Differences in healthy life expectancy for the US population by sex, race/ethnicity and geographic region: 2008.

Background: Healthy life expectancy (HLE) varies among demographic segments of the US population and by geography. To quantify that variation, we estimated the national and regional HLE for the US population by sex, race/ethnicity and geographic region in 2008.

Methods: National HLEs were calculated using the published 2008 life table and the self-reported health status data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS).

Genetic insulin resistance is a potent regulator of gene expression and proliferation in human iPS cells.

Insulin resistance is central to diabetes and metabolic syndrome. To define the consequences of genetic insulin resistance distinct from those secondary to cellular differentiation or in vivo regulation, we generated induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from individuals with insulin receptor mutations and age-appropriate control subjects and studied insulin signaling and gene expression compared with the fibroblasts from which they were derived. iPSCs from patients with genetic insulin resistance exhibited altered insulin signaling, paralleling that seen in the original fibroblasts.

Expected years of life free of chronic condition-induced activity limitations - United States, 1999-2008.

Over the 20th century, the U.S. population has witnessed major changes in fatal and nonfatal health outcomes.

Anatomical localization, gene expression profiling and functional characterization of adult human neck brown fat.

The imbalance between energy intake and expenditure is the underlying cause of the current obesity and diabetes pandemics. Central to these pathologies is the fat depot: white adipose tissue (WAT) stores excess calories, and brown adipose tissue (BAT) consumes fuel for thermogenesis using tissue-specific uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1). BAT was once thought to have a functional role in rodents and human infants only, but it has been recently shown that in response to mild cold exposure, adult human BAT consumes more glucose per gram than any other tissue.

An unbiased assessment of the role of imprinted genes in an intergenerational model of developmental programming.

Environmental factors during early life are critical for the later metabolic health of the individual and of future progeny. In our obesogenic environment, it is of great socioeconomic importance to investigate the mechanisms that contribute to the risk of metabolic ill health. Imprinted genes, a class of functionally mono-allelic genes critical for early growth and metabolic axis development, have been proposed to be uniquely susceptible to environmental change.

Life Expectancy Free of Chronic Condition-induced Activity Limitations Among White and Black Americans, 2000-2006.

Objective-Life expectancy without activity limitations or active life expectancy is one of the health expectancy measures that is used to summarize population health. The measure differentiates the remaining years of life that are expected to be spent with activity limitations from expected years of life without activity limitations. The objective of this study was to estimate life expectancy with and without activity limitations for the white and black populations of the United States in the years 2000-2006, focusing on expected years free of chronic condition-induced activity limitations.

Bacterial charity work leads to population-wide resistance.

Bacteria show remarkable adaptability in the face of antibiotic therapeutics. Resistance alleles in drug target-specific sites and general stress responses have been identified in individual end-point isolates. Less is known, however, about the population dynamics during the development of antibiotic-resistant strains.

Triplet repeat length bias and variation in the human transcriptome.

Length variation in short tandem repeats (STRs) is an important family of DNA polymorphisms with numerous applications in genetics, medicine, forensics, and evolutionary analysis. Several major diseases have been associated with length variation of trinucleotide (triplet) repeats including Huntington's disease, hereditary ataxias and spinobulbar muscular atrophy. Using the reference human genome, we have catalogued all triplet repeats in genic regions.

Complete genome sequence of Treponema pallidum ssp. pallidum strain SS14 determined with oligonucleotide arrays.

Background: Syphilis spirochete Treponema pallidum ssp. pallidum remains the enigmatic pathogen, since no virulence factors have been identified and the pathogenesis of the disease is poorly understood. Increasing rates of new syphilis cases per year have been observed recently.

Estimating healthy life expectancies using longitudinal survey data: methods and techniques in population health measures.

Objective-Summary measures of population health are statistics that combine mortality and morbidity to represent overall population health in a single index. Such measures include healthy life expectancy, also called disability-free life expectancy and active life expectancy. Healthy life expectancy can be calculated using cross-sectional or longitudinal survey data.

Retrospective information on health status and its application for population health measures.

Healthy life expectancies are almost always calculated by using health data from cross-sectional surveys. This type of calculation is done partly because data from longitudinal surveys are not always available, and when they are available, they are collected at intervals that are longer than one year. In such cases, collecting health information retrospectively for the years skipped by the survey is useful.

Genome-wide in situ exon capture for selective resequencing.

Increasingly powerful sequencing technologies are ushering in an era of personal genome sequences and raising the possibility of using such information to guide medical decisions. Genome resequencing also promises to accelerate the identification of disease-associated mutations. Roughly 98% of the human genome is composed of repeats and intergenic or non-protein-coding sequences.

Direct selection of human genomic loci by microarray hybridization.

We applied high-density microarrays to the enrichment of specific sequences from the human genome for high-throughput sequencing. After capture of 6,726 approximately 500-base 'exon' segments, and of 'locus-specific' regions ranging in size from 200 kb to 5 Mb, followed by sequencing on a 454 Life Sciences FLX sequencer, most sequence reads represented selection targets. These direct selection methods supersede multiplex PCR for the large-scale analysis of genomic regions.

A self-tuning method for one-chip SNP identification.

Current methods for interpreting oligonucleotide-based SNP-detection microarrays, SNP chips, are based on statistics and require extensive parameter tuning as well as extremely high-resolution images of the chip being processed. We present a method, based on a simple data-classification technique called nearest-neighbors that, on haploid organisms, produces results comparable to the published results of the leading statistical methods and requires very little in the way of parameter tuning. Furthermore, it can interpret SNP chips using lower-resolution scanners of the type more typically used in current microarray experiments.

Compensatory evolution of interacting gene products through multifunctional intermediates.

When two mutations are singly deleterious but neutral or beneficial together, compensatory evolution can occur. The accumulation of derived, compensated genotypes contributes to the evolution of genetic incompatibilities between diverging populations or species. Previous two locus/two allele models have shown that compensatory evolution is appreciable only with tight linkage, the possibility of nearly simultaneous mutations, and/or a way to overcome negative selection against the singly mutated genotype.

Mutation discovery in bacterial genomes: metronidazole resistance in Helicobacter pylori.

We developed a microarray hybridization-based method, 'comparative genome sequencing' (CGS), to find mutations in bacterial genomes and used it to study metronidazole resistance in H. pylori. CGS identified mutations in several genes, most likely affecting metronidazole activation, and produced no false positives in analysis of three megabases.

Achieving national health objectives: the impact on life expectancy and on healthy life expectancy.

Our study quantifies the impact of achieving specific Healthy People 2010 targets and of eliminating racial/ethnic health disparities on summary measures of health. We used life table methods to calculate gains in life expectancy and healthy life expectancy that would result from achievement of Healthy People 2010 objectives or of current mortality rates in the Asian/Pacific Islander (API) population. Attainment of Healthy People 2010 mortality targets would increase life expectancy by 2.

Gene expression analysis using oligonucleotide arrays produced by maskless photolithography.

Microarrays containing 195,000 in situ synthesized oligonucleotide features have been created using a benchtop, maskless photolithographic instrument. This instrument, the Maskless Array Synthesizer (MAS), uses a digital light processor (DLP) developed by Texas Instruments. The DLP creates the patterns of UV light used in the light-directed synthesis of oligonucleotides.