety of experimental conditions, illustrating its generalized use for future large-scale behavioral studies.
Developmental studies in multicellular model organisms such as
Caernohabditis elegans
rely extensively on the ability to cultivate and image animals repeatedly at the cell or subcellular level. ...However, standard high-resolution imaging techniques require the use of anaesthetics for immobilization, and may have undesirable side effects on development. Thus such techniques are not ideal in allowing the same animals to grow and be imaged throughout development to observe specific developmental processes. In this paper, we present a microfluidic system designed to overcome these difficulties. The system allows for long-term culture of
C. elegans
starting at L1 larval stage and repeated high-resolution imaging at physiological temperatures without using anaesthetics. We use a commercially available biocompatible polymer, Pluronic F127 for immobilization; this polymer is capable of a reversible thermo-sensitive sol-gel transition within ∼2 °C, which is well-controlled in the microfluidic chip. The gel phase is sufficient to immobilize the animals. While animals are not imaged, they are cultured in individual chambers in media containing nutrients required for development. We show here that this method facilitates time-lapse studies of single animals at high-resolution and lends itself to live imaging experiments on developmental processes and dynamic events.
We present a novel method to repeatedly immobilize
C. elegans
at physiological conditions. The microfluidic device also allows for long term culture and facilitates many long-term developmental studies.
Although recent therapeutic advances based on our understanding of molecular phenomena have prolonged the survival of melanoma patients, the prognosis of melanoma remains dismal and further ...understanding of the underlying mechanism of melanoma progression is needed. In this study, differential expression analyses revealed that many genes, including AKT1 and CDK2, play important roles in melanoma. Functional analyses of differentially expressed genes (DEGs), obtained from the GEO (Gene Expression Omnibus) database, indicated that high proliferative and metastatic abilities are the main characteristics of melanoma and that the PI3K and MAPK pathways play essential roles in melanoma progression. Among these DEGs, major facilitator superfamily domain-containing 12 (MFSD12) was found to have significantly and specifically upregulated expression in melanoma, and elevated MFSD12 level promoted cell proliferation by promoting cell cycle progression. Mechanistically, MFSD12 upregulation was found to activate PI3K signaling, and a PI3K inhibitor reversed the increase in cell proliferation endowed by MFSD12 upregulation. Clinically, high MFSD12 expression was positively associated with shorter overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS) in melanoma patients, and MFSD12 was an independent prognostic factor for OS and DFS in melanoma patients. Therapeutically, in vivo assays further confirmed that MFSD12 interference inhibited tumor growth and lung metastasis in melanoma. In conclusion, elevated MFSD12 expression promotes melanoma cell proliferation, and MFSD12 is a valuable prognostic biomarker and promising therapeutic target in melanoma.
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