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Important Set (important + set)
Selected AbstractsEpigenetics and the embodiment of race: Developmental origins of US racial disparities in cardiovascular healthAMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN BIOLOGY, Issue 1 2009Christopher W. Kuzawa The relative contribution of genetic and environmental influences to the US black-white disparity in cardiovascular disease (CVD) is hotly debated within the public health, anthropology, and medical communities. In this article, we review evidence for developmental and epigenetic pathways linking early life environments with CVD, and critically evaluate their possible role in the origins of these racial health disparities. African Americans not only suffer from a disproportionate burden of CVD relative to whites, but also have higher rates of the perinatal health disparities now known to be the antecedents of these conditions. There is extensive evidence for a social origin to prematurity and low birth weight in African Americans, reflecting pathways such as the effects of discrimination on maternal stress physiology. In light of the inverse relationship between birth weight and adult CVD, there is now a strong rationale to consider developmental and epigenetic mechanisms as links between early life environmental factors like maternal stress during pregnancy and adult race-based health disparities in diseases like hypertension, diabetes, stroke, and coronary heart disease. The model outlined here builds upon social constructivist perspectives to highlight an important set of mechanisms by which social influences can become embodied, having durable and even transgenerational influences on the most pressing US health disparities. We conclude that environmentally responsive phenotypic plasticity, in combination with the better-studied acute and chronic effects of social-environmental exposures, provides a more parsimonious explanation than genetics for the persistence of CVD disparities between members of socially imposed racial categories. Am. J. Hum. Biol., 2009. © 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source] Epidemiological investigation of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome infants , recommendations for future studiesCHILD: CARE, HEALTH AND DEVELOPMENT, Issue 2002P. Blair Abstract In recent years the study of infant care practices within the sleeping environment has proved to be the single most important set of observations for reducing the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). To further reduce the number of deaths and resolve the debate on safe infant care practice, a closer scrutiny of this environment is required. However, anecdotal observation from uncontrolled death-scene investigations and a reluctance to diagnose SIDS because of adverse social conditions or circumstantial evidence at the time of death is undermining future research. To investigate SIDS now means investigating the wider umbrella of all Sudden Unexpected Deaths in Infancy (SUDI) because of the potential for misdiagnosis. In trying to find out why SIDS infants die we have increasingly been forced to search for why infants survive in the first few months of life and it is this comparative component of epidemiological observation that has saved so many lives. A death-scene investigation is vital to any planned future investigation of SIDS but equally essential is a sleep-scene investigation of surviving infants to put any findings into context. SIDS infants are no longer scattered across the social strata and the cot is not the only environment in which they are found, social deprivation and use of the parental bed are now more discernable. Future studies should therefore reflect these changes with a second control group of surviving infants more closely matched to the type of environment in which SIDS infants might be found. [source] Hope Deferred: Theological Reflections on Reproductive Loss (Infertility, Stillbirth, Miscarriage)MODERN THEOLOGY, Issue 2 2001L. Serene Jones This essay examines the human experience of reproductive loss and grief surrounding infertility, miscarriage and stillbirth, in particular why such painful silences persist where one might least expect it; namely, in feminist communities and in churches. By bringing into conversation feminist theory and systematic theology on this topic, the author effectively crosses (and cross-fertilizes) the boundaries of two important sets of discourse with the hope of better understanding why painful silences persist concerning reproductive loss and what theological , in particular Trinitarian , resources are available to help the church think about the issue (both those who suffer this loss and the broader community who seeks to understand it). [source] Duality between constraints and gauge conditionsANNALEN DER PHYSIK, Issue 7-8 2007M.N. Stoilov Abstract There are two important sets of seemingly absolutely different objects in any gauge theory: the set of constraints, which generate the local symmetry and the set of gauge conditions, which fix this symmetry; the first one is determined by the Lagrangean of the model, the second is a matter of choice. However, in the transition amplitude constraints and gauge conditions participate in exactly the same way. This suggests the possibility for existence of a model with the same transition amplitude and in which gauge conditions and constraints are interchanged. We investigate the conditions that gauge fixing terms should satisfy so that this dual picture is allowed. En route, we propose to add new terms in the constraints which would generate the gauge transformation of the Lagrange multipliers and construct two BRST charges , one, as usual, for the constraints, and one for the gauge conditions. [source] | ||||||||||