Increased plasma vaspin concentration in patients with sepsis: an exploratory examination

Introduction

Vaspin (visceral adipose tissue-derived serpin) was first described as an insulin-sensitizing adipose tissue hormone. Recently its anti-inflammatory function has been demonstrated. Since no appropriate data is available yet, we sought to investigate the plasma concentrations of vaspin in sepsis.

Materials and methods

57 patients in intensive care, fulfilling the ACCP/SCCM criteria for sepsis, were prospectively included in our exploratory study. The control group consisted of 48 critically ill patients, receiving intensive care after trauma or major surgery. Patients were matched by age, sex, weight and existence of diabetes before statistical analysis. Blood samples were collected on the day of diagnosis. Vaspin plasma concentrations were measured using a commercially available enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay.

Results

Vaspin concentrations were significantly higher in septic patients compared to the control group (0.3 (0.1-0.4) ng/mL vs. 0.1 (0.0-0.3) ng/mL, respectively; P < 0.001). Vaspin concentration showed weak positive correlation with concentration of C-reactive protein (CRP) (r = 0.31, P = 0.002) as well as with SAPS II (r = 0.34, P = 0.002) and maximum of SOFA (r = 0.39, P < 0.001) scoring systems, as tested for the overall study population.

Conclusion

In the sepsis group, vaspin plasma concentration was about three-fold as high as in the median surgical control group. We demonstrated a weak positive correlation between vaspin and CRP concentration, as well as with two scoring systems commonly used in intensive care settings. Although there seems to be some connection between vaspin and inflammation, its role in human sepsis needs to be evaluated further.Key words: adipocytokine, inflammation, vaspin, CRP, intensive care     

Wake up Information Literacy Instruction: Ideas for Student Engagement

In this article, three librarians from Santa Fe College, the community college winner of the 2015 ACRL Excellence in Academic Libraries Award, share their successful work in information literacy instruction. While the ACRL award is given for overall achievement, this article focuses upon their creative and varied approaches to instruction, incorporating a wide blend of strategies to reach students across the college. Beginning with targeted approaches to virtual instruction, including broad use of the flipped classroom model, and building in active learning techniques, the librarians at Santa Fe College have built an instruction program that could serve as a model to community college libraries across the country.     

Infants’ and Young Children's Imitation of Linguistic In‐Group and Out‐Group Informants

Although children can use social categories to intelligently select informants, children's preference for in‐group informants has not been consistently demonstrated across age and context. This research clarifies the extent to which children use social categories to guide learning by presenting participants with a live or video‐recorded action demonstration by a linguistic in‐group and/or out‐group model. Participants’ (N = 104) propensity to imitate these actions was assessed. Nineteen‐month‐olds did not selectively imitate the actions of the in‐group model in live contexts, though in‐group preferences were found after watching the demonstration on video. Three‐year‐olds selectively imitated the actions demonstrated by the in‐group member regardless of context. These results indicate that in‐group preferences have a more nuanced effect on social learning than previous research has indicated.     

Assessing the Worth of the College Degree on Self-perceived Police Performance

Many formal policies have suggested that officers need a college degree; however, policies forced little change in practices of American police organizations. Six hundred-fifty patrol officers employed in 12 medium-sized police departments in three Midwestern states were surveyed as to their current educational attainment and job performance. The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between educational level and police performance.     

Caregiver speech predicts the emergence of children's emotion vocabulary

Learning about emotions is an important part of children's social and communicative development. How does children's emotion-related vocabulary emerge over development? How may emotion-related information in caregiver input support learning of emotion labels and other emotion-related words? This investigation examined language production and input among English-speaking toddlers (16–30 months) using two datasets: Wordbank (N = 5520; 36% female, 38% male, and 26% unknown gender; 1% Asian, 4% Black, 2% Hispanic, 40% White, 2% others, and 50% unknown ethnicity; collected in North America; dates of data collection unknown) and Child Language Data Exchange System (N = 587; 46% female, 44% male, 9% unknown gender, all unknown ethnicity; collected in North America and the UK; data collection dates, were available between 1962 and 2009). First, we show that toddlers develop the vocabulary to express increasingly wide ranges of emotional information during the first 2 years of life. Computational measures of word valence showed that emotion labels are embedded in a rich network of words with related valence. Second, we show that caregivers leverage these semantic connections in ways that may scaffold children's learning of emotion and mental state labels. This research suggests that young children use the dynamics of language input to construct emotion word meanings, and provides new techniques for defining the quality of infant-directed speech.     

Women in interdisciplinary science: Exploring preferences and consequences

For at least a decade, U.S. funding agencies and university campuses have promoted the expansion of interdisciplinary research. At the same time, federal and local programs have sought to increase the participation of women and minorities in science, mathematics, and engineering. Research has focused on each of these trends independently, but very few studies have considered their interaction by asking how intellectual preferences for and professional consequences of interdisciplinary science might be influenced by gender, race, and/or ethnicity. Focused specifically on gender, this paper considers the expectation that women will be more drawn to interdisciplinary research, and explores the learning styles, work preferences, and career behaviors that might anticipate and/or explicate gender differences in interdisciplinary science. Principal mechanisms by which researchers engage in interdisciplinarity - cross-fertilization, team-collaboration, field-creation, and problem-orientation - are tested for evidence of gendering using preliminary empirical data from three studies. The results of this exploratory analysis offer clues about possible tendencies and raise questions about the potential costs and benefits for those who adopt them.