Corrigendum to "Which factor is more important for the welfare of broiler chickens: Intensity or duration of episodic heat stress?" [J. Therm. Biol. 99 (2021) 102981].

Due to the effects of global warming, there is a predicted increase in the frequency, intensity and duration of heat waves in the future. Little is known of how this could affect the welfare of broiler chickens. Sixty-four broiler chickens were subjected to either high heat stress (HHS; 32oC, 70% RH for 3 h), moderate heat stress (MHS; 30oC, 70% RH for 6 h), or normal conditions (NC: 20oC, 50% RH for 6 h) for two consecutive days. Half the birds had been subjected to anaesthesia and fitted with a body temperature-ID chip placed in the breast muscle. Core body temperature (CBT) was taken during pre-heat stress (PrHS), at the end of 3 h (3HS) and 6 h (6HS) of heat stress using a pocket reader and used to estimate change in CBT (ΔCBT). Surface body temperatures (SBTs) from under the wing (WT), feet (FT), cloaca (CLT) and comb (CT) were also measured, along with blood parameters, feed intake, daily weight gain and mortality. Data were analysed using General Linear Model and simple linear regression. At 3HS, CBT/ΔCBT and all SBTs showed this trend: HHS > MHS > NC (P<0.001). Blood pH, pCO2, iCa, HCO3- and TCO2 showed the same trend: HHS, MHS > NC (P<0.05). Comparing HHS for 3 h with MHS and NC for 6 h showed that CBT/ΔCBT, WT and CLT in HHS, MHS > control (P<0.001) while FT and CT showed a different trend (HHS > MHS > NC, P<0.001). Exposure of broiler chickens to 3 hours of HHS had dramatic effects on core and surface body temperatures. The effects of MHS were initially more modest yet, after a further 3 hours exposure, resulted in an increase in CBT which was close to that which HHS birds experienced after just 3 hours. This illustrates that duration of exposure to heat stress can have a critical effect, achieving similar life-threatening changes in body temperature that were observed under higher levels of heat stress but for half the time.

Hospital re-admission after critical care survival: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Survivors of critical illness frequently require increased healthcare resources after hospital discharge. We undertook a systematic review and meta-analysis to assess hospital re-admission rates following critical care admission and to explore potential re-admission risk factors. We searched the MEDLINE, Embase and CINAHL databases on 05 March 2020. Our search strategy incorporated controlled vocabulary and text words for hospital re-admission and critical illness, limited to the English language. Two reviewers independently applied eligibility criteria and assessed quality using the Newcastle Ottawa Score checklist and extracted data. The primary outcome was acute hospital re-admission in the year after critical care discharge. Of the 8851 studies screened, 87 met inclusion criteria and 41 were used within the meta-analysis. The analysis incorporated data from 3,897,597 patients and 741,664 re-admission episodes. Pooled estimates for hospital re-admission after critical illness were 16.9% (95%CI: 13.3-21.2%) at 30 days; 31.0% (95%CI: 24.3-38.6%) at 90 days; 29.6% (95%CI: 24.5-35.2%) at six months; and 53.3% (95%CI: 44.4-62.0%) at 12 months. Significant heterogeneity was observed across included studies. Three risk factors were associated with excess acute care rehospitalisation one year after discharge: the presence of comorbidities; events during initial hospitalisation (e.g. the presence of delirium and duration of mechanical ventilation); and subsequent infection after hospital discharge. Hospital re-admission is common in survivors of critical illness. Careful attention to the management of pre-existing comorbidities during transitions of care may help reduce healthcare utilisation after critical care discharge. Future research should determine if targeted interventions for at-risk critical care survivors can reduce the risk of subsequent rehospitalisation.

Which factor is more important: Intensity or duration of episodic heat stress on broiler chickens?

With the current global warming, there is a predicted increase in frequency, intensity and duration of heat waves in future. Little is known of how this could affect the welfare of broiler chickens. Sixty-four broiler chickens were subjected to either high heat stress (HHS; 32 °C, 70% RH for 3 h), moderate heat stress (MHS; 30 °C, 70% RH for 6 h), or normal conditions (NC: 20 °C, 50% RH for 6 h) for two consecutive days. On both days, the temperature-ID chips on all chipped birds were scanned during pre-heat stress (PrHS), end of 3 h (3HS) and 6 h (6HS) of heat stress using a pocket reader. Half of the chip birds' CBT was measured at the end of each hour of heat stress (HS: 1st -3rd hour). Surface body temperatures (SBTs) from under the wing (WT), feet (FT), cloaca (CLT) and comb (CT) were measured. Blood samples, feed intake, daily weight gain and mortality was also monitored. Data was analysed using General Linear Model and simple linear regression. At 3HS, CBT/ΔCBT and all SBTs showed this trend: HHS>MHS>NC (P<0.001). The regression equations to predict ΔCBT in HHS and MHS are ΔCBT = 0.917 + 0.663 h, P<0.05 and ΔCBT = 0.371 + 0.338 h, P<0.05 respectively. Blood pH, pCO2, iCa, HCO3- and TCO2 showed same trend: HHS, MHS > NC (P<0.05). Comparing HHS for 3 h with MHS and NC for 6 h shows that CBT/ΔCBT, WT and CLT in HHS, MHS>control (P<0.001) while FT and CT showed a different trend (HHS > MHS > NC, P<0.001). pCO2, feed intake and daily weight gain showed same trend (HHS, MHS > control). Temperature-ID chip (a less invasive technique) gave CBT/ΔCBT values that corresponded with the degree of heat stress experienced by the birds. Broilers were more tolerant to MHS than HHS after 3 h but MHS for 6 h and HHS for 3 h had similar impact.

Constrained Domain Adaptation for Image Segmentation.

Domain Adaption tasks have recently attracted substantial attention in computer vision as they improve the transferability of deep network models from a source to a target domain with different characteristics. A large body of state-of-the-art domain-adaptation methods was developed for image classification purposes, which may be inadequate for segmentation tasks. We propose to adapt segmentation networks with a constrained formulation, which embeds domain-invariant prior knowledge about the segmentation regions. Such knowledge may take the form of anatomical information, for instance, structure size or shape, which can be known a priori or learned from the source samples via an auxiliary task. Our general formulation imposes inequality constraints on the network predictions of unlabeled or weakly labeled target samples, thereby matching implicitly the prediction statistics of the target and source domains, with permitted uncertainty of prior knowledge. Furthermore, our inequality constraints easily integrate weak annotations of the target data, such as image-level tags. We address the ensuing constrained optimization problem with differentiable penalties, fully suited for conventional stochastic gradient descent approaches. Unlike common two-step adversarial training, our formulation is based on a single segmentation network, which simplifies adaptation, while improving training quality. Comparison with state-of-the-art adaptation methods reveals considerably better performance of our model on two challenging tasks. Particularly, it consistently yields a performance gain of 1-4% Dice across architectures and datasets. Our results also show robustness to imprecision in the prior knowledge. The versatility of our novel approach can be readily used in various segmentation problems, with code available publicly.

Do horses with poor welfare show 'pessimistic' cognitive biases?

This field study tested the hypothesis that domestic horses living under putatively challenging-to-welfare conditions (for example involving social, spatial, feeding constraints) would present signs of poor welfare and co-occurring pessimistic judgement biases. Our subjects were 34 horses who had been housed for over 3 years in either restricted riding school situations (e.g. kept in single boxes, with limited roughage, ridden by inexperienced riders; N = 25) or under more naturalistic conditions (e.g. access to free-range, kept in stable social groups, leisure riding; N = 9). The horses' welfare was assessed by recording health-related, behavioural and postural indicators. Additionally, after learning a location task to discriminate a bucket containing either edible food ('positive' location) or unpalatable food ('negative' location), the horses were presented with a bucket located near the positive position, near the negative position and halfway between the positive and negative positions to assess their judgement biases. The riding school horses displayed the highest levels of behavioural and health-related problems and a pessimistic judgment bias, whereas the horses living under more naturalistic conditions displayed indications of good welfare and an optimistic bias. Moreover, pessimistic bias data strongly correlated with poor welfare data. This suggests that a lowered mood impacts a non-human species' perception of its environment and highlights cognitive biases as an appropriate tool to assess the impact of chronic living conditions on horse welfare.

Predictive Modeling of Tacrolimus Dose Requirement Based on High-Throughput Genetic Screening.

Any biochemical reaction underlying drug metabolism depends on individual gene-drug interactions and on groups of genes interacting together. Based on a high-throughput genetic approach, we sought to identify a set of covariant single-nucleotide polymorphisms predictive of interindividual tacrolimus (Tac) dose requirement variability. Tac blood concentrations (Tac C0 ) of 229 kidney transplant recipients were repeatedly monitored after transplantation over 3 mo. Given the high dimension of the genomic data in comparison to the low number of observations and the high multicolinearity among the variables (gene variants), we developed an original predictive approach that integrates an ensemble variable-selection strategy to reinforce the stability of the variable-selection process and multivariate modeling. Our predictive models explained up to 70% of total variability in Tac C0 per dose with a maximum of 44 gene variants (p-value <0.001 with a permutation test). These models included molecular networks of drug metabolism with oxidoreductase activities and the multidrug-resistant ABCC8 transporter, which was found in the most stringent model. Finally, we identified an intronic variant of the gene encoding SLC28A3, a drug transporter, as a key gene involved in Tac metabolism, and we confirmed it in an independent validation cohort.

Using body temperature, food and water consumption as biomarkers of disease progression in mice with Eµ-myc lymphoma.

BACKGROUND: Non-invasive biomarkers of disease progression in mice with cancer are lacking making it challenging to implement appropriate humane end points. We investigated whether body temperature, food and water consumption could be used to predict tumour burden. METHODS: Thirty-six male, wild-type C57Bl/6 mice were implanted with subcutaneous RFID temperature sensors and inoculated with Eµ-myc tumours that infiltrate lymphoid tissue. RESULTS: Decrease in body temperature over the course of the study positively predicted post-mortem lymph node tumour burden (R(2)=0.68, F(1,22)=44.8, P<0.001). At experimental and humane end points, all mice that had a mean decrease in body temperature of 0.7 °C or greater had lymph nodes heavier than 0.5 g (100% sensitivity), whereas a mean decrease in body temperature <0.7 °C always predicted lymph nodes lighter than 0.5 g (100% specificity). The mean decrease in food consumption in each cage also predicted mean post-mortem lymph node tumour burden at 3 weeks (R(2)=0.89, F(1,3)=23.2, P=0.017). CONCLUSION: Temperature, food and water consumption were useful biomarkers of disease progression in mice with lymphoma and could potentially be used more widely to monitor mice with other forms of cancer.

Non-attendance at clinic: cycles of audit of a consultant based gastroenterology outpatient department.

Attempts were made to reduce defaulting rates for new appointments to see a consultant in a general medical and gastroenterology clinic. Despite optimising the operation of the clinic, the non-attendance rate remained unsatisfactory, and comparable to the average for the NHS. There were short term improvements in defaulting rates, which appeared to result from extraneous factors such as a general election and moving to new buildings. Though efforts to improve attendance rates seem appropriate to conserve resources, no definite recommendations can be made on the results of this study.

Construction of bacterial artificial chromosome libraries and their application in developing PCR-based markers closely linked to a major locus conditioning bruchid resistance in mungbean (Vigna radiata L. Wilczek).

Bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) libraries have been widely used in different aspects of genome research. In this paper we report the construction of the first mungbean (Vigna radiata L. Wilczek) BAC libraries. These BAC clones were obtained from two ligations and represent an estimated 3.5 genome equivalents. This correlated well with the screening of nine random single-copy restriction fragment length polymorphism probes, which detected on average three BACs each. These mungbean clones were successfully used in the development of two PCR-based markers linked closely with a major locus conditioning bruchid (Callosobruchus chinesis) resistance. These markers will be invaluable in facilitating the introgression of bruchid resistance into breeding programmes as well as the further characterisation of the resistance locus.

Diversity and distribution in hypersaline microbial mats of bacteria related to Chloroflexus spp.

Filamentous bacteria containing bacteriochlorophylls c and a were enriched from hypersaline microbial mats. Based on phylogenetic analyses of 16S rRNA gene sequences, these organisms form a previously undescribed lineage distantly related to Chloroflexus spp. We developed and tested a set of PCR primers for the specific amplification of 16S rRNA genes from filamentous phototrophic bacteria within the kingdom of "green nonsulfur bacteria." PCR products recovered from microbial mats in a saltern in Guerrero Negro, Mexico, were subjected to cloning or denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis and then sequenced. We found evidence of a high diversity of bacteria related to Chloroflexus which exhibit different distributions along a gradient of salinity from 5.5 to 16%.

Quadruple therapy for symptomatic spontaneous duodenal ulcer disease.

AIM: To investigate Helicobacter pylori eradication in duodenal ulcer patients with a new regimen, lansoprazole 30 mg daily for one or four weeks plus twice daily tetracycline 500 mg, clarithromycin 250 mg, and metronidazole 400 mg. BACKGROUND: Spontaneous duodenal ulcer is regularly associated with H pylori, and permanent cure follows eradication of this bacterium. Numerous treatments have been proposed and none is ideal, possibly because of primary or acquired antibiotic resistance. Quadruple regimens with proton pump inhibitor therapy and three antibiotics offer promise as the most effective therapy. METHODS: From November 1995 all patients with spontaneous duodenal ulcer were offered quadruple therapy. A month after completion a carbon 14 urea breath test (UBT) was performed. Sensitivity of H pylori to the antibiotics used was tested in 1992-3, 1996, and 1999. RESULTS: A total of 331 patients were treated; 313 attended for a UBT, of which 299 were negative (95.5%). Of those patients who had an endoscopy with positive urease test immediately before treatment, 95/101 (94.0%) on lansoprazole for one week and 116/121 (95.8%) on lansoprazole for four weeks had a negative UBT. H pylori antibiotic sensitivity did not change. CONCLUSION: This regimen produced some of the best results yet seen and may be generally recommended as first line therapy.

Gallstones and cholecystectomy in modern Britain.

BACKGROUND: It has been suggested that gallstone disease is now commoner, and that this might explain an increase in cholecystectomy rates, though conclusive evidence has been lacking. METHODS: All the non-forensic necropsy results for Dundee 1953-98 were examined to assess the prevalence of gallstone disease. The NHS Scotland annual cholecystectomy figures were extracted from their earliest availability in 1961 up to the present. The subgroup of patients from Dundee was analysed separately, as were laparoscopic procedures, which were recorded from 1991. RESULTS: Gallstone disease was much commoner in 1974-98 than in 1953-73. Increasing age was the main determinant of gallstone disease. Though gallstone disease was commoner in women than men aged 40-89, there was no sex difference under 40 or over 90 years. Cholecystectomy became much commoner in the 1960s when frequency of gallstone disease did not change. It increased further in the 1970s, peaking in 1977-8. There was a gradual fall in rates in the 1980s when gallstone prevalence remained high. There was a further moderate rise in the 1990s after the wide introduction of laparoscopic cholecystectomy. Cholecystectomy is now much commoner in young women and this change started in the 1960s. By contrast, cholecystectomy in men has become more prevalent in the older age group. CONCLUSIONS: Gallstones were definitely more common in both sexes at all ages over 40 in the last 25 years. Changes in the cholecystectomy rates are only partly explained by changes in gallstone prevalence, and are more determined by surgical practice.