Adolescent

Of all the theories purporting to uncover the roots of childhood behaviour and its extension into adult behaviour, the most cogent relates to the physical and psychological bonds of attachment between infant and mother. It is helpful to divide the human lifespan into three periods, each of which has alternating phases of attachment and detachment.

We applied the Weibull distribution to the life-table and age-patterns of diseases in Japan. The life-table follows a composite Weibull distribution composed of initial failure and two stage wear-out failure periods. The extension of lifespan during the past century is manifested as increases in the scale parameters in all three periods and the shape parameters in the wear-out periods with female predominancy. The shape parameters of diseases show time-independent sex-dependent specific values.

BACKGROUND: Among patients with well differentiated papillary thyroid carcinoma who generally have an excellent prognosis and a near-normal lifespan, there exist subsets of patients who have significant risk for morbidity and mortality from this disease. It is important to define the patterns of disease progression and the clinical outcome of such patients to develop effective surveillance and treatment strategies.

Cognitive plasticity, a developmental trait that promotes acquisition of complex skills such as language or playing musical instruments, diminishes substantially during puberty. The loss of plasticity has been attributed to surge of sex steroids during adolescence, but the phenomenon remains poorly understood. We hypothesize that pineal involution during puberty may contribute to plasticity decay. The pineal gland produces melatonin, the level of which declines dramatically during onset of puberty.

A comparison of the data published in anatomy textbooks and anthropological tables does not reveal any change in basic heart dimensions during the period since the beginning of the 20th century to nowadays. However, normal values of many other parameters have changed up to 30% over the same period. These changes may be caused by the acceleration phenomenon or the extension of average lifespan.

The sirtuin 1 protein (SIRT1) is a member of the class III NAD+-dependent histone deacetylases, which are also referred to as the 'sirtuins'. The sirtuins and silent information regulator 1 (SIRT1) in particular, are known to play a role in the response to DNA damage, metabolism, longevity and carcinogenesis. SIRT1 regulates different cellular processes such as proliferation, differentiation and apoptosis through deacetylation of important regulatory proteins such as p53, FOXO3a and NFkappaB.

BACKGROUND: Scant research has examined the effect of neuropsychological (NP) functioning on treatment outcome in pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). This study sought to address this gap in existing research. METHODS: A total of 63 youths were included in this study and asked to complete the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure (ROCF) and specific subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Third Edition (WISC-III).

BACKGROUND: Orthopaedic oncologists often must address leg-length discrepancy after resection of tumors in growing patients with osteosarcoma. There are various alternatives to address this problem. We describe a three-stage procedure: (1) temporary arthrodesis, (2) lengthening by Ilizarov apparatus, and (3) tumor prosthesis.

There are a number of ethical, social, and personal implications generated by the potential development and use of technologies that may extend human longevity by intervening in aging. Despite speculations about likely public attitudes toward life extension, to date there have been few attempts to empirically examine the public's perspective of these issues. Using open-ended survey questions via telephone interviews, this study explored the attitudes of 605 members of the Australian public toward the implications of life extension.

BACKGROUND: The role of social-environmental factors in physical activity (PA) within lower income and ethnic minority populations is understudied. This study explored correlates of age-related PA and perceived walkability (PW). METHODS: Cross-sectional data (N = 401 women; ?18 y) were collected within the Jane-Finch community in Toronto, Ontario using questionnaires. Generalized additive models, an extension to multiple regression, were used to estimate effect sizes and standard errors.