Stakeholder Perceptions of Animal Welfare as a Component of Sustainable Beef Programs in the United States-A Pilot Study.

This study aimed to investigate how stakeholders in the United States beef industry incorporate animal welfare into their sustainability programs. A survey was administered online to the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef membership. Twenty-seven surveys were analyzed. Most respondents (n = 26, 96%) had sustainability programs that incorporated animal welfare. Most respondents believed that welfare positively impacted environmental (n = 25/26, 96%), economic (n = 25/26, 96%), and social (n = 26/26, 100%) sustainability. The thematic analysis of five free response questions identified ten themes: Animal Care, Regulations and Guidelines, Responsibility, Consumers and Stakeholders, Performance and Efficiency, Financial Impact, Connectedness, Critical Component, Animal-based Outcomes, and Employees. When asked to define welfare, the most common themes were Animal Care and Regulations and Guidelines. When asked why welfare was a component of their sustainability program, the top factors from a provided list were: cattle health (n = 20, 74%), cattle performance (n = 12, 44%), and consumer perceptions (n = 12, 44%). Findings suggest a widespread recognition of animal welfare's importance within sustainable beef production.

Heat Stress Mitigation Strategies in Feedyards: Use, Perceptions, and Experiences of Industry Stakeholders.

The purpose of this study was to: (1) understand heat mitigation strategies currently used and recommended by feedyard operators, veterinarians, and nutritionists, (2) understand their perceptions of heat mitigation strategies related to cattle health, performance, welfare, and carcass quality, (3) quantify the frequency of extreme heat events, and (4) understand industry needs associated with heat stress mitigation strategies. An online survey was shared via 11 industry association listservs. Descriptive statistics were performed on 56 responses (n = 22 operators, 26 veterinarians and eight nutritionists). Thematic analysis was performed on free-response questions. Sixteen (72.7%) operators, 23 (88.5%) veterinarians and eight (100%) nutritionists utilized at least one heat mitigation strategy. "Changing processing and shipping hours" (n = 42, 75%) had the most "strongly agree" responses when asked about strategy effectiveness. The majority of respondents agreed that heat stress negatively impacts cattle health, performance, and welfare (Mean ± SD; ≥7.8 ± 2.6 for all roles). Forty-two (75%) respondents experienced cattle death loss from extreme heat events. Thematic analysis indicated that respondents perceived pen infrastructure and water/feed management as important considerations for better mitigating heat stress impacts. When asked what resources would be helpful, respondents indicated research and data regarding the effectiveness of various strategies.

Management and outcomes of 13 dogs treated with a modified Heller myotomy and Dor fundoplication for lower esophageal sphincter achalasia-like syndrome.

OBJECTIVE: To report the management and outcomes of dogs treated for lower esophageal sphincter achalasia-like syndrome (LES-AS) with modified Heller myotomy, Dor fundoplication, and with the use of a temporary gastrostomy tube. STUDY DESIGN: Retrospective. SAMPLE POPULATION: Thirteen client-owned dogs. METHODS: Medical records and a client survey were used to assess frequency of vomiting/regurgitation, quality of life (QoL), bodyweight, and feeding modifications at the following time points: prior to referral, postoperatively from discharge to first recheck (4-6 weeks), and from first recheck to survey (48 months). Postoperative and gastrostomy tube complications were surveyed and recorded. Pretreatment and 4-6 weeks postoperative videofluoroscopic swallow studies (VFSS) were compared. Two-sided t-tests were used to compare outcomes between survey time points. RESULTS: Postoperative VFSS scores (available in 9 dogs) improved over preoperative scores in 6 dogs, and 12/13 dogs survived to discharge. One dog was euthanized 3 days postoperatively due to aspiration pneumonia. Postoperative gastrostomy tube complications occurred in half of the dogs that survived to discharge. According to the owners, scores assigned to vomiting/regurgitation improved by 180% (P = .004), QoL by 100% (P = .004), and bodyweight by 63% (P = .035). CONCLUSION: Modified Heller myotomy with Dor fundoplication and the use of a temporary gastrostomy tube improved clinical signs and owners' perceived quality of life in half of the dogs treated for LES-AS in our clinical setting. Oral sildenafil therapy discontinued postoperatively suggests that surgery was equally efficacious. CLINICAL SIGNIFICANCE: Modified Heller myotomy with Dor fundoplication and temporary gastrostomy tube is a treatment option with potentially sustained benefits for dogs that have LES-AS.

Designing an Integrated Care Initiative for Vulnerable Families: Operationalisation of Realist Causal and Programme Theory, Sydney Australia.

INTRODUCTION: In July 2015 Sydney Local Health District (SLHD) implemented an integrated care initiative for vulnerable families in the Inner West region of Sydney, Australia. The initiative was designed as a cross-agency care coordination network that would ensure that vulnerable families: had their complex health and social needs met; kept themselves and their children safe; and were connected to society. We will describe the development of the design that drew on earlier realist causal and program theoretical work. METHODS: Realist causal and program theory were used to inform the collaborative design of an initiative for vulnerable families. The collaborative design process included: identification of desirable and undesirable outcomes and contextual factors, stakeholder consultation, interagency planning, and development of a service proposal. RESULTS: The design elements included: identification of vulnerable family cohorts; care coordination; evidence-informed intervention(s); general practice engagement and support; family health improvement; placed-based neighbourhood initiatives; interagency system change and collaborative planning; monitoring of individual and family outcomes; and evaluation. CONCLUSIONS: The design study described advances toward the implementation of a whole-of-government integrated health and social care initiative. The initiative was designed as a cross-agency care coordination network that would ensure that vulnerable families: had their complex health and social needs met; kept themselves and their children safe; and were connected to society. In so doing we aim to break intergenerational cycles of poverty, violence and crime, poor education and employment opportunities, psychopathology, and poor lifestyle and health behaviours, through strengthening family resilience, improving access to services, and addressing the social determinants of health and wellbeing.

Different contributions of primary motor cortex, reticular formation, and spinal cord to fractionated muscle activation.

Coordinated movement requires patterned activation of muscles. In this study, we examined differences in selective activation of primate upper limb muscles by cortical and subcortical regions. Five macaque monkeys were trained to perform a reach and grasp task, and electromyogram (EMG) was recorded from 10 to 24 muscles while weak single-pulse stimuli were delivered through microelectrodes inserted in the motor cortex (M1), reticular formation (RF), or cervical spinal cord (SC). Stimulus intensity was adjusted to a level just above threshold. Stimulus-evoked effects were assessed from averages of rectified EMG. M1, RF, and SC activated 1.5 ± 0.9, 1.9 ± 0.8, and 2.5 ± 1.6 muscles per site (means ± SD); only M1 and SC differed significantly. In between recording sessions, natural muscle activity in the home cage was recorded using a miniature data logger. A novel analysis assessed how well natural activity could be reconstructed by stimulus-evoked responses. This provided two measures: normalized vector length L, reflecting how closely aligned natural and stimulus-evoked activity were, and normalized residual R, measuring the fraction of natural activity not reachable using stimulus-evoked patterns. Average values for M1, RF, and SC were L = 119.1 ± 9.6, 105.9 ± 6.2, and 109.3 ± 8.4% and R = 50.3 ± 4.9, 56.4 ± 3.5, and 51.5 ± 4.8%, respectively. RF was significantly different from M1 and SC on both measurements. RF is thus able to generate an approximation to the motor output with less activation than required by M1 and SC, but M1 and SC are more precise in reaching the exact activation pattern required. Cortical, brainstem, and spinal centers likely play distinct roles, as they cooperate to generate voluntary movements. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Brainstem reticular formation, primary motor cortex, and cervical spinal cord intermediate zone can all activate primate upper limb muscles. However, brainstem output is more efficient but less precise in producing natural patterns of motor output than motor cortex or spinal cord. We suggest that gross muscle synergies from the reticular formation are sculpted and refined by motor cortex and spinal circuits to reach the finely fractionated output characteristic of dexterous primate upper limb movements.

Artificial grammar learning in vascular and progressive non-fluent aphasias.

Patients with non-fluent aphasias display impairments of expressive and receptive grammar. This has been attributed to deficits in processing configurational and hierarchical sequencing relationships. This hypothesis had not been formally tested. It was also controversial whether impairments are specific to language, or reflect domain general deficits in processing structured auditory sequences. Here we used an artificial grammar learning paradigm to compare the abilities of controls to participants with agrammatic aphasia of two different aetiologies: stroke and frontotemporal dementia. Ten patients with non-fluent variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA), 12 with non-fluent aphasia due to stroke, and 11 controls implicitly learned a novel mixed-complexity artificial grammar designed to assess processing of increasingly complex sequencing relationships. We compared response profiles for otherwise identical sequences of speech tokens (nonsense words) and tone sweeps. In all three groups the ability to detect grammatical violations varied with sequence complexity, with performance improving over time and being better for adjacent than non-adjacent relationships. Patients performed less well than controls overall, and this was related more strongly to aphasia severity than to aetiology. All groups improved with practice and performed well at a control task of detecting oddball nonwords. Crucially, group differences did not interact with sequence complexity, demonstrating that aphasic patients were not disproportionately impaired on complex structures. Hierarchical cluster analysis revealed that response patterns were very similar across all three groups, but very different between the nonsense word and tone tasks, despite identical artificial grammar structures. Overall, we demonstrate that agrammatic aphasics of two different aetiologies are not disproportionately impaired on complex sequencing relationships, and that the learning of phonological and non-linguistic sequences occurs independently. The similarity of profiles of discriminatory abilities and rule learning across groups suggests that insights from previous studies of implicit sequence learning in vascular aphasia are likely to prove applicable in nfvPPA.

Fractionation of muscle activity in rapid responses to startling cues.

Movements in response to acoustically startling cues have shorter reaction times than those following less intense sounds; this is known as the StartReact effect. The neural underpinnings for StartReact are unclear. One possibility is that startling cues preferentially invoke the reticulospinal tract to convey motor commands to spinal motoneurons. Reticulospinal outputs are highly divergent, controlling large groups of muscles in synergistic patterns. By contrast the dominant pathway in primate voluntary movement is the corticospinal tract, which can access small groups of muscles selectively. We therefore hypothesized that StartReact responses would be less fractionated than standard voluntary reactions. Electromyogram recordings were made from 15 muscles in 10 healthy human subjects as they carried out 32 varied movements with the right forelimb in response to startling and nonstartling auditory cues. Movements were chosen to elicit a wide range of muscle activations. Multidimensional muscle activity patterns were calculated at delays from 0 to 100 ms after the onset of muscle activity and subjected to principal component analysis to assess fractionation. In all cases, a similar proportion of the total variance could be explained by a reduced number of principal components for the startling and the nonstartling cue. Muscle activity patterns for a given task were very similar in response to startling and nonstartling cues. This suggests that movements produced in the StartReact paradigm rely on similar contributions from different descending pathways as those following voluntary responses to nonstartling cues.NEW & NOTEWORTHY We demonstrate that the ability to activate muscles selectively is preserved during the very rapid reactions produced following a startling cue. This suggests that the contributions from different descending pathways are comparable between these rapid reactions and more typical voluntary movements.

Chronic moderate sleep restriction in older long sleepers and older average duration sleepers: a randomized controlled trial.

Epidemiologic studies have consistently shown that sleeping <7 h and ≥8 h is associated with increased mortality and morbidity. The risks of short sleep may be consistent with results from experimental sleep deprivation studies. However, there has been little study of chronic moderate sleep restriction and little evaluation of older adults who might be more vulnerable to negative effects of sleep restriction, given their age-related morbidities. Moreover, the risks of long sleep have scarcely been examined experimentally. Moderate sleep restriction might benefit older long sleepers who often spend excessive time in bed (TIB) in contrast to older adults with average sleep patterns. Our aims are: (1) to examine the ability of older long sleepers and older average sleepers to adhere to 60 min TIB restriction; and (2) to contrast effects of chronic TIB restriction in older long vs. average sleepers. Older adults (n = 100) (60-80 years) who sleep 8-9 h per night and 100 older adults who sleep 6-7.25 h per night will be examined at 4 sites over 5 years. Following a 2-week baseline, participants will be randomized to one of two 12-week treatments: (1) a sleep restriction involving a fixed sleep-wake schedule, in which TIB is reduced 60 min below each participant's baseline TIB; and (2) a control treatment involving no sleep restriction, but a fixed sleep schedule. Sleep will be assessed with actigraphy and a diary. Measures will include glucose tolerance, sleepiness, depressive symptoms, quality of life, cognitive performance, incidence of illness or accident, and inflammation.

Transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 agonists modulate hippocampal CA1 LTP via the GABAergic system.

Transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) was shown to modulate hippocampal CA1 pyramidal cell synaptic plasticity, including long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD). Synaptic plasticity is the cellular mechanism thought to mediate declarative learning and memory in the hippocampus. Although TRPV1 is involved in modulating hippocampal plasticity, it has yet to be determined how TRPV1 mediates its effects. Using field electrophysiology in hippocampal CA1 stratum radiatum we investigated how TRPV1 agonists modulate LTP, low frequency stimulation-induced LTD, and (RS)-3,5-dihydroxyphenylglycine (DHPG)-induced LTD. First we confirmed that TRPV1 agonists induce enhancement of CA1 pyramidal cell LTP in the absence the GABA(A) receptor antagonist picrotoxin. Because it was recently determined that TRPV1 mediates a novel form of LTD in CA1 inhibitory GABAergic interneurons, which can disinhibit CA1 pyramidal cells, we used picrotoxin to block the effect of the GABAergic circuitry on CA1 LTP. When using picrotoxin, the TRPV1 agonist-induced enhancement of CA1 LTP was eliminated suggesting that the GABAergic circuitry is required for TRPV1 agonist mediated increases. Regarding LTD, in contrast to previously reported data, we did not see TRPV1 agonist-mediated effect on low frequency-induced stimulus LTD. However, during DHPG-induced LTD, TRPV1 was involved in the acute, but not the long-term depression phase of this plasticity. In summary, our findings support TRPV1 agonist involvement in hippocampal synaptic plasticity, including its enhancement of CA1 LTP. We demonstrate that the enhancement mediated by TRPV1 agonists requires GABA input to pyramidal cells thus providing a mechanism for how TRPV1 agonists modulate hippocampal synaptic plasticity.