The present study examined differences in olfactory sensitivity between 16 naturally cycling (NC) women and 17 women taking monophasic oral contraceptives (OCs) to six odors: lemon, peppermint, rose, musk, androstenone and androsterone. Thresholds were assessed twice for both groups of women (during the periovulatory and luteal phases of their cycles) via a forced-choice discrimination task. NC...

Background: Total folate intake includes naturally occurring food folate and folic acid from fortified foods and dietary supplements. Recent reports have focused on total folate intakes of persons aged 14 y. Information on total folate intakes of young children, however, is limited. Objective: The objective was to compute total folate and total folic acid intakes of US children aged 1–13 y by u...

The vitamin folate is recognized as beneficial health-wise in the prevention of neural tube defects, anemia, cardiovascular diseases, poor cognitive performance, and some forms of cancer. However, suboptimal dietary folate intake has been reported in a number of countries. Several national health authorities have therefore introduced mandatory food fortification with synthetic folic acid, which...

Over the last two decades, the California Geological Survey (CGS) has increasingly received requests for environmental geology/mineralogy/geochemistry information from State and local agencies, consultants, industries, and the public. These requests have led to projects to identify and map potential mineral hazards such as naturally occurring asbestos, heavy metals, and radon. In these projects...

Research over the past three decades has shown that the mammalian immune system can be altered by the occupational exposure of asbestos. Early clinical studies generally focused on systemic observations of immune alteration such as the number and function of peripheral lymphocytes and monocytes. More recently as the regulatory influence of local immunity in health and disease becomes more defin...

Renal excretion is one of the main elimination pathways for the toxic and carcinogenic chemical agents and metabolites to which man may be exposed. The urinary system is naturally often a target of such agents, the kidney being the filter in which they may be trapped, and the bladder a place where they may linger for a long time before being excreted. The likelihood that asbestos has a carcinog...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Nutrient values are influenced by the analytical method used. Food folate measured by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) or by microbiological assay (MA) yield different results, with in general higher results from MA than from HPLC. This leads to the question of how to deal with different analytical methods in compiling standardised and internationally compa...

This paper investigates the robust sliding mode control (SMC) problem for a class of uncertain nonlinear stochastic systems with mixed time-delays. Both the sector-like nonlinearities and the norm-bounded uncertainties enter into the system in randomly ways, and such randomly occurring uncertainties (ROUs) and randomly occurring nonlinearities (RONs) obey certain mutually uncorrelated Bernoulli...

A protective effect of folate against the development of neural tube defects (NTDs), specifically, anencephaly and spina bifida, is now well recognized, having been established by a chain of clinical research studies over the past half century. This article summarizes the more important of these studies, which have led to the current situation in which all women capable of becoming pregnant are...

BACKGROUND Evidence is conflicting as to whether the bioavailability of food folates is influenced by the extent of their conjugation. OBJECTIVE The objective was to compare the bioavailability of 3 representative food folate sources with various degrees of glutamylation-ie, egg yolk, spinach, and yeast, whose polyglutamyl folate content measured 0%, 50%, and 100%, respectively. DESIGN In a...