Publications by authors named "L Jespersen"

Objective: The onset of childhood diabetes necessitates that the child and family quickly must learn numerous self-management tasks. Diabetes education is key to successful self-management, and established diabetes-related habits are known to be difficult to change. Hence, the initial hospital-based diabetes education and support is a distinct opportunity to optimize habits and disease management.

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Since its recognition as a plausible direction to assure food safety, food safety culture research has evolved with several commercial and scientific assessment tools developed to evaluate the food safety culture in food businesses. However, existing research does not specify the validity and reliability checks required to demonstrate rigor in the tool development process and there is no unified methodology to confirm robustness of the tools to ensure trustworthiness and usefulness of findings and inferences generated. The purpose of the study was to develop a method to evaluate food safety culture assessment tools and to assess the reliability and validity of existing food safety culture assessment tools using the developed method.

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Several strategies, programs and policies have long been developed and implemented to alleviate child malnutrition in sub-Saharan African countries. However, stunting and wasting still persist at an alarming rate, suggesting that alternative strategies are needed to induce faster progress toward the 2030 SDGs targets of reducing malnutrition. Gut microbiota-directed intervention is now being recognized as an unconventional powerful approach to mitigate malnutrition and improve overall child health.

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Motor learning relies on experience-dependent plasticity in relevant neural circuits. In four experiments, we provide initial evidence and a double-blinded, sham-controlled replication (Experiment I-II) demonstrating that motor learning involving ballistic index finger movements is improved by preceding paired corticospinal-motoneuronal stimulation (PCMS), a human model for exogenous induction of spike-timing-dependent plasticity. Behavioral effects of PCMS targeting corticomotoneuronal (CM) synapses are order- and timing-specific and partially bidirectional (Experiment III).

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When grows on mixtures of glucose and galactose, galactose utilization is repressed by glucose, and induction of the gene network only occurs when glucose is exhausted. Contrary to reference alleles, alternative alleles support faster growth on galactose, thus enabling distinct galactose utilization strategies maintained by balancing selection. Here, we report on new wild populations of harboring alternative versions and, for the first time, of alternative alleles.

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