Urine Test For Fatigue Could Help Prevent Accidents

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Analytical Chemistry

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Newswise — Doctors, pilots, air traffic controllers and bus drivers have at least one thing in common — if they're exhausted at work, they could be putting lives at risk. But the development of a new urine test, reported in the ACS journal Analytical Chemistry, could help monitor just how weary they are. The results could potentially reduce fatigue-related mistakes by allowing workers to recognize when they should take a break.

The effects of fatigue have long been recognized and studied as a problem in the transportation and healthcare industries. In the early 2000s, studies published in scientific journals reported that fatigue-related mistakes were linked to thousands of vehicular crashes every year, and were a major concern in patient safety. Weariness can cause anyone on or off the job to lose motivation and focus, and become drowsy. Although very common, these symptoms come with biochemical changes that are not well understood. Zhenling Chen, Xianfa Xu and colleagues set out to determine whether a urine test could detect these changes.

The researchers analyzed urine samples from dozens of air traffic controllers working in civil aviation before and after an 8-hour shift on the job. Out of the thousands of metabolites detected, the study identified three that could serve as indicators of fatigue. Further work is needed to validate what they found, the researchers say, but their initial results represent a new way to investigate and monitor fatigue — and help prevent worn-out workers from making potentially dangerous errors.

The authors acknowledge funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Civil Aviation Administration of China.

ARTICLE #1 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Application of LC-MS-Based Global Metabolomic Profiling Methods to Human Mental Fatigue"

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CONTACT:
Zhenling Chen, Ph.D.
Civil Aviation Medicine Center
Civil Aviation Administration of China (Civil Aviation Hospital)
Beijing, China
Phone: 86-10-8576-2244-2322
Email: chenzhenling@camc-caac.cn

or

Xianfa Xu, M.D.
Civil Aviation Medicine Center
Civil Aviation Administration of China (Civil Aviation Hospital)
Beijing, China
Phone: 86-10-8578-2661
Email: xuxianfa@hotmail.com

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Don’t Share, Don’t Ask: Physicians Need Better Screening Practices To Determine Sexual Partners, History

• 
  Credit: Saint Louis University.
  Katie Heiden-Rootes, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of medical family therapy in Family and Community Medicine at Saint Louis University School of Medicine.

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Saint Louis University, Same Sex, Family Therapy, SLU, Medical Records

Newswise — ST. LOUIS – Research from Saint Louis University finds that male and female same-sex partnered patients fail to identify as such in medical records and that failure may contribute to poorer health outcomes.

The research by Katie Heiden-Rootes, Ph.D., assistant professor of medical family therapy in Family and Community Medicine at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, calls for more consistent screening of the sexual partnering of patients to identify patients at greater risk of adverse health problems.

“There is a stigma that still exists with patients in telling the full truth to their physician,” Heiden-Rootes said. “Gay, lesbian and bisexual patients worry about how their physician will react to them.”

The findings point to a need for well-rounded cultural sensitivity training for physicians and gender-neutral language in medical forms, Heiden-Rootes said.

“Doctors are missing a lot of data on sexual partnering by not working towards more complete records,” Heiden-Rootes said. “By not asking those questions about romantic partnerships and spouses, they could be missing a chance to connect with their patients and create a relationship with open communication.”

Heiden-Rootes’ study, which looked at the medical records of patients seen at primary care clinics, found only 44.2 percent of medical records included information about the sexual partners of patients.

“Comparison of Medical Diagnoses among Same-Sex and Opposite-Sex-Partnered Patients” was published online Nov. 9in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine.

The study looked at a sample of opposite sex and same sex partnered patients, based on medical record diagnoses and identified specific medical needs as well as the impact of socioeconomic issues for lesbians and gay patients in primary care.

“By keeping sexual behavior and partnering a secret we are missing a chance to talk about preventative measures and reach out to someone who may be struggling with depression or possibly involved in sexually risky behavior that their partner does not know about,” Heiden-Rootes said. “We need to ask better questions without making assumptions,” she said.

Eligible patients in the study were those who self-reported being sexually active and identified the gender of their partner in their medical history forms. The research found that there is not a consistent policy across clinics for updating or maintaining missing information from patient history forms.

Both male and female same-sex partnered patients were more likely than opposite-sex partnered patients, to be in lower socio-economic areas and have diagnoses of substance abuse, depression and are more likely to smoke. Women in the sample were more likely to be obese.

Co-authors include Joanne Salas, MPH; Jeffrey F. Scherrer, Ph.D.; F. David Schneider, M.D., MSPH; and Craig W. Smith, Ph.D.

Established in 1836, Saint Louis University School of Medicine has the distinction of awarding the first medical degree west of the Mississippi River. The school educates physicians and biomedical scientists, conducts medical research, and provides health care on a local, national and international level. Research at the school seeks new cures and treatments in five key areas: infectious disease, liver disease, cancer, heart/lung disease, and aging and brain disorders.

Science For Sweet Tooths

• 
  
  Credit: Photo: Martin Dee
  UBC’s Xiaonan Lu and Yaxi Hu are testing antioxidant levels in raw cocoa beans to chocolate bars.

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Newswise — Food scientists at the University of British Columbia have developed a faster and cheaper way to quantify antioxidant levels in chocolate. It’s a method they plan to use in new research to help uncover when antioxidant levels rise and fall during the manufacturing process, from raw cocoa beans to chocolate bars.

“Our method predicts the antioxidant levels in chocolate in under a minute, compared to the industry standard that can take several hours or even days,” said Xiaonan Lu, an assistant professor in food, nutrition and health in the faculty of land and food systems, who developed the method alongside PhD student Yaxi Hu. “It’s not a substitute for the traditional method used at the moment, but it does show a strong correlation for being just as reliable.”

The UBC method uses infrared spectroscopy, a technology that can be used to illuminate infrared light onto chocolate samples. The infrared spectra record the chemical composition of each sample, including the amount of polyphenols, micronutrients with high antioxidant properties. The traditional method relies on biochemical tests to read absorbance values and can be quite time consuming and expensive.

“Testing for antioxidant levels can give chocolatiers guidance on which cocoa beans to select, or how to improve their processing parameters,” said Hu.

Chocolate is made from cocoa beans and is manufactured through several processing stages, including drying, roasting and fermentation of the beans. The UBC food scientists have started to use their method to measure cocoa bean samples from around the world in each stage to determine when antioxidant levels are at their highest and lowest.

“If we identify drying as the step that significantly lowers the bean’s antioxidant properties, for example, we will want to develop a strategy to reduce the drying time, or drying temperature,” Lu said.

It could be considered incredibly valuable information for chocolate companies who want to make products high in antioxidants or appeal more to health-conscious consumers.

Antioxidants benefit human health and help contribute to the prevention of cancers, vision loss and heart diseases. Antioxidant compounds are commonly found in foods like pecans, blueberries and chocolate.

Lu and Hu’s research on cocoa beans is in its early stages as they test hundreds of samples. The method they developed to test for antioxidant levels was funded by a local chocolatier in Metro Vancouver, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and by the non-profit MITACS.

The UBC food scientists hope to attract additional funding, particularly from a major chocolate company, to further their studies.

Parts of their existing research were published earlier this year in a study, Determination of antioxidant capacity and phenolic content of chocolate by attenuated total reflectance-Fourier transformed-infrared spectroscopy, in the journal Food Chemistry.

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Parents Should Avoid Pressuring Young Children Over Grades Compassion,

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Journal of Youth and Adolescence

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Newswise — New research from ASU suggests parents shouldn't obsess over grades and extracurricular activities for young schoolchildren, especially if such ambitions come at the expense of social skills and kindness.

Doing so, the study says, can work against helping kids become well-adjusted and successful later in life.

"When parents emphasize children's achievement much more than their compassion and decency during the formative years, they are sowing the seeds of stress and poorer well-being, seen as early as sixth grade," said Suniya Luthar, a Foundation professor of psychology at ASU and one of the co-authors of the study.

"In order to foster well-being and academic success during the critical years surrounding early adolescence, our findings suggest that parents should accentuate kindness and respect for others at least as much as (or more than) stellar academic performance and extracurricular accolades."

The study, "When mothers and fathers are seen as disproportionately valuing achievements: Implications for adjustment among upper middle class youth," is published in the current early online edition of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence. Luthar co-authored the study with Lucia Ciciolla of Oklahoma State University, Alexandria Curlee, an ASU doctoral student, and Jason Karageorge, a psychologist in private practice in San Francisco.

The study focused on perceptions of parents' values among 506 sixth grade students from an affluent community. Kids were asked to rank the top three of six things their parents valued for them. Three values were about personal successes such as good grades and a successful later career, and the other three were about kindness and decency towards others.

The researchers examined underlying patterns on scores based on children's perceptions of their parents' achievement emphasis (relative to children's kindness to others). These patterns on perceived achievement emphasis were compared against the children's school performance and actions as measured by grade point average and in-class behaviors.

The authors tried to determine if there were differences in how children were doing psychologically and academically, depending on their parents' values. They chose students entering middle school because of the immense changes that children experience at this stage, both physiologically and psychologically. Results showed that mothers and fathers perceived emphases on achievement versus interpersonal kindness played a key role in the child's personal adjustment and academic performance, as did perceptions of parents' criticism.

Specifically, Luthar said that the best outcomes were among children who perceived their mothers and fathers as each valuing kindness toward others as much as, or more than, achievements. Much poorer outcomes were seen among children who perceived either mothers or fathers valuing their achievements more highly than they valued being kind to others. These youth experienced more internalizing symptoms, such as depression and anxiety, externalizing or acting out behaviors and lower self-esteem, as well as more parental criticism. And paradoxically given their parents high emphases on achievements, these students also had lower GPAs, and were reported by teachers to have more learning problems and disruptive behavior at school.

The findings demonstrate the value of being socially oriented, Luthar said. "It is beneficial for kids to be strongly connected with their social networks, whereas focusing too much on external validations (such as grades, extra-curricular honors) for their sense of self-worth can lead to greater insecurity, anxiety and overall distress."

What was surprising in the study, Ciciolla said, was how strongly children's psychological and academic performance, consistently across a number of different measures, were tied to what children believed their parents cared most about. And it did not matter much whether both parents or either parent were thought to more highly value achievement than kindness to others -- having disproportionate emphasis on achievement coming from either parent was generally harmful.

It was also surprising, she said, that children who viewed their parents as valuing kindness to others much more highly than achievement did not appear to be suffering academically.

"It seems that emphasizing kindness as a top priority may not take the spotlight off achievement, because we found that these children did very well over all, including in their academics," Ciciolla explained. "But when children believed their parents cared most about achievement, possibly related to how parents communicated this message and if it came across as critical, they did worse across the board."

"To be clear," said Ciciolla, "our data did not show that encouraging achievement in itself is bad. It becomes destructive when it comes across as critical, and when it overshadows, or does not co-exist with, a simultaneous value on more intrinsic goals that are oriented toward personal growth, interpersonal connections and community well-being."

"The key is balance," added Luthar. "Not pushing kids to achieve or succeed at the expense of maintaining close relationships to others. And, we as parents must watch our tones," she cautioned, "because sometimes, what we might think is encouragement to perform better comes across to our kids as criticism for not being 'good enough' by their standards."

"The more parents are able to balance their encouragement of personal success with encouragement of maintaining kindness and personal decency, the more likely it is that children will do well," she added. "This is especially true for kids in high achieving schools and communities where the reverberating message they hear from their earliest years is that above all else they must distinguish themselves as top-notch, or the very best, across their various activities, academic as well as extracurricular."

###

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Research at FAU has found that neurological diseases, including he... – Florida Atlantic University Wildlife Researchers Study Impact of Wind Energy, Mercury, Oil Spills and Other Human Cultural Developments on Wildlife BRI's mission is to conduct scientific investigations into human impacts on the environment to better understand ecological health through the lens of animals. – Biodiversity Research Institute (BRI) Lifestyle & Social Sciences We Like What Experts Like - and What Is Expensive Whether Peter Paul Rubens or Damien Hirst – the personal taste of art can be argued. Scientists from the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Vienna have now shown that the individual taste of art is also dependent on social factors. The pers... – University of Vienna Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts Subsidized Housing Works Better for Some Kids Than Others Living in subsidized housing seems to give a boost to children with high standardized test scores and few behavior problems, but it has the opposite effect on students who score poorly and have behavioral issues, a new study finds. – Johns Hopkins University American Journal of Community Psychology, Nov-2016 Young Children’s Spatial Talk Predicts Their Spatial Abilities In a study published this month in the journal Child Development, UW-Madison researcher Hilary Miller shows preschool age kids often skip location words and lean on other relevant information to describe important spatial details. – University of Wisconsin-Madison Child Development Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation May Help People Manage Their Drive for Gambling, Sex, Alcohol or Overeating UCLA study looks at theta burst stimulation as intervention in problem behaviors – University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Health Sciences PLOS One Parents Should Avoid Pressuring Young Children Over Grades New research from ASU suggests parents shouldn't obsess over grades and extracurricular activities for young schoolchildren, especially if such ambitions come at the expense of social skills and kindness. – Arizona State University (ASU) Journal of Youth and Adolescence Saving Lives: Kansas State University Helps Provide Trucks, Equipment for Rural Fire Departments The Kansas Forest Service, which is housed at Kansas State University, provides trucks and equipment for rural fire departments. – Kansas State University New Website Uses Big Data to Address Underrepresentation of Women in Philosophy A new website created by faculty and students at Binghamton University, State University of New York ranks university philosophy departments and academic journals by gender in order to draw attention to the underrepresentation of women in philosophy.... – Binghamton University, State University of New York Northwest Philosophy Conference 2016 American College of Radiology (ACR) Statement on the Nomination of Rep. Tom Price as HHS Secretary The American College of Radiology (ACR) applauds the selection of Representative Tom Price (R-GA), MD, as President-Elect Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). – American College of Radiology (ACR) Daniel Resasco Named Inaugural Gallogly Chair It is the great pleasure and honor of the School of Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering to announce that Dr. Daniel Resasco was named the Inaugural Gallogly Chair of the Gallogly College of Engineering this September, pending Regents’ ap... – University of Oklahoma, Gallogly College of Engineering Rutgers Licenses Risk Terrain Modeling Software to SUNY Cortland RTMDx, a program developed by criminologists Joel Caplan and Leslie Kennedy at Rutgers University–Newark, is now being licensed to SUNY Cortland for classroom use. – Rutgers' Office of Research and Economic Development Business News The Neediest Case… or the Prettiest Face? On Giving Tuesday, holiday donation campaigns launch into high gear, with various year-end appeals supporting a whole array of causes. But how do people decide where to donate their money?  They know that they should give to the neediest cases, but ... – Washington University in St. Louis Journal of Marketing Research Lawrence Livermore Lab Honored for Military Recruiting Programs