Are Active Video Games Effective at Eliciting Moderate-Intensity Physical Activity in Children, and Do They Enjoy Playing Them?

Background: Despite current physical activity (PA) guidelines, children spend an average of 1-3 hours/day playing video games. Some video games offer physically active components as part of gameplay. We sought to determine if these active video games (AVGs) can elicit at least moderate PA in children, identify game elements important for PA, and determine if they are fun to play.

Improving remote lifestyle intervention studies in children: Participant and caregiver feedback of the smart heart study.

Objectives: We sought to describe and analyze the quantitative and qualitative feedback obtained from participants and their caregivers of the Smart Heart study, a successful 12-month lifestyle intervention for children with overweight or obesity and congenital heart disease that provided remote lifestyle counseling, to improve future lifestyle interventions in children.

Methods: Thirty-six participants and caregivers were polled using a standard program evaluation questionnaire at the end of the intervention. Feedback was compiled into themes, and facilitators and barriers to program success were identified.

Increased blood pressure is associated with increased carotid artery intima-media thickness in children with repaired coarctation of the aorta.

Objectives: The intima-media thickness of the common carotid artery (cIMT) is a good noninvasive surrogate marker for cardiovascular disease. Regular cIMT monitoring in children with congenital heart disease has great potential. We sought to determine which anthropomorphic and haemodynamic variables were significantly associated with the cIMT in paediatric patients with obesity and children with repaired coarctation of the aorta (CoA).

Impact of Obesity on Noninvasive Cardiac Hemodynamic Measurement by Electrical Cardiometry in Adults With Aortic Stenosis.

Objectives: There are substantial potential benefits to noninvasive cardiac monitoring methods, such as electrical cardiometry (EC), over more invasive methods, including significantly reduced risk of complications, lower up-front and operational costs, ease of use, and continuous monitoring. To take advantage of these technologies, clinical equivalence to currently established methods must be determined. The authors sought to determine if the noninvasive measurement of cardiac index (CI) by EC was clinically equivalent to thermodilution (TD) in adult patients with aortic stenosis (AS).

Non-invasive measurement of cardiac output in children with repaired coarctation of the aorta using electrical cardiometry compared to transthoracic Doppler echocardiography.

Objective: To evaluate the equivalence of the ICON electrical cardiometry (EC) haemodynamic monitor to measure cardiac output (CO) relative to transthoracic Doppler echocardiography (TTE) in paediatric patients with repaired coarctation of the aorta (CoA).

Approach: A group of n  =  28 CoA patients and n  =  27 matched controls were enrolled. EC and TTE were performed synchronously on each participant and CO measurements compared using linear regression and Bland-Altman analysis.

Remote Lifestyle Counseling Influences Cardiovascular Health Outcomes in Youth with Overweight or Obesity and Congenital Heart Disease.

Background: Children with overweight/obesity and congenital heart disease (CHD) are at increased cardiovascular risk. A lifestyle intervention may help reduce these risks. We sought to determine the feasibility of a smartphone-based lifestyle intervention to improve cardiovascular health outcomes in children with overweight/obesity and CHD.

The chemiluminescence based Ziplex automated workstation focus array reproduces ovarian cancer Affymetrix GeneChip expression profiles.

Background: As gene expression signatures may serve as biomarkers, there is a need to develop technologies based on mRNA expression patterns that are adaptable for translational research. Xceed Molecular has recently developed a Ziplex technology, that can assay for gene expression of a discrete number of genes as a focused array. The present study has evaluated the reproducibility of the Ziplex system as applied to ovarian cancer research of genes shown to exhibit distinct expression profiles initially assessed by Affymetrix GeneChip analyses.

Identifying leukocyte gene expression patterns associated with plasma lipid levels in human subjects.

Plasma lipid levels have been known to be risk factors for atherosclerosis for decades, and in recent years it has become accepted that inflammation is a crucial event in the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis. In this study, we investigated the relationship between plasma lipids and leukocytes by profiling and analyzing leukocyte gene expression in response to plasma lipid levels. We discovered several interesting patterns of leukocyte gene expression: (1) the expression of a number of immune response- and inflammation-related genes are correlated with plasma lipid levels; (2) genes involved in lipid metabolism and in the electron transport chain were positively correlated with triglycerides and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL) levels, and negatively correlated with high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL) levels; (3) genes involved in platelet activation were negatively correlated with HDL levels; (4) transcription factors regulating lipogenesis-related genes were correlated with plasma lipid levels; (5) a number of genes correlated with plasma lipid levels were found to be located in the regions of known quantitative trait loci (QTLs) associated with hyperlipemia.

The peripheral blood transcriptome dynamically reflects system wide biology: a potential diagnostic tool.

In our genome-wide survey of gene expression in human peripheral blood cells using both an expressed sequence tag (EST) and a microarray hybridization approach, we identified the expression of a large proportion (approximately 80%) of the genes encoded in the human genome. Comparison of the peripheral blood transcriptome with genes expressed in nine different human tissue types revealed that expression of over 80% was shared with any given tissue. We also sought to determine whether those gene transcripts undetected by these methods were also expressed in peripheral blood cells.