Purpose: The aim of the study was to explore the potential of performance on a Danish sentence repetition (SR) task--including specific morphological and syntactic properties--to identify ...difficulties in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) relative to typically developing (TD) children. Furthermore, the potential of the task as a clinical marker for Danish DLD was explored. Method: SR performance of children with DLD aged 5;10-14;1 (years;months; n = 27) and TD children aged 5;3-13;4 (n = 87) was investigated. Results: Compared to TD same-age peers, children with DLD were less likely to repeat the sentences accurately but more likely to make ungrammatical errors with respect to verb inflection and use of determiners and personal pronouns. Younger children with DLD also produced more word order errors that their TD peers. Furthermore, older children with DLD performed less accurately than younger TD peers, indicating that the SR task taps into morphosyntactic areas of particular difficulty for Danish children with DLD. The classification accuracy associated with SR performance showed high levels of sensitivity and specificity (> 90%) and likelihood ratios indicating good identification potential for clinical and future research purposes. Conclusion: SR performance has a strong potential for identifying children with DLD, also in Danish, and with a carefully designed SR task, performance has potential for revealing morphosyntactic difficulties.
Recent studies have found correlations between sentence-level tests and reading comprehension. However, the task demands of sentence-level tests are not well understood. The present study ...investigated syntactic knowledge as a construct by examining the convergent and discriminant validity of two sentence-level tasks, sentence comprehension and sentence repetition, designed to test syntactic knowledge and their relation with reading comprehension. Results from 86 Grade 6 students showed that the syntax tests were more highly correlated with each other than with tests of working memory and vocabulary. This suggests that the syntax measures tap into a set of skills that are at least partially separate from these other cognitive constructs. Furthermore, syntactic knowledge explained unique variance in reading comprehension beyond controls. The syntax tasks were working memory dependent, but working memory was not the primary reason why syntax tasks are correlated with reading comprehension.
•Attitude moderates the impact of labelling information on the choice of functional foods.•Health claims alone are not sufficient to guide consumers towards healthy choices.•The personal relevance of ...health benefits drives the choice of functional foods.•Increased awareness of nutraceutical benefits promotes healthy choices.
Our study is a part of the scientific and political debate on how to inform consumers about the health benefits of foods and guide their choices towards healthier diets. In particular, the study has investigated how attitude towards functional foods moderates the effect of the health claim and naturalness claim when choosing these products. For this purpose, we used a hybrid choice model that has allowed us to identify the determinants of attitude towards functional foods and then integrate said attitude into a choice function. The empirical study was conducted on biscuits, by analysing data from a representative sample of Italian (500) and Danish (506) consumers. The results provide novel evidence for both policy makers and manufacturers involved in fostering the demand for foods with enhanced nutraceutical characteristics.
•We investigated how states of attitudes to food shopping and cooking changed during the COVID-19 lockdown in Denmark.•People who changed attitude states were most likely to change towards more ...liking of food shopping and cooking.•Attitude states were linked to food literacy and buying behaviour.•People with stronger negative emotional reactions to the pandemic were more likely to change.
For this study, the authors measured attitudes toward shopping for food and cooking, before and during the first lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, among a sample of 526 Danish consumers, using an online survey. To analyse changes due to the lockdown, they applied a latent class Markov model, which revealed four states: middle of the road, love cooking (and like shopping), like shopping and cooking, and do not like shopping or cooking. In estimating transition probabilities, the findings reveal that most respondents remained in the same state before and during the lockdown, but those that changed were more likely to exhibit relatively higher liking of shopping and cooking. These states also reflect variations in people’s food literacy and self-reported food consumption. Finally, respondents with stronger negative emotional reactions to the lockdown were more likely to change their states.
Purpose: The authors' primary goal was to investigate the potential of past tense inflection as a clinical marker of Danish specific language impairment (SLI). They also wished to test the ...predictions of the extended optional infinitive (EOI) account and processing based accounts of SLI on Danish. Method: Using sentence completion and sentence repetition tasks, the authors investigated the use of past tense by 3 groups (n = 11 in each group): (a) children with SLI whose ages ranged from 5;2 (years;months) to 7;11; (b) children with typical language development matched on chronological age; and (c) children with typical language development matched on vocabulary. Results: Participants with SLI were less likely to produce past tense than were both typically developing control groups. In particular, only the children with SLI had difficulties with accurately producing past tense verbs during the sentence repetition task. Past tense accuracy was associated with children's productive vocabulary levels and proficiency with a nonword repetition task. Conclusion: Past tense use is potentially a clinical marker of Danish SLI, but more research is needed to confirm this. Results provided mixed support for competing accounts of SLI.
Background and Objectives
Current cancer immunotherapeutic treatment with PD‐1 inhibitors is administered systemically. However, a local treatment strategy may be advantageous as it could provide ...targeted drug delivery as well as attenuate side effects seen with systemic treatments. For keratinocyte cancers, where surgical excision is not always applicable, an alternate local treatment approach would be beneficial. This study aims to examine cutaneous pharmacokinetics and biodistribution of the PD‐1 inhibitor nivolumab, locally delivered either by ablative fractional laser (AFL)‐assisted passive diffusion or active intradermal injection, in vivo.
Materials and Methods
In vivo pig skin was either exposed to CO2 AFL (80 mJ/mb by two stacked pulses of 40 mJ/mb) at 5% or 15% density followed by topical application of nivolumab (1 mg/ml, 100 µl/10 × 10 mm) or intradermally injected with nivolumab (1 mg/ml, 100 µl). Cutaneous nivolumab delivery was evaluated at different timepoints (0, 1, 2, 4 hours and 2 days) at two tissue depths (100–800 and 900–1600 µm) by ELISA. Visualization of cutaneous biodistribution was shown in vertical tissue sections using HiLyte FluorTM 488 SE labeled nivolumab for fluorescence microscopy whereas nivolumab was DOTA‐tagged with Dysprosium before the laser ablation‐inductively coupled plasma‐mass spectrometry analysis (LA‐ICP‐MS).
Results
Our in vivo study revealed different pharmacokinetic and biodistribution patterns for the AFL‐ and injection techniques. A superficial horizontal band‐like uptake of nivolumab was provided with AFL‐assisted passive diffusion whereas a deep focal deposition was seen with active intradermal injection, compared with controls showing remnant deposition on the skin surface. AFL‐assisted nivolumab uptake in upper dermis peaked after 4 hours (p < 0.01). The cutaneous concentration of nivolumab achieved by intradermal injection was markedly higher than with AFL, the highest deposition with intradermal injection was detected at time 0 hours in both upper and deep dermis (p < 0.01) and decreased throughout the study period, although the concentration remained higher compared with saline control injections at all time points (0 hours –2 d) (p < 0.01).
Conclusion
Local cutaneous delivery of nivolumab with either AFL or intradermal injection revealed two different pharmacokinetic and biodistribution patterns. Passive AFL‐assisted diffusion of nivolumab resulted in enhanced uptake after 4 hours, while intradermal actively injected nivolumab showed immediate enhanced cutaneous deposition with retention up to 2 days after injection. The two local delivery techniques show potential for development of individualized treatment strategies depending on the clinical tumor appearance.
As governments, funding agencies and research organisations worldwide seek to maximise both the financial and non-financial returns on investment in research, the way the research process is ...organised and funded is becoming increasingly under scrutiny. There are growing demands and aspirations to measure research impact (beyond academic publications), to understand how science works, and to optimise its societal and economic impact. In response, a multidisciplinary practice called research impact assessment is rapidly developing. Given that the practice is still in its formative stage, systematised recommendations or accepted standards for practitioners (such as funders and those responsible for managing research projects) across countries or disciplines to guide research impact assessment are not yet available.In this statement, we propose initial guidelines for a rigorous and effective process of research impact assessment applicable to all research disciplines and oriented towards practice. This statement systematises expert knowledge and practitioner experience from designing and delivering the International School on Research Impact Assessment (ISRIA). It brings together insights from over 450 experts and practitioners from 34 countries, who participated in the school during its 5-year run (from 2013 to 2017) and shares a set of core values from the school's learning programme. These insights are distilled into ten-point guidelines, which relate to (1) context, (2) purpose, (3) stakeholders' needs, (4) stakeholder engagement, (5) conceptual frameworks, (6) methods and data sources, (7) indicators and metrics, (8) ethics and conflicts of interest, (9) communication, and (10) community of practice.The guidelines can help practitioners improve and standardise the process of research impact assessment, but they are by no means exhaustive and require evaluation and continuous improvement. The prima facie effectiveness of the guidelines is based on the systematised expert and practitioner knowledge of the school's faculty and participants derived from their practical experience and research evidence. The current knowledge base has gaps in terms of the geographical and scientific discipline as well as stakeholder coverage and representation. The guidelines can be further strengthened through evaluation and continuous improvement by the global research impact assessment community.
•Keratinocytes from Sca-1 knockout mice have reduced clonogenic potential.•Sca-1 knockout transcriptome differs from the wildtype transcriptome.•Sca-1 knockout mice have normal epidermal morphology.
...Stem Cell Antigen-1 (SCA-1) is a central positive marker for isolating stem cells in several tissues in the mouse. However, for the epidermis, this appears to be the opposite since lack of SCA-1 has been shown to identify keratinocyte populations with progenitor characteristics.
This study investigates the effect of SCA-1 knockout in murine keratinocytes. We compared Sca-1EGFP/EGFP knockout and wildtype mice with respect to the three-dimensional morphology of the epidermis, performed functional assays, and generated gene expression profiles on FACS sorted cells.
There were no morphological abnormalities on skin, fur, or hair follicles in transgenic knockout mice compared to wild type mice. SCA-1 knockout keratinocytes showed significantly reduced colony-forming efficiency, colony size and proliferation rate in vitro, however, SCA-1 knockout did not alter wound healing efficiency or keratinocyte proliferation rate in vivo. Moreover, gene expression profiling shows that the effect from knockout of SCA-1 in keratinocytes is dissimilar from what has been observed in other tissues. Additionally, tumor assay indicated that SCA-1 knockout decreases the number of formed papillomas.
The results indicate a more complex role for SCA-1, which might differ between epidermal keratinocytes during homeostasis and activated conditions.
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