| 1. |
- Clase, CM, et al.
(författare)
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Can Peer Review Be Kinder? Supportive Peer Review: A Re-Commitment to Kindness and a Call to Action
- 2022
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Ingår i: Canadian journal of kidney health and disease. - : SAGE Publications. - 2054-3581. ; 9, s. 20543581221080327-
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Peer review aims to select articles for publication and to improve articles before publication. We believe that this process can be infused by kindness without losing rigor. In 2014, the founding editorial team of the Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease (CJKHD) made an explicit commitment to treat authors as we would wish to be treated ourselves. This broader group of authors reaffirms this principle, for which we suggest the terminology “supportive review.”
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| 2. |
- Visser, P. J., et al.
(författare)
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Cerebrospinal fluid tau levels are associated with abnormal neuronal plasticity markers in Alzheimer's disease
- 2022
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Ingår i: Molecular Neurodegeneration. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1750-1326. ; 17:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background Increased total tau (t-tau) in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is a key characteristic of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and is considered to result from neurodegeneration. T-tau levels, however, can be increased in very early disease stages, when neurodegeneration is limited, and can be normal in advanced disease stages. This suggests that t-tau levels may be driven by other mechanisms as well. Because tau pathophysiology is emerging as treatment target for AD, we aimed to clarify molecular processes associated with CSF t-tau levels. Methods We performed a proteomic, genomic, and imaging study in 1380 individuals with AD, in the preclinical, prodromal, and mild dementia stage, and 380 controls from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative and EMIF-AD Multimodality Biomarker Discovery study. Results We found that, relative to controls, AD individuals with increased t-tau had increased CSF concentrations of over 400 proteins enriched for neuronal plasticity processes. In contrast, AD individuals with normal t-tau had decreased levels of these plasticity proteins and showed increased concentrations of proteins indicative of blood-brain barrier and blood-CSF barrier dysfunction, relative to controls. The distinct proteomic profiles were already present in the preclinical AD stage and persisted in prodromal and dementia stages implying that they reflect disease traits rather than disease states. Dysregulated plasticity proteins were associated with SUZ12 and REST signaling, suggesting aberrant gene repression. GWAS analyses contrasting AD individuals with and without increased t-tau highlighted several genes involved in the regulation of gene expression. Targeted analyses of SNP rs9877502 in GMNC, associated with t-tau levels previously, correlated in individuals with AD with CSF concentrations of 591 plasticity associated proteins. The number of APOE-e4 alleles, however, was not associated with the concentration of plasticity related proteins. Conclusions CSF t-tau levels in AD are associated with altered levels of proteins involved in neuronal plasticity and blood-brain and blood-CSF barrier dysfunction. Future trials may need to stratify on CSF t-tau status, as AD individuals with increased t-tau and normal t-tau are likely to respond differently to treatment, given their opposite CSF proteomic profiles.
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| 3. |
- Alejandre, Elizabeth M., et al.
(författare)
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Characterization Factors to Assess Land Use Impacts on Pollinator Abundance in Life Cycle Assessment
- 2023
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Ingår i: Environmental Science and Technology. - : American Chemical Society (ACS). - 0013-936X .- 1520-5851. ; 57:8, s. 3445-3454
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- While wild pollinators play a key role in global food production, their assessment is currently missing from the most commonly used environmental impact assessment method, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). This is mainly due to constraints in data availability and compatibility with LCA inventories. To target this gap, relative pollinator abundance estimates were obtained with the use of a Delphi assessment, during which 25 experts, covering 16 nationalities and 45 countries of expertise, provided scores for low, typical, and high expected abundance associated with 24 land use categories. Based on these estimates, this study presents a set of globally generic characterization factors (CFs) that allows translating land use into relative impacts to wild pollinator abundance. The associated uncertainty of the CFs is presented along with an illustrative case to demonstrate the applicability in LCA studies. The CFs based on estimates that reached consensus during the Delphi assessment are recommended as readily applicable and allow key differences among land use types to be distinguished. The resulting CFs are proposed as the first step for incorporating pollinator impacts in LCA studies, exemplifying the use of expert elicitation methods as a useful tool to fill data gaps that constrain the characterization of key environmental impacts.
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| 4. |
- Amano, Tatsuya, et al.
(författare)
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Transforming Practice : Checklists for Delivering Change
- 2022
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Ingår i: Transforming Conservation : A Practical Guide to Evidence and Decision Making - A Practical Guide to Evidence and Decision Making. - 9781800648562 - 9781800648586 ; , s. 367-386
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Delivering a revolution in evidence use requires a cultural change across society. For a wide range of groups (practitioners, knowledge brokers, organisations, organisational leaders, policy makers, funders, researchers, journal publishers, the wider conservation community, educators, writers, and journalists), options are described to facilitate a change in practice, and a series of downloadable checklists is provided.
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| 5. |
- Cole, Lorna J., et al.
(författare)
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A critical analysis of the potential for EU Common Agricultural Policy measures to support wild pollinators on farmland
- 2020
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Ingår i: Journal of Applied Ecology. - : Wiley. - 0021-8901 .- 1365-2664. ; 57:4, s. 681-694
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Agricultural intensification and associated loss of high-quality habitats are key drivers of insect pollinator declines. With the aim of decreasing the environmental impact of agriculture, the 2014 EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) defined a set of habitat and landscape features (Ecological Focus Areas: EFAs) farmers could select from as a requirement to receive basic farm payments. To inform the post-2020 CAP, we performed a European-scale evaluation to determine how different EFA options vary in their potential to support insect pollinators under standard and pollinator-friendly management, as well as the extent of farmer uptake. A structured Delphi elicitation process engaged 22 experts from 18 European countries to evaluate EFAs options. By considering life cycle requirements of key pollinating taxa (i.e. bumble bees, solitary bees and hoverflies), each option was evaluated for its potential to provide forage, bee nesting sites and hoverfly larval resources. EFA options varied substantially in the resources they were perceived to provide and their effectiveness varied geographically and temporally. For example, field margins provide relatively good forage throughout the season in Southern and Eastern Europe but lacked early-season forage in Northern and Western Europe. Under standard management, no single EFA option achieved high scores across resource categories and a scarcity of late season forage was perceived. Experts identified substantial opportunities to improve habitat quality by adopting pollinator-friendly management. Improving management alone was, however, unlikely to ensure that all pollinator resource requirements were met. Our analyses suggest that a combination of poor management, differences in the inherent pollinator habitat quality and uptake bias towards catch crops and nitrogen-fixing crops severely limit the potential of EFAs to support pollinators in European agricultural landscapes. Policy Implications. To conserve pollinators and help protect pollination services, our expert elicitation highlights the need to create a variety of interconnected, well-managed habitats that complement each other in the resources they offer. To achieve this the Common Agricultural Policy post-2020 should take a holistic view to implementation that integrates the different delivery vehicles aimed at protecting biodiversity (e.g. enhanced conditionality, eco-schemes and agri-environment and climate measures). To improve habitat quality we recommend an effective monitoring framework with target-orientated indicators and to facilitate the spatial targeting of options collaboration between land managers should be incentivised.
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| 6. |
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| 7. |
- Visser, Pieter Jelle, et al.
(författare)
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Cerebrospinal fluid total tau levels indicate aberrant neuronal plasticity in Alzheimer's disease.
- 2020
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Ingår i: medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences. - : Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterised by abnormal amyloid beta and tau processing. Previous studies reported that cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) total tau (t-tau) levels vary between patients. Here we show that CSF t-tau variability is associated with distinct impairments in neuronal plasticity mediated by gene repression factors SUZ12 and REST. AD individuals with abnormal t-tau levels have increased CSF concentrations of plasticity proteins regulated by SUZ12 and REST. AD individuals with normal t-tau, on the contrary, have decreased concentrations of these plasticity proteins and increased concentrations in proteins associated with blood-brain and blood CSF-barrier dysfunction. Genomic analyses suggested that t-tau levels in part depend on genes involved in gene expression. The distinct plasticity abnormalities in AD as signaled by t-tau urge the need for personalised treatment.
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| 8. |
- Wink, Alle Meije, et al.
(författare)
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Quantifying AD-related brain amyloid with linearised progression models : model-based vs. data-based.
- 2022
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Ingår i: Alzheimer's and Dementia. - : Wiley. - 1552-5260 .- 1552-5279. ; 18:S1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: Brain amyloid-β (Aβ) is the pathological hallmark of Alzheimer's disease (AD). In logistic disease models, Aβ accumulation is a sigmoid function of time-since-disease-onset (TSDO) (figure 1). Previous positron emission tomography (PET)-based models vary accumulation onset(t50) and duration(r) globally; capacity(K) and baseline(NS) regionally (Whittington2018). We confirm existing approaches and propose a more powerful ICA-based approach to quantify disease severity and estimate TSDO. Method: We used 1071 18F-florbetapir standard uptake value ratio (SUVR) images from the ADNI-2 study (adni.loni.usc.edu/data-samples/data-types/pet). Images were mapped into MNI space. Averages were extracted using the Harvard-Oxford brain-atlas. Whole-brain tracer-specific sigmoid parameters (Jack2013) obtained from the literature were used to estimate TSDO. Of 16 models of regional Aβ accumulation (each of the 4 regional sigmoid parameters varied either regionally or globally), the optimal Bayesian information criterion was found with global t50 and r, and regional NS and K (figure 1) with global values r=6.16y and t50=4.10y. Linearised maps of NS and K were obtained by regressing the SUVR maps onto the global sigmoid. We also estimated these maps as independent components, using a 2-component ICA on the SUVR maps. Both outcomes were used to quantify Aβ accumulation from SUVR images as weighting factors of the accumulation map. We compared the weights from the logistic model and the ICA model in ADNI, using effect size measured with Hedges' g between cognitively normal (CN), subjective memory complaints (SMC), mild cognitive impairment (EMCI/MCI/LMCI) and AD groups. We compared 3 longitudinal visits (N=112) in the OASIS-3 study (see www.oasis-brains.org) with both methods, global SUVR and Centiloid (Klunk2015) using 11C-PiB PET SUVR images. Result: Maps of accumulation capacity from both models had spatial correlation of 0.86 (figure 2); baseline maps had spatial correlation of 0.95. Hedges' g between ADNI groups was 2.25 for K, and 2.42 for ICA (1.46 for global SUVR). In OASIS-3, Hedges' g between visits was 1.24 for K, 1.46 for ICA (global SUVR 0.15, Centiloid 0.4). Conclusion: We demonstrate that linear accumulation models can be used to quantify brain Aβ with PET; maps obtained by ICA yield larger effect sizes than the logistic method for differentiating groups and measuring changes between visits.
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