Chronic inflammation and oxidative damage caused by obesity, cigarette smoking, and chronic gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) are major risk factors associated with Barrett's esophagus (BE) and esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC). EAC has been increasing the past few decades, and early discovery and treatment are crucial for survival. Telomere shortening due to cell division and oxidative dama...

BACKGROUND Energy restriction in prenatal life has detrimental effects on later life health and longevity. Studies in rats have shown that the shortening of telomeres in key tissues plays an important role in this association. OBJECTIVE The aim of the current study was to investigate leukocyte telomere length in relation to prenatal famine exposure. DESIGN The Dutch famine birth cohort cons...

STUDY QUESTION What are the relationships between telomere lengths in leukocytes and sperm, sperm count and parents' age at conception in a group of apparently healthy subjects of the same age? SUMMARY ANSWER Sperm telomere length (STL) is related to sperm count, it is lower in oligozoospermic than in normozoospermic men and it is directly related to parents' age at conception. WHAT IS KNOW...

Background. Modifiable factors in adulthood that explain the racial disparity in prostate cancer have not been identified. Because racial differences in utero that may account for this disparity are understudied, we investigated the association of maternal and neonate factors with cord blood telomere length, as a cumulative marker of cell proliferation and oxidative damage, by race. Further, we...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Accumulating evidence suggests that telomere length is a maker for biological aging of the cardiovascular system. Whether stroke is associated with accelerated biological aging as measured by telomere length has not been conclusively demonstrated. Our aim was to determine whether mean leukocyte telomere length is a predictor for the development of stroke. METHODS The re...

OBJECTIVES To examine the association between leukocyte mitochondrial DNA copy number (mtCN) and different anthropometric indices as well as weight changes; and to compare mtCN and telomere length with respect to their associations with BMI and age. DESIGN Population based cohort study. SETTING Nurses' Health Study, an ongoing prospective cohort study of 121,700 nurses enrolled in 1976; in ...

Assisting designers in writing high-quality specifications is an important step towards minimizing product defects and rework efforts. Drawing on the attractive performance of satisfiability solvers, in this paper, we present a SAT encoding that enables an efficient model-based diagnosis of LTL specifications in the context of behavioral samples (traces). The resulting diagnoses at operator lev...

An increased role for rail freight is an objective of the British government. Limited growth potential exists in rail’s traditional bulk markets, so more non-bulk volume is needed. This paper focuses on non-bulk rail freight activity in Britain, through deskbased research and company interviews. It considers changes in both the intermodal and traditional less-than-trainload (LTL) markets over t...

IMPORTANCE Telomere length has been associated with dementia and psychological stress, but its relationship with human brain size is unknown. OBJECTIVE To determine if peripheral blood telomere length is associated with brain volume. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Peripheral blood leukocyte telomere length and brain volumes were measured for 1960 individuals in the Dallas Heart Study, a ...

In this paper we present a pattern-based approach for synthesizing truly distributed Petri nets from a class of LTL specifications. The synthesis allows for the automatic, correct generation of humanly conceivable Petri nets, thus circumventing a manual construction of nets, or the use of Büchi automata which are not distributed and often less intuitive to understand.