n The assessment of vitamin A status is critical for the planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of vitamin A deficiency prevention and treatment programmes. Determination of night blindness is one of the traditional methods of assessing vitamin A deficiency. A variety of subjective and objective methods have been used, however, reported night blindness, the most common method to as...

Background Healthcare workers exhibit among the highest injury rates of all occupations, with musculoskeletal injuries predominating. Anthropometric attributes and demanding work schedules may contribute to enhanced injury risks. Specifically, physical characteristics and performance capacities as well as accumulating fatigue from multiple work shifts may predispose workers to job-related injur...

The visually evoked response (VER) to dim lights with intensities within the scotopic or lower mesopic range increased in amplitude during the progressive dark adaptation. The VER amplitude vs. time curve resembled the psychophysical dark adaptation curve. The spectral sensitivity curve of the dark-adapted VER matched the C.I.E. scotopic sensitivity curve. The dark-adapted VER was abnormal in p...

This large-scale study, consisting of 21.3 million hand hygiene opportunities from 19 distinct facilities in 10 different states, uses linear predictive models to expose factors that may affect hand hygiene compliance. We examine the use of features such as temperature, relative humidity, influenza severity, day/night shift, federal holidays and the presence of new medical residents in predicti...

Twice each year, millions of night-migratory songbirds migrate thousands of kilometers. To find their way, they must process and integrate spatiotemporal information from a variety of cues including the Earth's magnetic field and the night-time starry sky. By using sensory-driven gene expression, we discovered that night-migratory songbirds possess a tight cluster of brain regions highly active...

Sex differences in shock thresholds in relation to the day-night cycle were examined in rats and gerbils using a modification of the flinch-jump technique. In rats, males had higher thresholds than females in both day and night tests, but the magnitude of the difference was greater during the night tests. This effect arose because females tested at night had lower thresholds than females tested...

In a cross-sectional survey of 5420 children in northern Bangladesh, 124 were reported to have night blindness by their parents. Of these, 105 cases along with controls matched for age, sex, and neighbourhood had their scotopic vision examined under standard condition using a luxometer, underwent an ophthalmological examination, and had their serum vitamin A level determined. The mean serum vit...

Mutations in NYX and CACNA1F gene are responsible for the X-linked congenital stationary night blindness (CSNB). In this study, we described the clinical characters of the two Chinese families with X-linked CSNB and detected two novel mutations of c. 371_377delGCTACCT and c.214A>C in the NYX gene by direct sequencing. These two mutations would expand the mutation spectrum of NYX. Our study woul...