Community-based complex interventions to sustain independence in older people, stratified by frailty: a systematic review and network meta-analysis.

Background: Sustaining independence is important for older people, but there is insufficient guidance about which community health and care services to implement.

Objectives: To synthesise evidence of the effectiveness of community services to sustain independence for older people grouped according to their intervention components, and to examine if frailty moderates the effect.

Review Design: Systematic review and network meta-analysis.

Community based complex interventions to sustain independence in older people: systematic review and network meta-analysis.

Objective: To synthesise evidence of the effectiveness of community based complex interventions, grouped according to their intervention components, to sustain independence for older people.

Design: Systematic review and network meta-analysis.

Data Sources: Medline, Embase, CINAHL, PsycINFO, CENTRAL, clinicaltrials.

A sensitive method to determine Po and Pb in environmental samples by alpha spectrometry using CuS micro-precipitation.

A new sensitive method to determine polonium-210 (Po) and lead-210 (Pb) in a diversity of environmental samples was developed. For fresh and marine waters, Po was pre-concentrated using a titanium (III) hydroxide (Ti(OH)) co-precipitation. Solid environmental samples were digested with nitric acid (HNO) and hydrogen peroxide (HO).

What works in advocating for food advertising policy change across an english region - a realist evaluation.

Background: With increasing recognition of the role of commercial determinants of health, local areas in England have sought to restrict the advertising of products high in fat, salt and sugar (HFSS) on council-owned spaces, as part of wider strategies to reduce obesity. While there is some evidence of the impact of such policy change on behaviour, little is known about what works in the process of implementing this policy change.

Methods: Guided by a realist evaluation framework that explores the interaction between context, mechanism and outcomes, this study aims to investigate the factors that influence the restriction of outdoor advertising of HFSS products in one region in England.

Plasticity is a locally adapted trait with consequences for ecological dynamics in novel environments.

Phenotypic plasticity is predicted to evolve in more variable environments, conferring an advantage on individual lifetime fitness. It is less clear what the potential consequences of that plasticity will have on ecological population dynamics. Here, we use an invertebrate model system to examine the effects of environmental variation (resource availability) on the evolution of phenotypic plasticity in two life history traits-age and size at maturation-in long-running, experimental density-dependent environments.

Matrix-trapped viruses can prevent invasion of bacterial biofilms by colonizing cells.

Bacteriophages can be trapped in the matrix of bacterial biofilms, such that the cells inside them are protected. It is not known whether these phages are still infectious and whether they pose a threat to newly arriving bacteria. Here, we address these questions using and its lytic phage T7.

Methodological advances for hypothesis-driven ethnobiology.

Ethnobiology as a discipline has evolved increasingly to embrace theory-inspired and hypothesis-driven approaches to study why and how local people choose plants and animals they interact with and use for their livelihood. However, testing complex hypotheses or a network of ethnobiological hypotheses is challenging, particularly for data sets with non-independent observations due to species phylogenetic relatedness or socio-relational links between participants. Further, to account fully for the dynamics of local ecological knowledge, it is important to include the spatially explicit distribution of knowledge, changes in knowledge, and knowledge transmission and use.

Prestige and homophily predict network structure for social learning of medicinal plant knowledge.

Human subsistence societies have thrived in environmental extremes while maintaining biodiversity through social learning of ecological knowledge, such as techniques to prepare food and medicine from local resources. However, there is limited understanding of which processes shape social learning patterns and configuration in ecological knowledge networks, or how these processes apply to resource management and biological conservation. In this study, we test the hypothesis that the prestige (rarity or exclusivity) of knowledge shapes social learning networks.

Biofilm Structure Promotes Coexistence of Phage-Resistant and Phage-Susceptible Bacteria.

Encounters among bacteria and their viral predators (bacteriophages) are among the most common ecological interactions on Earth. These encounters are likely to occur with regularity inside surface-bound communities that microbes most often occupy in natural environments. Such communities, termed biofilms, are spatially constrained: interactions become limited to near neighbors, diffusion of solutes and particulates can be reduced, and there is pronounced heterogeneity in nutrient access and physiological state.

Sr-90 soil to plant transfer factor reduction using calcium and polymer soil amendments.

Introducing calcium into soils can inhibit Sr-90 uptake by plants. To test the efficacy of calcium amendments on the inhibition of Sr-90 uptake by edible plants, a number of different calcium applications, including calcium nitrate, calcium thiosulfate and a mixture of both liquid solutions, were used in this study. Pea plants (Pisum sativum 'Sabre') grown in Sr-90 contaminated soil from seeds to maturity were watered with these calcium solutions.

Intergenerational effects of CO-induced stream acidification in the Trinidadian guppy ().

Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are driving decreases in aquatic pH. As a result, there has been a surge in the number of studies examining the impact of acidification on aquatic fauna over the past decade. Thus far, both positive and negative impacts on the growth of fish have been reported, creating a disparity in results.

Topical Delivery of Lactobacillus Culture Supernatant Increases Survival and Wound Resolution in Traumatic Acinetobacter baumannii Infections.

Species of Lactobacillus have been proposed as potential candidates for treating wound infections due to their ability to lower pH, decrease inflammation, and release antimicrobial compounds. This study investigated the impact of lactobacilli (Lactobacillus acidophilus ATCC 4356, Lactobacillus casei ATCC 393, Lactobacillus reuteri ATCC 23272) secreted products on wound pathogens in vitro and in a murine wound infection model. Evaluation of 1-5 day lactobacilli conditioned media (CM) revealed maximal inhibition against wound pathogens using the 5-day CM.

Fungal biofilm morphology impacts hypoxia fitness and disease progression.

Microbial populations form intricate macroscopic colonies with diverse morphologies whose functions remain to be fully understood. Despite fungal colonies isolated from environmental and clinical samples revealing abundant intraspecies morphological diversity, it is unclear how this diversity affects fungal fitness and disease progression. Here we observe a notable effect of oxygen tension on the macroscopic and biofilm morphotypes of the human fungal pathogen Aspergillus fumigatus.

Permafrost thaw and implications for the fate and transport of tritium in the Canadian north.

Layers of permafrost developed during the 1950s and 1960s incorporated tritium from the atmosphere that originated from global nuclear weapons testing. In regions underlain by substantial permafrost, this tritium has been effectively trapped in ice since it was deposited and subject to radioactive decay alone, which has substantially lengthened its environmental half-life compared to areas with little or no permafrost where the weapons-test era precipitation has been subject to both decay and hydrodynamic dispersion. The Arctic is warming three times faster than other parts of the world, with northern regions incurring some of the most pronounced effects of climate change, resulting in permafrost degradation.

The political mobilization of corporate directors: socio-economic correlates of affiliation to European pressure groups.

Business has played a central role in the debate over Britain's place in the European Union. This paper examines the socio-economic characteristics of directors of Britain's largest corporations who affiliated either to Business for Sterling or Britain in Europe. It reports associations between directors' social backgrounds and their probabilities of affiliation.

Social influences on corporate political donations in Britain.

It is argued that institutional features of the British state create collective action problems for the mobilization of corporations as donors to the Conservative Party. Social factors are necessary for overcoming these problems. Using social network analyses, the effect that interlocking directorates have on 250 large British corporations' decisions to donate are analysed.

Does ageism affect the management of ischaemic heart disease?

Objectives: To analyse access by age to exercise testing, coronary angiography, revascularisation (percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty/stent insertion and coronary artery bypass graft surgery) and receipt of thrombolysis, where indicated, for hospital patients with diagnosed cardiovascular disease.

Method: Retrospective case note analysis, tracking each case backwards and forwards by 12 months from the patient's date of entry to the study. The setting was a district hospital in the eastern part of outer London.

Foundation trusts. Hitting the big time.

Foundation trusts offer the potential for substantial local autonomy. Their governance arrangements raise concerns. Lay non-executives in primary care trusts will face difficulties holding hospitals to account.

Primary care trusts. Nurture not nature.

Primary care groups had few precedents in the NHS, but their introduction was met with little political hostility. It is difficult to discern PCG/Ts' achievements. The record on commissioning and health improvement is poor.

Age- and sex-related bias in the management of heart disease in a district general hospital.

Objective: To investigate the clinical management of heart disease and determine whether there was age- and sex-related bias in the use of investigations and interventions.

Design: Retrospective analysis of individual patient records against criteria of appropriateness based on published guidelines, clinical practice and literature relevant to the 1996-7 study period.

Setting: A single, district general hospital in London, serving a population of 185,000 people.