Hind feet position score: A novel trait to genetically reduce lameness incidence.

Lameness is an important health and welfare issue that causes considerable economic losses in dairy herds. The objective of this study was to investigate whether the hind feet position score (HFPS) can be used as an auxiliary trait for genetic evaluation of lameness. The HFPS is evaluated by visual scoring of the position of both the hind-digits to the mid-line of the cow's body. The higher the heel height of the lateral claw, the higher is the HFPS, and the higher is the risk for development of lameness. In total, 3,478 records from 1,064 Fleckvieh cows from 35 farms were obtained between September 1, 2021, and March 5, 2022. Data collection was carried out by the regional milk recording organizations. Hind feet position was scored visually by trained personnel during routine milk performance testing in the milking parlor using a 3-class scoring system: score 1 = 0° to <17° indicating a balanced heel height of both the medial and the lateral claw; score 2 = angle of 17° to 24°; score 3 = angle of >24°. After all cows had been milked, locomotion scoring was performed for each animal using a 5-class scoring system with locomotion scores ranging between 1 (normal) and 5 (severely lame). Using HFPS, sensitivity and specificity were 69.5% and 66.8%, respectively, for detecting lameness defined by locomotion score ≥2. For genetic analyses, a bivariate linear animal model was fitted with fixed effects of herd, parity, lactation stage, and classifier, and random effects of animal and permanent environment. Heritabilities for HFPS and locomotion score were 0.07 and 0.10, respectively, and the genetic correlation between the 2 traits studied was 0.80. These results suggest that the HFPS could be used for genetic evaluations to reduce lameness incidence in dairy cattle.

Prospective remembering: perceptually driven or conceptually driven processes?

Converging experimental operations and several prospective memory tasks were used across three experiments to determine the extent to which prospective remembering is supported by data-driven versus conceptually driven processes. In all experiments, subjects were asked to perform an action when a target item later occurred. When the semantic context changed from encoding to test, prospective memory significantly declined (Experiment 1). When the target event (the item, which in its subsequent appearance in the experiment was the signal to perform the action) was presented as word (relative to picture presentation, Experiment 2) or was encoded nonsemantically (relative to semantic encoding, Experiment 3), there was a decline in prospective memory performance. Dividing attention during prospective memory retrieval substantially reduced prospective memory performance (Experiment 3). The results of this research indicated that prospective memory is largely conceptually driven, and it behaves more similarly to direct rather than indirect conceptual tests. We suggest that prospective remembering of the type studied here is mediated by a reflexive episodic associative memory system as proposed by Moscovitch (1994).

[Stimulation of platelet mitogen-induced prostaglandin I2 synthesis in periodontal tissue of cyclosporin A treated patients]. / Stimulation der Plättchenmitogen-induzierten Prostaglandin I2-Synthese in periodontalem Gewebe von Cyclosporin A-behandelten Patienten.

Cyclosporine A (CsA) is a highly potent immunosuppressive agent that has proven to be particularly useful in organ transplantation. Like phenytoin and the calcium antagonists, this drug may be associated with gingival hyperplasia. This study examined the interaction of platelet derived growth factor (PDGF) with prostaglandin I2 (PGI2)--a potent mediator in inflammation and bone resorption. PGI2 synthesis was examined by bioassay in gingival tissue from rats, rabbits and humans. Gingival tissue from CsA-treated patients generates less PGI2. PDGF causes a dose-dependent increase in PGI2 release in both CsA-treated and control subjects. The actual and percentage increase in PGI2 synthesis, however, was significantly higher in control tissue. While PDGF on the other hand modulated cellular proliferation, it causes on the other hand liberation of PGI2 from gingival tissue, thus interfering with its own action and further synthesis. If the PGI2 response is insufficient as after CsA therapy, the proliferative action might dominate. These findings therefore suggest an important pathogenetic role of PDGF and possibly other growth factors in CsA-induced gingival hyperplasia. "CsA gingivitis" seems to be a predominantly proliferative process, whereby inflammatory reactions appear only as a secondary phenomenon.

Further constraints on the bizarreness effect: elaboration at encoding.

In this study, we attempted to determine why the mnemonic benefit of bizarreness is not found with the use of complex sentences (i.e., those containing additional modifiers of nouns) as stimuli. Several explanations were investigated, including the idea that complexity reduces the imageability of the sentence and the idea that complexity itself is mnemonically beneficial. The results of four experiments favored the latter explanation. We suggest that the cues associated with the complexity of the sentence provide more effective or salient retrieval cues than do those associated with sentence bizarreness. Consequently, the mnemonic benefit of bizarreness appears to occur only with relatively impoverished encoding contexts (e.g., simple, unelaborated sentences).