Publications by authors named "Normand M"

According to a central tenet of classical immune theory, a healthy immune system must avoid self-reactive lymphocyte clones but we now know that B cells repertoire exhibit some level of autoreactivity. These autoreactive B cells are thought to rely on self-ligands for their clonal selection and survival. Here, we confirm that healthy mice exhibit self-reactive B cell clones that can be stimulated by agonists of toll-like receptor (TLR) 1/2, TLR4, TLR7 and TLR9 to secrete anti-LG3/perlecan.

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  • Uric acid (UA) stones are linked to health issues like obesity and diabetes, and occur due to acidic urine, which can be mitigated by alkalizing the urine.
  • A study of 120 patients treated with potassium citrate showed high effectiveness in dissolving stones and preventing recurrences without surgery, using a method that reduced gastrointestinal side effects.
  • The results indicated that 88% of patients experienced complete stone dissolution, with improved urinary factors and minimal side effects, suggesting that potassium citrate is a safe and effective treatment for UA stones with proper monitoring.
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Osteopontin (OPN) and Bone Sialoprotein (BSP), abundantly expressed by osteoblasts and osteoclasts, appear to have important, partly overlapping functions in bone. In gene-knockout (KO, -/-) models of either protein and their double (D)KO in the same CD1/129 genetic background, we analyzed the morphology, matrix characteristics, and biomechanical properties of femur bone in 2 and 4 month old, male and female mice. OPN mice display inconsistent, perhaps localized hypermineralization, while the BSP are hypomineralized throughout ages and sexes, and the low mineralization of young DKO mice recovers with age.

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Neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis type 2 (CLN2) disease is a rare, lysosomal storage disorder that causes pediatric onset neurodegenerative disease. It is characterized by mutations in the TPP1 gene. Symptoms begin between 2 and 4 years of age with loss of previously acquired motor, cognitive, and language abilities.

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Background: Individuals with Phelan-McDermid syndrome (PMS) present with a wide range of diagnoses: autism spectrum disorder, intellectual disability, or schizophrenia. Differences in the genetic background could explain these different neurodevelopmental trajectories. However, a more parsimonious hypothesis is to consider that they may be the same phenotypic entity.

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Background: To date, no clinical test provides specific objective information on the integrity of key ligamentous support of the trapeziometacarpal (TMC) joint.

Purpose: To examine the potential of the TMC joint screw home torque mechanism (SHTM) in estimating the integrity of the posterior ligament complex in older adult population. STUDY DESIGN: Cross-sectional laboratory-based study.

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The maturation of the uncrossed medial olivocochlear (UMOC) efferent remains poorly documented to date. The UMOC efferent system allows listeners to not only detect but also to process, recognize, and discriminate auditory stimuli. Its fibers can be explored non-invasively by recording the effect of contralateral acoustic stimulation (CAS), resulting in a decrease in the amplitude of transient evoked otoacoustic emissions (TEOAE).

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Behavior analysts in practice have an advantage over many others in the helping professions-they have at their disposal a robust science of behavior change informed primarily by single-case experimental research designs. This is advantageous because the research literature is focused on individual behavior change and has direct relevance to behavior analysts who need to change the behavior of individuals in need. Also, the same experimental designs used to advance the basic and applied sciences can be used to evaluate and refine specific procedures as they are put into practice.

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In exoskeleton research, transparency is the degree to which a device hinders the movement of the user, a critical component of performance and usability. Transparency is most often evaluated individually, thus lacking generalization. Our goal was to systematically evaluate transparency due to inertial effects on gait of a hypothetical hip exoskeleton.

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Project SWEET examined the barriers and facilitators to the use of non-nutritive sweeteners and sweetness enhancers (hereafter "S&SE") alongside potential risks/benefits for health and sustainability. The Beverages trial was a double-blind multi-centre, randomised crossover trial within SWEET evaluating the acute impact of three S&SE blends (plant-based and alternatives) vs. a sucrose control on glycaemic response, food intake, appetite sensations and safety after a carbohydrate-rich breakfast meal.

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Background: One of the most consistent findings reported in the paediatric cochlear implant (CI) literature is the heterogeneity of language performance observed more in grammatical morphology than in lexicon or pragmatics. As most of the corpus studies addressing these issues have been conducted in English, it is unclear whether their results can be generalized to other languages. In particular, little is known about languages known for their grammatical complexity, such as French.

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Dichotic listening is the high-level auditory process which enables the perception of different verbal stimuli delivered simultaneously to the right and left ears (binaural integration), as well as the perception of a verbal stimulus presented to one ear while ignoring a different stimulus in the other ear (binaural separation). Deficits in central auditory processing have been reported in children with learning disabilities. The present study aimed to compare dichotic listening performances in right-handed impaired readers (IR) and non-impaired readers (non-IR) according to age.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The study investigates the effects of consuming non-nutritive sweeteners and sweetness enhancers (S&SEs) on appetite and related health outcomes, particularly focusing on how acute versus repeated intake influences these factors in food consumption.
  • - Conducted as part of the SWEET Project, the research includes five double-blind trials with 213 participants across Europe, comparing traditional sugar-sweetened products to those reformulated with S&SEs in various food forms.
  • - Ethical approvals have been obtained, and findings will be shared in open-access journals and an online research data archive, ensuring transparency and accessibility of the results.
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Impaired mechanical stimuli during hindlimb unloading (HLU) are believed to exacerbate osteocyte paracrine regulation of osteoclasts. We hypothesized that bone loss and deterioration of the osteocyte lacuno-canalicular network are attenuated in HLU mice housed at thermoneutrality (28 °C) compared with those housed at ambient temperature (22 °C). Following acclimatization, 20-week-old male C57BL/6J mice were submitted to HLU or kept in pair-fed control cages (CONT), for 5 days (5d) or 14d, at 22 °C or 28 °C.

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Objectives: The purpose of this preclinical study was to evaluate the safety, the local tissue effects and bone healing performance (osteoconduction, osseointegration) of nacre powder in a sheep intraosseous implantation model. This represents the first preclinical study to assess nacre safety and efficacy in supporting new bone formation in accordance with the ISO 10993 standard for biomedical devices.

Methods: The local tissue effects and the material performance were evaluated 8 weeks after implantation by qualitative macroscopic observation and qualitative as well as semiquantitative microscopic analyses of the bone sites.

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  • * A study measured IgG responses to specific oral bacteria in 101 JIA patients and 19 patients with other autoimmune diseases, finding significant differences in antibody levels.
  • * Results indicated that children with oligoarticular JIA and enthesitis-related arthritis had higher IgG levels to these bacteria, suggesting that oral dysbiosis might play a role in the development of JIA in these groups.
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To evaluate whole-body vibration (WBV) osteogenic potential in physically inactive postmenopausal women using high-frequency and combined amplitude stimuli. Two-hundred fifty-five physically inactive postmenopausal women (55-75 years) with 10-year major osteoporotic fracture risk (3%-35%) participated in this 18-month study. For the first 12 months, the vibration group experienced progressive 20-min WBV sessions (up to 3 sessions/week) with rest periods (30-60 s) between exercises.

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Some have argued that behavior analysts have insulated themselves by eschewing the vernacular and adopting idiosyncratic and sometimes counterintuitive technical terms to describe their science and practice. Because of this, behavior analysis plays a minor role in psychology and related fields and effective behavior-change interventions go unused. All told, findings about the effects of behavior-analytic jargon are mixed.

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Nacre has emerged as a beneficial natural product for bone cells and tissues, but its effect was only studied by gavage in the ovariectomized mouse model. We sought to assess the antiosteoporotic effect of nacre through a nutritional supplementation in the ovariectomized rat model. Sixteen-week-old female Wistar rats were either Sham-operated or bilateral ovariectomized (OVX) and then fed with standard diet (Sham and OVX groups) or standard diet supplemented with either 0.

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The dry immersion (DI) model closely reproduces factors of spaceflight environment such as supportlessness, mechanical and axial unloading, physical inactivity, and induces early increased bone resorption activity and metabolic responses as well as fluid centralization. The main goal of this experiment was to assess the efficacity of venoconstrictive thigh cuffs, as countermeasure to limit cephalad fluidshift, on DI-induced deconditioning, in particular for body fluids and related ophthalmological disorders. Our specific goal was to deepen our knowledge on the DI effects on the musculoskeletal events and to test whether intermittent counteracting fluid transfer would affect DI-induced bone modifications.

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YAP/TAZ are transcription co-factors recently described responsive to pro-inflammatory cytokines and involved in inflammatory-related disorders. However, the role of tumor necrosis factor (TNF), a major pro-inflammatory cytokine, on YAP signaling is not well understood and controversial. Here, we observe , using wild type and YAP knockout HEK293 cells, that TNF triggers YAP nuclear translocation and transcriptional activity, thus being dependent on Rho family of GTPases.

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The question of how children learn Function Words (FWs) is still a matter of debate among child language researchers. Are early multiword utterances based on lexically specific patterns or rather abstract grammatical relations? In this corpus study, we analyzed FWs having a highly predictable distribution in relation to Mean Length Utterance (MLU) an index of syntactic complexity in a large naturalistic sample of 315 monolingual French children aged 2 to 4 year-old. The data was annotated with a Part Of Speech Tagger (POS-T), belonging to computational tools from CHILDES.

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Individuals with pre-existing chronic systemic low-grade inflammation are prone to develop severe COVID-19 and stronger anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody responses. Whether this phenomenon reflects a differential expansion of antiviral B cells or a failure to regulate antibody synthesis remains unknown. Here, we compared the antiviral B cell repertoire of convalescent healthcare personnel to that of hospitalized patients with pre-existing comorbidities.

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Unlabelled: Bone microarchitecture assessed by high-resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography varies across populations of different origin. The study presents a reference dataset of microarchitectural parameters in a homogeneous group of participants aged within 22-27 range determined by a discriminant analysis of a larger cross-sectional cohort of 339 women.

Introduction: High-resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography (HR-pQCT) non-invasively measures three-dimensional bone microarchitectural parameters and volumetric bone mineral density.

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