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- Ademuyiwa, Adesoji O., et al.
(författare)
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Determinants of morbidity and mortality following emergency abdominal surgery in children in low-income and middle-income countries
- 2016
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Ingår i: BMJ Global Health. - : BMJ Publishing Group Ltd. - 2059-7908. ; 1:4
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: Child health is a key priority on the global health agenda, yet the provision of essential and emergency surgery in children is patchy in resource-poor regions. This study was aimed to determine the mortality risk for emergency abdominal paediatric surgery in low-income countries globally.Methods: Multicentre, international, prospective, cohort study. Self-selected surgical units performing emergency abdominal surgery submitted prespecified data for consecutive children aged <16 years during a 2-week period between July and December 2014. The United Nation's Human Development Index (HDI) was used to stratify countries. The main outcome measure was 30-day postoperative mortality, analysed by multilevel logistic regression.Results: This study included 1409 patients from 253 centres in 43 countries; 282 children were under 2 years of age. Among them, 265 (18.8%) were from low-HDI, 450 (31.9%) from middle-HDI and 694 (49.3%) from high-HDI countries. The most common operations performed were appendectomy, small bowel resection, pyloromyotomy and correction of intussusception. After adjustment for patient and hospital risk factors, child mortality at 30 days was significantly higher in low-HDI (adjusted OR 7.14 (95% CI 2.52 to 20.23), p<0.001) and middle-HDI (4.42 (1.44 to 13.56), p=0.009) countries compared with high-HDI countries, translating to 40 excess deaths per 1000 procedures performed.Conclusions: Adjusted mortality in children following emergency abdominal surgery may be as high as 7 times greater in low-HDI and middle-HDI countries compared with high-HDI countries. Effective provision of emergency essential surgery should be a key priority for global child health agendas.
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| 2. |
- Fresard, Laure, et al.
(författare)
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Identification of rare-disease genes using blood transcriptome sequencing and large control cohorts
- 2019
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Ingår i: Nature Medicine. - : NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP. - 1078-8956 .- 1546-170X. ; 25:6, s. 911-919
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- It is estimated that 350 million individuals worldwide suffer from rare diseases, which are predominantly caused by mutation in a single gene(1). The current molecular diagnostic rate is estimated at 50%, with whole-exome sequencing (WES) among the most successful approaches(2-5). For patients in whom WES is uninformative, RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) has shown diagnostic utility in specific tissues and diseases(6-8). This includes muscle biopsies from patients with undiagnosed rare muscle disorders(6,9), and cultured fibroblasts from patients with mitochondrial disorders(7). However, for many individuals, biopsies are not performed for clinical care, and tissues are difficult to access. We sought to assess the utility of RNA-seq from blood as a diagnostic tool for rare diseases of different pathophysiologies. We generated whole-blood RNA-seq from 94 individuals with undiagnosed rare diseases spanning 16 diverse disease categories. We developed a robust approach to compare data from these individuals with large sets of RNA-seq data for controls (n = 1,594 unrelated controls and n = 49 family members) and demonstrated the impacts of expression, splicing, gene and variant filtering strategies on disease gene identification. Across our cohort, we observed that RNA-seq yields a 7.5% diagnostic rate, and an additional 16.7% with improved candidate gene resolution.
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| 3. |
- Gei, Maga, et al.
(författare)
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Legume abundance along successional and rainfall gradients in Neotropical forests
- 2018
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Ingår i: Nature Ecology & Evolution. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2397-334X. ; 2:7
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The nutrient demands of regrowing tropical forests are partly satisfied by nitrogen-fixing legume trees, but our understanding of the abundance of those species is biased towards wet tropical regions. Here we show how the abundance of Leguminosae is affected by both recovery from disturbance and large-scale rainfall gradients through a synthesis of forest inventory plots from a network of 42 Neotropical forest chronosequences. During the first three decades of natural forest regeneration, legume basal area is twice as high in dry compared with wet secondary forests. The tremendous ecological success of legumes in recently disturbed, water-limited forests is likely to be related to both their reduced leaflet size and ability to fix N2, which together enhance legume drought tolerance and water-use efficiency. Earth system models should incorporate these large-scale successional and climatic patterns of legume dominance to provide more accurate estimates of the maximum potential for natural nitrogen fixation across tropical forests.
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| 6. |
- Duncan, Rebecca
(författare)
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From Cheap Labour to Surplus Humanity : World-Ecology and the Postapartheid Speculative in Neill Blomkamp’s District 9
- 2018
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Ingår i: Science Fiction Film and Television. - : Liverpool University Press. - 1754-3770 .- 1754-3789. ; 11:1, s. 45-72
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Conventions appropriated from certain forms of speculative fiction – sf, gothic and horror among them – have become increasingly discernible features of diverse contemporary postcolonial imaginaries. In this article, I consider Neill Blomkamp's District 9 (2009) in light of questions posed by these developments. Drawing on world-ecological thinking (Moore 2015) and highlighting legacies of South African political economy (Wolpe 1972), I suggest the film deploys sf and horror traditions alongside invocations of local history in response to the reorganisation of 'Nature' in South Africa in the wake of the transition from apartheid to neoliberal governance. I show that Blomkamp manipulates speculative forms to register the febrile climate of this anxious time, and to contest the logic undergirding historic and ongoing unevenness. In conclusion, I point to key limitations to his project in this last regard.
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| 7. |
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| 8. |
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| 9. |
- Duncan, Rebecca, et al.
(författare)
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Introduction : McGrath in the World: Gothic, Madness and Transnational Consciousness
- 2019
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Ingår i: Patrick McGrath and his Worlds. - London : Routledge. - 9781138311190 - 9781003007944 ; , s. 1-18
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This introduction identifies a transnational consciousness that runs through Patrick McGrath’s work. Locating this in relation to the author’s own migration from England to the United States, and considering it in the context of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century transatlantic upheavals, the chapter explores McGrath’s established and related investments in the gothic and tropes of madness as registering and, at times, interrogating contemporary geopolitical shifts. To bring this relationship between madness, gothic, and the transnational into focus, the introduction examines a selection of fictions from across McGrath’s oeuvre through the lens of the imperial gothic—a mode that is frequently reflexively and critically engaged by these texts. Viewed in this way, McGrath’s gothic figurations of madness can—in certain of his narratives—be read to witness anxieties around the decline of British and US hegemony in the latter phases of the Cold War, for example, and in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. To approach the author’s fiction from this vantage point is not, as we point out, to refuse the psychoanalytic perspectives so frequently applied to the McGrath canon; rather, it is to make visible the ways in which self-consciously summoned clinical paradigms articulate with gothic forms and a transnational sensibility to critique planetary formations of power. The introduction closes with an outline of the chapters collected in this volume.
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| 10. |
- Duncan, Rebecca
(författare)
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Shades of Dissent : Notes on Haunting in South African Literary History
- 2017
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Ingår i: Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story. - London : Routledge. - 9781138184763 - 9781315644417
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This chapter suggests encountering gradations—or, perhaps more appropriately, shades—of dissent. It explores the idea in respect of haunting figures emergent across the twentieth century in South African literatures. The tale of South African politics is, Antjie Krog suggests, something akin to a haunted house: narratives of liberal empire—elaborately extended as apartheid from the middle of the twentieth century—are populated by restless, revenant things. To read Perceval Gibbon’s ghost stories as haunted by that which their imperial premises cannot acknowledge is to engage in a particular historical praxis. The ability of the ghost to interrupt ‘modern’ knowledges becomes especially important if it is considered that, in South Africa, the epistemologies have unfolded with the processes of imperial expansion. Discourses inherited from Enlightenment modernity inform British imperial governance, and they live on as the founding premise of apartheid rule, which began with the election of the National Party in 1948.
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