610 Medizin und Gesundheit
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Background: The relationship between engagement in physical activity and the development of motor competence (MC) is considered to be reciprocal and dynamic throughout childhood and adolescence. The 10-month follow-up study aimed to explore this reciprocal relationship and investigated whether the relationship is mediated by the corresponding self-perception of MC (PMC).
Methods: A total of 51 children aged between 10 and 11 years (M = 10.27 [0.45]) participated in the study (52.9% boys, 47.1% girls). As an indicator for physical activity, the average vigorous physical activity (VPA) per day was measured by ActiGraph accelerometers. Two aspects of MC and PMC were recorded: self-movement and object movement. Saturated pathway models in a cross-lagged panel design with 2 measurement points were analyzed.
Results: Reciprocal and direct relationships between VPA and MC object movement respectively MC self-movement were not found in longitudinal analyses with PMC as a mediator. Indirect effects of MC at t1 on VPA at t2 via PMC were identified (self-movement: beta = 0.13, 95% confidence interval, 0.04 to 0.26; object movement: beta = 0.14, 95% confidence interval, 0.01 to 0.49).
Conclusion: The results highlight the importance of MC and PMC in promoting children's VPA. However, VPA does not drive the development of MC.
Synthesis and purification of peptide drugs for medical applications is a challenging task. The leech-derived factor hirudin is in clinical use as an alternative to heparin in anticoagulatory therapies. So far, recombinant hirudin is mainly produced in bacterial or yeast expression systems. We describe the successful development and application of an alternative protocol for the synthesis of active hirudin based on a cell-free protein synthesis approach. Three different cell lysates were compared, and the effects of two different signal peptide sequences on the synthesis of mature hirudin were determined. The combination of K562 cell lysates and the endogenous wild-type signal peptide sequence was most effective. Cell-free synthesized hirudin showed a considerably higher anti-thrombin activity compared to recombinant hirudin produced in bacterial cells.
The rapid emergence of online targeted political advertising has raised concerns over data privacy and what the government's response should be. This paper tested and confirmed the hypothesis that public attitudes toward stricter regulation of online targeted political advertising are partially motivated by partisan self-interest. We conducted an experiment using an online survey of 1549 Americans who identify as either Democrats or Republicans. Our findings show that Democrats and Republicans believe that online targeted political advertising benefits the opposing party. This belief is based on their conviction that their political opponents are more likely to be mobilized by online targeted political advertising than are supporters of their own party. We exogenously manipulated partisan self-interest considerations of a random subset of participants by truthfully informing them that, in the past, online targeted political advertising has benefited Republicans. Our findings show that Republicans informed about this had less favorable attitudes toward regulation than did their uninformed co-partisans. This suggests that Republicans' attitudes regarding stricter regulation are based not solely on concerns about privacy violations, but also, in part, are caused by beliefs about partisan advantage. The results imply that people are willing to accept violations of their privacy if their preferred party benefits from the use of online targeted political advertising.
Neural signatures of temporal regularity and recurring patterns in random tonal sound sequences
(2021)
The auditory system is highly sensitive to recurring patterns in the acoustic input - even in otherwise unstructured material, such as white noise or random tonal sequences. Electroencephalography (EEG) research revealed a characteristic negative potential to periodically recurring auditory patterns - a response, which has been interpreted as memory trace-related and specific, rather than as a sign of periodicity-driven entrainment. Here, we aim to disentangle these two possible contributions by investigating the influence of a periodic sound sequence's inherent temporal regularity on event-related potentials. Participants were presented continuous sequences of short tones of random pitch, with some sequences containing a recurring pattern, and asked to indicate whether they heard a repetition. Patterns were either spaced equally across the random sequence (isochronous condition) or with a temporal jitter (jittered condition), which enabled us to differentiate between event-related potentials (and thus processing operations associated with a memory trace for a repeated pattern) and the periodic nature of the repetitions. A negative recurrence-related component could be observed independently of temporal regularity, was pattern-specific, and modulated by across trial repetition of the pattern. Critically, isochronous pattern repetition induced an additional early periodicity-related positive component, which started to build up already before the pattern onset and which was elicited undampedly even when the repeated pattern was occasionally not presented. This positive component likely reflects a sensory driven entrainment process that could be the foundation of a behavioural benefit in detecting temporally regular repetitions.
Odd-chain fatty acids (OCFA) are inversely associated with type-2-diabetes in epidemiological studies. They are considered as a biomarker for dairy intake because fermentation in ruminants yields high amounts of propionate, which is used as the primer for lipogenesis. Recently, we demonstrated endogenous OCFA synthesis from propionate in humans and mice, but how this is affected by microbial colonization is still unexplored. Here, we investigated the effect of increasing microbiota complexity on hepatic lipid metabolism and OCFA levels in different dietary settings. Germ-free (GF), gnotobiotic (SIH, simplified human microbiota) or conventional (CONV) C3H/HeOuJ-mice were fed a CHOW or high-fat diet with inulin (HFI) to induce microbial fermentation. We found that hepatic lipogenesis was increased with increasing microbiota complexity, independently of diet. In contrast, OCFA formation was affected by diet as well as microbiota. On CHOW, hepatic OCFA and intestinal gluconeogenesis decreased with increasing microbiota complexity (GF > SIH > CONV), while cecal propionate showed a negative correlation with hepatic OCFA. On HFI, OCFA levels were highest in SIH and positively correlated with cecal propionate. The propionate content in the CHOW diet was 10 times higher than that of HFI. We conclude that bacterial propionate production affects hepatic OCFA formation, unless this effect is masked by dietary propionate intake.
There is an urgent need for screening of patients with a communicable viral disease to cut infection chains. Recently, we demonstrated that ion mobility spectrometry coupled with a multicapillary column (MCC-IMS) is able to identify influenza-A infections in patients' breath. With a decreasing influenza epidemic and upcoming SARS-CoV-2 infections we proceeded further and analyzed patients with suspected SARS-CoV-2 infections. In this study, the nasal breath of 75 patients (34 male, 41 female, aged 64.4 +/- 15.4 years) was investigated by MCC-IMS for viral infections. Fourteen were positively diagnosed with influenza-A infection and sixteen with SARS-CoV-2 by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) of nasopharyngeal swabs. In one patient RT-PCR was highly suspicious of SARS-CoV-2 but initially inconclusive. The remaining 44 patients served as controls. Breath fingerprints for specific infections were assessed by a combination of cluster analysis and multivariate statistics. There were no significant differences in gender or age according to the groups. In the cross validation of the discriminant analysis 72 of the 74 clearly defined patients could be correctly classified to the respective group. Even the inconclusive patient could be mapped to the SARS-CoV-2 group by applying the discrimination functions. Conclusion: SARS-CoV-2 infection and influenza-A infection can be detected with the help of MCC-IMS in breath in this pilot study. As this method provides a fast non-invasive diagnosis it should be further developed in a larger cohort for screening of communicable viral diseases. A validation study is ongoing during the second wave of COVID-19.
Trial registration: ClinicalTrial.gov, NCT04282135 Registered 20 February 2020-Retrospectively registered,
No evidence of growth impairment after forced migration in Polish school children after World War II
(2023)
Background: Migration is omnipresent. It can come hand in hand with emotional stress which is known to influence the growth of children.
Objective: The aim of this study was to analyse whether type of migration (forced or voluntary) and the geographic direction had influenced the growth of Polish children after World War II.
Sample and Methods: A sub dataset of 2,208 individuals between the ages of 2-20, created from data of the 2nd Polish Anthropological Survey carried out in 1966–1969, including anthropometrical data and social and demographic information based on questionnaire, was used to analyse migration effects.
Results: No association could be found between the direction of migration and the height of the children. The confidence intervals of the means of all classified migration categories overlap significantly and the effect size of the influence of migration category on height is ds=.140, which is too low to see any effects, even if there were one.
Conclusion: Neither forced nor voluntary migration in Poland after World War II led to a change in height in children of migrating families.
The St. Nicolas House Algorithm (SNHA) finds association chains of direct dependent variables in a data set. The dependency is based on the correlation coefficient, which is visualized as an undirected graph. The network prediction is improved by a bootstrap routine. It enables the computation of the empirical p-value, which is used to evaluate the significance of the predicted edges. Synthetic data generated with the Monte Carlo method were used to firstly compare the Python package with the original R package, and secondly to evaluate the predicted network using the sensitivity, specificity, balanced classification rate and the Matthew's correlation coefficient (MCC). The Python implementation yields the same results as the R package. Hence, the algorithm was correctly ported into Python. The SNHA scores high specificity values for all tested graphs. For graphs with high edge densities, the other evaluation metrics decrease due to lower sensitivity, which could be partially improved by using bootstrap,while for graphs with low edge densities the algorithm achieves high evaluation scores. The empirical p-values indicated that the predicted edges indeed are significant.
Background: Assessing short-term growth in humans is still fraught with difficulties. Especially when looking for small variations and increments, such as mini growth spurts, high precision instruments or frequent measurements are necessary. Daily measurements however require a lot of effort, both for anthropologists and for the subjects. Therefore, new sophisticated approaches are needed that reduce fluctuations and reveal underlying patterns.
Objectives: Changepoints are abrupt variations in the properties of time series data. In the context of growth, such variations could be variation in mean height. By adjusting the variance and using different growth models, we assessed the ability of changepoint analysis to analyse short-term growth and detect mini growth spurts.
Sample and Methods: We performed Bayesian changepoint analysis on simulated growth data using the bcp package in R. Simulated growth patterns included stasis, linear growth, catch-up growth, and mini growth spurts. Specificity and a normalised variant of the Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) were used to assess the algorithm’s performance. Welch’s t-test was used to compare differences of the mean.
Results: First results show that changepoint analysis can detect mini growth spurts. However, the ability to detect mini growth spurts is highly dependent on measurement error. Data preparation, such as ranking and rotating time series data, showed negligible improvements. Missing data was an issue and may affect the prediction quality of the classification metrics.
Conclusion: Changepoint analysis is a promising tool to analyse short-term growth. However, further optimisation and analysis of real growth data is needed to make broader generalisations.
Human growth data analysis and statistics – the 5th Gülpe International Student Summer School
(2023)
The Summer School in Gülpe (Ecological Station of the University of Potsdam) offers an exceptional learning opportunity for students to apply their knowledge and skills to real-world problems. With the guidance of experienced human biologists, statisticians, and programmers, students have the unique chance to analyze their own data and gain valuable insights. This interdisciplinary setting not only bridges different research areas but also leads to highly valuable outputs. The progress of students within just a few days is truly remarkable, especially when they are motivated and receive immediate feedback on their questions, problems, and results. The Summer School covers a wide range of topics, with this year’s focus mainly on two areas: understanding the impact of socioeconomic and physiological factors on human development and mastering statistical techniques for analyzing data such as changepoint analysis and the St. Nicolas House Analysis (SNHA) to visualize interacting variables. The latter technique, born out of the Summer School’s emphasis on gaining comprehensive data insights and understanding major relationships, has proven to be a valuable tool for researchers in the field. The articles in this special issue demonstrate that the Summer School in Gülpe stands as a testament to the power of practical learning and collaboration. Students who attend not only gain hands-on experience but also benefit from the expertise of professionals and the opportunity to engage with peers from diverse disciplines.