Int J Environ Res Public Health
March 2023
Waste sorting is a practical way of handling the garbage and an effective strategy for facilitating sustainable waste management. This research extended the theory of planned behavior (TPB) with self-identity and moral norms to predict waste sorting intentions in a heritage context of tourism. A total of 403 valid self-administrated questionnaires were achieved at a heritage destination in China.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe effect of hotel employee resilience during major crises lacks sufficient empirical investigation. This research aimed to develop a conceptual model of hotel employee resilience effects on turnover intentions and service quality with belief restoration as mediation and challenge stressors and perceived risk as moderation variables. A questionnaire survey was conducted with 28 star-rated hotels (including two 3-star, fifteen 4-star, and eleven 5-star hotels) in southeastern, northeastern, central, and western China against the background of the COVID-19 pandemic, and with operational (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis review considers recent challenges to, and changes within, narrative medicine as a paradigm for humanities-based medical education. It suggests that, while narrative medicine has often been criticised for emphasising narrative at the expense of other dimensions of human experience, newer criticism has focused more on its relationship with other areas of medical knowledge. In different ways, recent work has shown greater interest in taking in humanities perspectives on their own terms, rather than (this is the charge against narrative medicine) instrumentalising them as diagnostic tools.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHow to save resources and protect the environment at destinations is one of the hot issues in tourism. One effective solution is to cultivate tourist resource-saving behavioral intentions (TRSBI). Prior studies mainly use Structural equation modeling (SEM) to explore its antecedents, whereas other potential methods (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResidents' environmental citizenship behavior is essential to the environmental protection and sustainable development of rural destinations. However, previous research with regards to environmental citizenship behavior has focused on an employee perspective, rather than a resident one. Through the theoretical lens of the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) model, our research examined how perceived environmental CSR (ECSR) contributes to residents' environmental citizenship behavior, with resident-environment relationship quality acting as the organism.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe aim of this research was to examine the long- and short-run relationships among real expenditures on outbound tourism from China, economic growth and international trade for the period of 1995 to 2018, applying a newly developed cointegration test-the Bootstrap Autoregressive Distributed Lag framework. Evidence of cointegration was found when expenditures on outbound tourism served as the dependent variable, and economic growth and international trade were important factors affecting outbound tourism from China. For the short-run, a two-way Granger causality relationship was detected between economic growth and outbound tourism expenditures, and the feedback was confirmed between outbound tourism expenditures and international trade.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
October 2022
Improper waste disposal of tourists has detrimental impacts on the environment, economy, and people in rural destinations. Separating at the source is an effective means to mitigate these adverse impacts on rural destinations. Hence, identifying factors influencing tourists' waste sorting intentions in rural destinations is critical to the sustainability of rural tourism and rural land.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
December 2021
This research analyzed the impact of environmental regulations and their power in suppressing tourism carbon emissions. The results showed that: (1) four types of environmental regulations had significant inhibiting effects on tourism carbon emissions, but different types of regulations had varying effects; and (2) environmental regulations had a significant time lag effect on tourism carbon emissions. The decay rates of the environmental regulation effects were dissimilar for supervisory management, market incentives, command and control, and public participation; and (3) environmental regulations had dissimilar influences on tourism carbon emissions at the regional level.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
October 2021
Medical, health and wellness tourism and travel represent a dynamic and rapidly growing multi-disciplinary economic activity and field of knowledge. This research responds to earlier calls to integrate research on travel medicine and tourism. It critically reviews the literature published on these topics over a 50-year period (1970 to 2020) using CiteSpace software.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe field of cell and gene therapy (GT) is expanding rapidly and there is undoubtedly a wave of enthusiasm and anticipation for what these treatments could achieve next. Here we assessed the worldwide landscape of GT assets currently in early clinical development (clinical trial phase 1/2 or about to enter clinical trial). We included all gene therapies, i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNordisk Alkohol Nark
August 2017
Introduction: Alcohol ranks as a major risk factor for health-related harm and mortality. Older males who encounter alcohol problems late in life are an under-studied part of the affected population. This article seeks to broaden our understanding of this group by combining empirical data with humanistic cultural analysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDysbindin-1, a protein that regulates aspects of early and late brain development, has been implicated in the pathobiology of schizophrenia. As the functional roles of the three major isoforms of dysbindin-1, (A, B, and C) remain unknown, we generated a novel mutant mouse, dys-1A, with selective loss of dysbindin-1A and investigated schizophrenia-related phenotypes in both males and females. Loss of dysbindin-1A resulted in heightened initial exploration and disruption in subsequent habituation to a novel environment, together with heightened anxiety-related behavior in a stressful environment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhosphatidylinositol 4-kinase type IIIα (PI4KA) is a host factor essential for hepatitis C virus replication and hence is a target for drug development. PI4KA has also been linked to endoplasmic reticulum exit sites and generation of plasma membrane phosphoinositides. Here, we developed highly specific and potent inhibitors of PI4KA and conditional knock-out mice to study the importance of this enzyme in vitro and in vivo.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Physiol Endocrinol Metab
April 2012
TRPM2 Ca(2+)-permeable cation channel is widely expressed and activated by markers of cellular stress. Since inflammation and stress play a major role in insulin resistance, we examined the role of TRPM2 Ca(2+) channel in glucose metabolism. A 2-h hyperinsulinemic euglycemic clamp was performed in TRPM2-deficient (KO) and wild-type mice to assess insulin sensitivity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe mammalian nicotinamide-adenine dinucleotide (NAD)-dependent deacetylase Sirt1 impacts different processes involved in the maintenance of brain integrity and in the pathogenic pathways associated with several neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer's disease. Here we used human Sirt1 transgenic mice to demonstrate that neuron-specific Sirt1 overexpression promoted neurite outgrowth and improved cell viability under normal and nutrient-limiting conditions in primary culture systems and that Sirt1-overexpressing neurons exhibited higher tolerance to cell death or degeneration induced by amyloid-β1-42 oligomers. Coincidentally, we found that enhanced Sirt1 expression in neurons downregulated the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) protein levels and its phosphorylation without changes in its mRNA levels, which was accompanied by concomitant inhibition of the mTOR downstream signaling activity as revealed by decreased p70S6 kinase (p70S6K) phosphorylation at Thr389.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) is inherent to immune responses. ROS are crucially involved in host defense against pathogens by promoting bacterial killing, but also as signaling agents coordinating the production of cytokines. Transient Receptor Potential Melastatin 2 (TRPM2) is a Ca(2+)-permeable channel gated via binding of ADP-ribose, a metabolite formed under conditions of cellular exposure to ROS.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTo properly understand the function of genes of neurological interest, in vivo manipulation in the adult is essential, particularly when the target gene is involved in brain development. Moreover, since the physiological effects of target protein may be region-specific, targeting a distinct brain region could be required to dissect these effects in specific brain locations. Infection of somatic tissues of transgenic mice bearing loxP-flanked gene sequences with a viral vector expressing Cre recombinase provides a means of allowing flexible spatio-temporal control of target gene expression.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Physiol Gastrointest Liver Physiol
April 2009
P2Y receptors have been reported to modulate gastrointestinal functions. The newest family member is the nucleotide-sugar receptor P2Y14. P2ry14 mRNA was detected throughout the rat gut, with the highest level being in the forestomach.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt has been postulated that the G protein-coupled receptor, GPR55, is a third cannabinoid receptor. Given that the ligands at the CB(1) and CB(2) receptors are effective analgesic and anti-inflammatory agents, the role of GPR55 in hyperalgesia associated with inflammatory and neuropathic pain has been investigated. As there are no well-validated GPR55 tool compounds, a GPR55 knockout (GPR55(-/-)) mouse line was generated and fully backcrossed onto the C57BL/6 strain.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Studies of gene function in the mouse have relied mainly on gene targeting via homologous recombination. However, this approach is difficult to apply in specific windows of time, and to simultaneously knock-down multiple genes. Here we report an efficient method for dsRNA-mediated gene silencing in late cleavage-stage mouse embryos that permits examination of phenotypes at post-implantation stages.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe transparency of the juvenile zebrafish and its genetic advantages make it an attractive model for study of cell turnover in the gut. BrdU labelling shows that the gut epithelium is renewed in essentially the same way as in mammals: the villi are lined with non-dividing differentiated cells, while cell division is confined to the intervillus pockets. New cells produced in the pockets take about 4 days to migrate out to the tips of the villi, where they die.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe serine protease HtrA2/Omi is released from the mitochondrial intermembrane space following apoptotic stimuli. Once in the cytosol, HtrA2/Omi has been implicated in promoting cell death by binding to inhibitor of apoptosis proteins (IAPs) via its amino-terminal Reaper-related motif, thus inducing caspase activity, and also in mediating caspase-independent death through its own protease activity. We report here the phenotype of mice entirely lacking expression of HtrA2/Omi due to targeted deletion of its gene, Prss25.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGlycogen synthase kinase-3 (GSK-3) protein levels and activity are elevated in skeletal muscle in type 2 diabetes, and inversely correlated with both glycogen synthase activity and insulin-stimulated glucose disposal. To explore this relationship, we have produced transgenic mice that overexpress human GSK-3beta in skeletal muscle. GSK-3beta transgenic mice were heavier, by up to 20% (P < .
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA new autosomal recessive mouse mutation, causing loss of hair in homozygous mice 2-3 weeks after birth, arose spontaneously in a colony at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), Mill Hill, London in early 1998. Complementation analysis confirmed that this mutation was an allele of the hairless gene (hr). The gene symbol hr(rhbm) (hairless-rhino-bald Mill Hill) was assigned to reflect the source of the colony.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUncoupling protein 1 (UCP1) diverts energy from ATP synthesis to thermogenesis in the mitochondria of brown adipose tissue by catalysing a regulated leak of protons across the inner membrane. The functions of its homologues, UCP2 and UCP3, in other tissues are debated. UCP2 and UCP3 are present at much lower abundance than UCP1, and the uncoupling with which they are associated is not significantly thermogenic.
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