Pregnant Mexican American Biopsychosocial/Cultural risks for adverse infant outcomes.

AIMS: To test a model of psychosocial/cultural/biological risk factors for poor birth outcomes in Latina pregnant women. DESIGN: An observational study measuring acculturation, progesterone, cortisol, cotinine, age, marital status, income, stress, depressive symptoms and coping. We tested a structural equation model to predict risk. METHODS: We obtained a convenience sample (N = 515) of low medical risk pregnant Mexican American Hispanic women at 22-24 weeks of gestation. Bilingual research nurses collected data from blood, urine and questionnaires. Self-report measures were the Beck Depression Inventory-II, the Perceived Stress Scale, the Acculturation Rating Scale for Mexican Americans-II and the Brief Cope. We measured progesterone and cortisol in plasma and cotinine levels in urine by enzyme-linked immunoassays. RESULTS: A PLS-SEM model revealed that Mexican American Hispanic pregnant women who were younger, single, lower income, more acculturated and who had greater negative coping, stress and depression were most at risk for having earlier and smaller babies.

Pilot Study of the Mastery Lifestyle Intervention.

BACKGROUND: Recognizing the effects of acculturation on quality of life and emotional health, especially during pregnancy, we developed an intervention that would target these factors in order to improve maternal well-being during the prenatal period and potentially improve infant outcomes, particularly preterm birth for Mexican-American women (Latinas). OBJECTIVE: The purpose of these pilot studies was to test the acceptability, feasibility, and preliminary efficacy of the mastery lifestyle intervention (MLI) to decrease depressive and anxiety symptoms and improve coping as implemented in prenatal clinics with culturally homogenous groups of Latinas. METHODS: The MLI was tested in three small pilot studies (n = 15), one in El Paso, Texas (an urban area), and two in Bastrop, Texas (a rural area outside Austin), for acceptability and feasibility. A pretest/posttest, quasi-experimental design was used with pregnant self-identified Mexican-American Latinas at 14-20 weeks' gestation. Measures of anxiety, depressive symptoms, and positive and negative coping were used. RESULTS: Feasibility was a success in terms of implementation of the MLI in an active prenatal clinic setting and the use of electronic tablets for data collection and entry of data into REDcap. Satisfaction was high, with the location of the MLI being at their primary OB/GYN clinic. Participants reported that six intervention sessions appear to be ideal as was the class length of 1.5 to 2 hours. On Cohen's d, there were medium to large effect size decreases in depressive and anxiety symptoms and small to medium effect size decreases in the use of negative coping strategies and small effect sizes for increases in positive coping strategies. DISCUSSION: Pilot testing of the MLI indicated that it was well accepted from the participants and feasible as a culturally tailored behavioral therapy administered in a group setting by nurse practitioners. Our initial pilot results also suggest preliminary efficacy as indicated by moderate to large Cohen's d effect sizes for depression and anxiety.

OSA: a fast and accurate alignment tool for RNA-Seq.

UNLABELLED: Accurately mapping RNA-Seq reads to the reference genome is a critical step for performing downstream analysis such as transcript assembly, isoform detection and quantification. Many tools have been developed; however, given the huge size of the next generation sequencing datasets and the complexity of the transcriptome, RNA-Seq read mapping remains a challenge with the ever-increasing amount of data. We develop Omicsoft sequence aligner (OSA), a fast and accurate alignment tool for RNA-Seq data. Benchmarked with existing methods, OSA improves mapping speed 4-10-fold with better sensitivity and less false positives. AVAILABILITY: OSA can be downloaded from http://omicsoft.com/osa. It is free to academic users. OSA has been tested extensively on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows platforms.

Assessment of macrophage infiltration in a murine model of abdominal aortic aneurysm.

PURPOSE: To evaluate the use of an ultrasmall superparamagnetic iron oxide (USPIO) contrast agent as a marker for the detection of macrophage in a preclinical abdominal aortic aneurysm animal (AAA) model. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Osmotic pumps were implanted subcutaneously in apoE(-/-) mice for continuous infusion of Angiotensin II (Ang-II). Weekly bright-blood gradient echo scans were performed on the suprarenal abdominal aorta to evaluate aneurysm development. Once an AAA was detected, animals were administered 1000 mumol/kg of the USPIO contrast agent ferumoxtran-10 (Combidex) followed by in vivo scanning 24 h post-USPIO administration. After in vivo imaging, aortas were harvested for ex vivo imaging, histology, iron quantification, and gene expression analysis. RESULTS: Reduced signal intensity was evident in the post-USPIO transverse images of the abdominal aorta. The areas of reduced signal were primarily along the aneurysm shoulder and outer perianeurysm areas and corresponded to regions of macrophage infiltration and colocalized USPIO determination by means of histological staining. The absolute iron content measured significantly correlated to the area of signal reduction in the ex vivo images (r = 0.9; P < 0.01). In the AAA tissue, the macrophage-driven cytokine gene expression was up-regulated along with a matrix metalloproteinase known to mediate extracellular matrix breakdown in this disease model. CONCLUSION: These results demonstrate the feasibility of using an USPIO contrast agent as a surrogate for detecting the acute inflammatory process involved in the development of abdominal aneurysms.