An investigation of dietary intake, nutrition knowledge and hydration status of Gaelic Football players.

Purpose: To assess the dietary intake, nutrition knowledge and hydration status of Irish Gaelic footballers.

Method: One hundred and sixty-eight male club/county level Irish Gaelic footballers (median [IQR]; age 23 years [20.0, 27.

Central connections of the trigeminal motor command system in the weakly electric Elephantnose fish (Gnathonemus petersii).

The highly mobile chin appendage of Gnathonemus petersii, the Schnauzenorgan, is used to actively probe the environment and is known to be a fovea of the electrosensory system. It receives an important innervation from both the trigeminal sensory and motor systems. However, little is known about the premotor control pathways that coordinate the movements of the Schnauzenorgan, or about central pathways originating from the trigeminal motor nucleus.

Development and validation of diagnostic triage criteria for liver disease from a minimum data set enabling the 'intelligent LFT' pathway for the automated assessment of deranged liver enzymes.

Background: Liver function tests (LFTs) are commonly abnormal; most patients with 'incidental' abnormal LFTs are not investigated appropriately and for those who are, current care pathways are geared to find an explanation for the abnormality by a lengthy process of investigation and exclusion, with costs to the patient and to the health service.

Objective: To validate an intelligent automatable analysis tool (iLFT) for abnormal liver enzymes, which diagnoses common liver conditions, provides fibrosis stage and recommends management.

Design: A retrospective case note review from three tertiary referral liver centres, with application of the iLFT algorithm and comparison with the clinician's final opinion as gold standard.

Physiological evidence of sensory integration in the electrosensory lateral line lobe of Gnathonemus petersii.

Mormyrid fish rely on reafferent input for active electrolocation. Their electrosensory input consists of phase and amplitude information. These are encoded by differently tuned receptor cells within the Mormyromasts, A- and B-cells, respectively, which are distributed over the animal's body.

Practical Use of Metal Oxide Semiconductor Gas Sensors for Measuring Nitrogen Dioxide and Ozone in Urban Environments.

The potential of inexpensive Metal Oxide Semiconductor (MOS) gas sensors to be used for urban air quality monitoring has been the topic of increasing interest in the last decade. This paper discusses some of the lessons of three years of experience working with such sensors on a novel instrument platform (Small Open General purpose Sensor (SOGS)) in the measurement of atmospheric nitrogen dioxide and ozone concentrations. Analytic methods for increasing long-term accuracy of measurements are discussed, which permit nitrogen dioxide measurements with 95% confidence intervals of 20.

Post-hatching brain morphogenesis and cell proliferation in the pulse-type mormyrid Mormyrus rume proboscirostris.

The anatomical organization of African Mormyrids' brain is a clear example of departure from the average brain morphotype in teleosts, probably related to functional specialization associated to electrosensory processing and sensory-motor coordination. The brain of Mormyrids is characterized by a well-developed rhombencephalic electrosensory lobe interconnected with relatively large mesencephalic torus semicircularis and optic tectum, and a huge and complex cerebellum. This unique morphology might imply cell addition from extraventricular proliferation zones up to late developmental stages.

Modeling latency code processing in the electric sense: from the biological template to its VLSI implementation.

Understanding the coding of sensory information under the temporal constraints of natural behavior is not yet well resolved. There is a growing consensus that spike timing or latency coding can maximally exploit the timing of neural events to make fast computing elements and that such mechanisms are essential to information processing functions in the brain. The electric sense of mormyrid fish provides a convenient biological model where this coding scheme can be studied.

Impact of clinical pharmacists in the emergency department of an Australian public hospital: A before and after study.

Objective: To evaluate the impact of an ED pharmacy service on ED clinical staff and hospital pharmacist activity.

Methods: A prospective study measuring pharmacist activities and surveying ED staff attitudes and experience before and after commencement of an ED pharmacy service.

Results: There were 2275 and 2072 hospital-wide pharmacist occasions of service recorded over a 1 month period before and after implementation of the ED pharmacy service, respectively; 339 (16.

New cellular mechanisms of gap junction degradation and recycling.

Background Information: Connexins (Cxs), the constitutive proteins of gap junctions, are key actors of many physiological processes. Therefore, alterations of Cx expression and degradation lead to the development of physiopathological disorders. Because of the formation of a double membrane vesicle termed annular gap junction (AGJ), gap junction degradation is a unique physiological process for which many cellular aspects remain unclear.

More a finger than a nose: the trigeminal motor and sensory innervation of the Schnauzenorgan in the elephant-nose fish Gnathonemus petersii.

The weakly electric fish Gnathonemus petersii uses its electric sense to actively probe the environment. Its highly mobile chin appendage, the Schnauzenorgan, is rich in electroreceptors. Physical measurements have demonstrated the importance of the position of the Schnauzenorgan in funneling the fish's self-generated electric field.

Receptive field properties of neurons in the electrosensory lateral line lobe of the weakly electric fish, Gnathonemus petersii.

The receptive field of a sensory neuron is known as that region in sensory space where a stimulus will alter the response of the neuron. We determined the spatial dimensions and the shape of receptive fields of electrosensitive neurons in the medial zone of the electrosensory lateral line lobe of the African weakly electric fish, Gnathonemus petersii, by using single cell recordings. The medial zone receives input from sensory cells which encode the stimulus amplitude.

Functional foveae in an electrosensory system.

Several species of Mormyrid weakly electric fish have a mobile chin protuberance that serves as a mobile antenna during prey detection, tracking behaviors, and foraging for food. It has been proposed that it constitutes a fovea of the electrosensory system. The distribution of the three types of receptor organs involved in active imaging of the local surroundings, prey detection, and passive electroreception, and their central projection to the electrosensory lobe (ELL), have been studied in Gnathonemus petersii.

Electric imaging through active electrolocation: implication for the analysis of complex scenes.

The electric sense of mormyrids is often regarded as an adaptation to conditions unfavourable for vision and in these fish it has become the dominant sense for active orientation and communication tasks. With this sense, fish can detect and distinguish the electrical properties of the close environment, measure distance, perceive the 3-D shape of objects and discriminate objects according to distance or size and shape, irrespective of conductivity, thus showing a degree of abstraction regarding the interpretation of sensory stimuli. The physical properties of images projected on the sensory surface by the fish's own discharge reveal a "Mexican hat" opposing centre-surround profile.

Active sensing in a mormyrid fish: electric images and peripheral modifications of the signal carrier give evidence of dual foveation.

Weakly electric fish generate electric fields with an electric organ and perceive them with cutaneous electroreceptors. During active electrolocation, nearby objects are detected by the distortions they cause in the electric field. The electrical properties of objects, their form and their distance, can be analysed and distinguished.

Etomidate reduces initiation of backpropagating dendritic action potentials: implications for sensory processing and synaptic plasticity during anesthesia.

Anesthetics may induce specific changes that alter the balance of activity within neural networks. Here we describe the effects of the GABA(A) receptor potentiating anesthetic etomidate on sensory processing, studied in a cerebellum-like structure, the electrosensory lateral line lobe (ELL) of mormyrid fish, in vitro. Previous studies have shown that the ELL integrates sensory input and removes predictable features by comparing reafferent sensory signals with a descending electromotor command-driven corollary signal that arrives in part through parallel fiber synapses with the apical dendrites of GABAergic interneurons.

Sensory and motor effects of etomidate anesthesia.

The effects of anesthesia with etomidate on the cellular mechanisms of sensory processing and sensorimotor coordination have been studied in the active electric sense of the mormyrid fish Gnathonemus petersii. Like many anesthetics, etomidate is known to potentiate GABA(A) receptors, but little is known about the effects on sensory processing at the systems level. A better understanding is necessary for experimental studies of sensory processing, in particular regarding possible effects on the dynamic structure of excitatory and inhibitory receptive fields and to improve the knowledge of the mechanisms of anesthesia in general.

Dendritic spike back propagation in the electrosensory lobe of Gnathonemus petersii.

Spike timing-dependent plasticity that follows anti-Hebbian rules has been demonstrated at synapses between parallel fibers and inhibitory interneurons known as medium ganglionic layer (MG) neurons in the cerebellum-like electrosensory lobe of mormyrid fish. This plasticity is expressed when presynaptic activation is associated with a characteristically broad, postsynaptic action potential, lasting 7-15 ms, occurring within a window of up to 60-80 ms following synaptic activation. Since the site of plastic change is presumably in the apical dendrites, it is important to know where, when and how this broad spike is generated and the manner in which such events propagate within the intrinsic network of the electrosensory lobe.

Pre-receptor profile of sensory images and primary afferent neuronal representation in the mormyrid electrosensory system.

Afferent responses to the fish's own electric organ discharge were explored in the electrosensory lobe of the mormyrid fish Gnathonemus petersii. In order to understand the neural encoding of natural sensory images, responses were examined while objects of different conductivities were placed at different positions along the skin of the fish, i.e.

Dye coupling without gap junctions suggests excitatory connections of gamma-aminobutyric acidergic neurons.

After injections of the low-molecular-weight tracer neurobiotin into the preeminential nucleus of the brain of the mormyrid fish Gnathonemus petersii, we observed that retrogradely labeled, large fusiform projection neurons (LFd cells) of the deep granular layer of the electrosensory lobe (ELL) were surrounded by 30-50 labeled satellite granular cells. More superficially located projection cells, including large fusiform cells in the superficial granular layer (LFs) and large ganglionic (LG) cells in the ganglionic layer, were never surrounded by labeled satellites. LFd-satellite cells have a small soma (diameter 5-8 microm), a few small dendrites, and an apical axon that terminates in the plexiform and ganglionic layers of the ELL.