Personal care products (PCPs) refer to a wide variety of items commonly characterized as health or beauty products. PCPs contain a number of ingredients, often including a wide range of endocrine ...disrupting chemicals such as phthalates and parabens. The present study examines the association between self-reported PCP use and prenatal sex-steroids and thyroid hormones levels in women from Puerto Rico. We recruited pregnant women (n = 1070) through the Puerto Rico PROTECT Cohort and collected blood, demographic and pregnancy-related data at recruitment and subsequent visits. PCP use in the 48-h preceding the blood sample was collected through self-reported questionnaires. Nine hormones (corticotropin-releasing hormone CRH, sex-hormone binding globulin SHBG, estriol E3, progesterone, testosterone, thyroid-stimulating hormone TSH, total triiodothyronine T3, total thyroxine T4, and free thyroxine fT4) were measured in maternal serum samples at two points during pregnancy. Linear mixed models with random intercepts were used to examine associations between PCP use and serum hormone levels. Use of cosmetics significantly increased with age, household income and education level (p < 0.01). Use of hair products, such as hair dyes and bleach, relaxers, and mousse, was associated with lower levels of all sex steroid hormones compared to non-use: SHBG (%Δ = −7.1, 95%CI: −12.4,-1.8), E3 (%Δ = −23.2, 95%CI: −32.2,-13.0), progesterone (%Δ = −21.5, 95%CI: −29.4,-12.9) and testosterone (%Δ = −21.5, 95%CI: −33.1,-7.8) adjusted for maternal age, education and pre-pregnancy body mass index. Our findings suggest that household income and education level influence PCP use among pregnant women in this study. Use of certain hair products was associated with lower concentrations of sex steroid hormones. Although there are limitations to questionnaire data, characterizing PCP use is inexpensive and may represent exposure from multiple classes of chemicals, including chemicals that may not specifically appear on product labels and/or have not been tested for endocrine disrupting potential, making it a useful complement to chemical biomarker data.
•PCPs use did not change between visits in this population of Puerto Rican women.•Household income and education level influenced use of cosmetics and other PCPs.•Use of certain hair products was associated with lower sex steroid hormones levels.•Self-reported PCP use questionnaires are useful complement to biomarker data.
We perform a spectral energy distribution fitting analysis on a COSMOS photometric sample covering the ultraviolet up to the farinfrared wavelengths and including emission lines from the Fiber ...Multi-Object Spectrograph (FMOS) survey. The sample consists of 182 objects with Hα and OIIIλ5007 emission line measurements lying in a redshift range of 1.40 < z < 1.68. We obtain robust estimates of the stellar mass and star-formation rate spanning over a range of 10 9.5 −10 11.5 M and 10 1 −10 3 M yr −1 from the Bayesian analysis performed with CIGALE and using continuum photometry and Hα fluxes. Combining photometry and spectroscopy gives secure estimations of the amount of dust attenuation for both continuum and line emissions. We obtain a median attenuation of A Hα = 1.16 ± 0.19 mag and A OIII = 1.41 ± 0.22 mag. Hα and OIIIλ5007 attenuations are found to increase with stellar mass, confirming previous findings with Hα. A difference of 57% in the attenuation experienced by emission lines and continuum is found to be in agreement with the emission lines being more attenuated than the continuum emission. Implementation of new CLOUDY HII-region models in CIGALE enables good fits of the Hα, Hβ, OIIIλ5007 emission lines with discrepancies smaller than 0.2 dex in the predicted fluxes. Fitting the NIIλ6584 line is found challenging due to well-known discrepancies in the locus of galaxies in the NII-BPT diagram at intermediate and high redshifts. We find a positive correlation between SFR and L OIIIλ5007 after correcting for dust attenuation and we derive the linear relation log 10 (SFR/M yr −1) = log 10 (L OIII /ergs s −1) − (41.20 ± 0.02). Leaving the slope as a free parameter leads to log 10 (SFR/M yr −1) = (0.83 ± 0.06) log 10 (L OIII /ergs s −1) − (34.01 ± 2.63). The spread in the relation is driven by differences in the gas-phase metallicity and ionization parameter accounting for a 0.24 dex and 1.1 dex of the dispersion, respectively. We report an average value of log U ≈ −2.85 for this sample of galaxies. Including HII-region models to fit simultaneously photometric data and emission line fluxes is paramount to analyses of upcoming data sets from large spectroscopic surveys of the future, such as MOONS and PFS.
Chagas disease (CD) treatment is limited to two therapeutic options: benznidazole (generally the first option in Spain) and nifurtimox. Both drugs present high rates of adverse reactions and ...treatment discontinuation and there is no consensus regarding the most effective administration schedule for benznidazole or how to prevent and manage treatment toxicity. We aim to compare the tolerability and treatment discontinuation rate between two different treatment schemes with benznidazole.
This was a prospective observational study of adult patients with CD, enrolled from January 2014 to March 2018 in two referral centres in Madrid (Spain). Participants were treated either with benznidazole 5 mg/kg/day (full dose) over 60 days (benznidazole standard dose scheme (BSD)), or with an escalating dose lasting 5 days up to a maximum of 300 mg/day (benznidazole increasing dose scheme (BID)).
471 patients were analysed: 201 in the BSD group and 270 in the BID group. There were no significant differences regarding age (40.4 (SD 8.7) vs 41 (SD 8.2) years), sex (74.1% (149/201) vs 68.5% (185/270) women), weight (69.4 (SD 12.8) vs 68.9 (SD 11) kg) or nationality (97.5% (196/201) vs 96.7% (261/270) Bolivians) between groups. There were also no differences in adverse reactions rate (55.2% (111/201) vs 55.6% (150/270)), number of adverse reactions per patient, adverse reactions type (except for arthralgias and myalgias which occurred more frequently in the BID group (0% (0/111) BSD vs 8% (12/150) BID; p 0.002)) and degree and time to first adverse reactions. There was significantly more treatment discontinuation (49.8% (100/201) vs 33.0% (89/270); p <0.001) in the BSD group, but not during the first 30 days of treatment (32.3% (65/201) vs 25.6% (69/270); p 0.08).
The use of increasing doses of benznidazole for 5 days and a maximum dose of 300 mg, does not significantly improve drug tolerability. However, while the treatment discontinuation rates were similar during the first 30 days of treatment, it may improve the treatment completion rate at 60 days.
How do people judge responsibility in collaborative tasks? Past work has proposed a number of metrics that people may use to attribute blame and credit to others, such as effort, competence, and ...force. Some theories consider only the actual effort or force (individuals are more responsible if they put forth more effort or force), whereas others consider counterfactuals (individuals are more responsible if some alternative behavior on their or their collaborator’s part could have altered the outcome). Across four experiments (N=717), we found that participants’ judgments are best described by a model that considers both actual and counterfactual effort. This finding generalized to an independent validation data set (N=99). Our results thus support a dual-factor theory of responsibility attribution in collaborative tasks.
We prove a general version of Bezout’s form of the Nullstellensatz for arbitrary fields. The corresponding sufficient and necessary condition only involves the local existence of multi-valued roots ...for each of the polynomials belonging to the ideal in consideration. Finally, this version implies the standard Nullstellensatz when the coefficient field is algebraically closed.
The physiological and endocrine benefits of sustained exercise in fish were largely demonstrated, and this work examines how the swimming activity can modify the effects of two diets (high-protein, ...HP: 54% proteins, 15% lipids; high-energy, HE: 50% proteins, 20% lipids) on different growth performance markers in gilthead sea bream juveniles. After 6 weeks of experimentation, fish under voluntary swimming and fed with HP showed significantly higher circulating growth hormone (GH) levels and plasma GH/insulin-like growth-1 (IGF-1) ratio than fish fed with HE, but under exercise, differences disappeared. The transcriptional profile of the GH-IGFs axis molecules and myogenic regulatory factors in liver and muscle was barely affected by diet and swimming conditions. Under voluntary swimming, fish fed with HE showed significantly increased mRNA levels of capn1, capn2, capn3, capns1a, n3, and ub, decreased gene and protein expression of Ctsl and Mafbx and lower muscle texture than fish fed with HP. When fish were exposed to sustained exercise, diet-induced differences in proteases’ expression and muscle texture almost disappeared. Overall, these results suggest that exercise might be a useful tool to minimize nutrient imbalances and that proteolytic genes could be good markers of the culture conditions and dietary treatments in fish.
•Validation of a non-expensive method for the analysis of inorganic arsenic in food.•The method performs well when compared to more sophisticated analytical approaches.•Intrinsic problems of ...inorganic arsenic analysis are discussed.•The determination of inorganic arsenic is particularly difficult in mussels.
A collaborative trial was conducted to determine the performance characteristics of an analytical method for the quantification of inorganic arsenic (iAs) in food.
The method is based on (i) solubilisation of the protein matrix with concentrated hydrochloric acid to denature proteins and allow the release of all arsenic species into solution, and (ii) subsequent extraction of the inorganic arsenic present in the acid medium using chloroform followed by back-extraction to acidic medium. The final detection and quantification is done by flow injection hydride generation atomic absorption spectrometry (FI-HG-AAS).
The seven test items used in this exercise were reference materials covering a broad range of matrices: mussels, cabbage, seaweed (hijiki), fish protein, rice, wheat, mushrooms, with concentrations ranging from 0.074 to 7.55mgkg−1.
The relative standard deviation for repeatability (RSDr) ranged from 4.1 to 10.3%, while the relative standard deviation for reproducibility (RSDR) ranged from 6.1 to 22.8%.
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