Academy of Finland

About: Academy of Finland is a government organization based out in Helsinki, Finland. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Health care. The organization has 286 authors who have published 419 publications receiving 15304 citations. The organization is also known as: Finlands Akademi & Suomen Akatemia.

Blackouts increase with age, social class and the frequency of intoxication.

Abstract: Of 2,076 Finnish males, 35% reported at interview as having one or more blackouts during the previous 12 months. Age-adjusted mean frequencies of blackouts showed an almost linear increase with the frequency of intoxication. Because of the skewness of the drinking variables, logarithmic transformations were used in multiple regression analysis. This indicated that the frequency of blackouts was significantly associated with age, social class and the frequency of intoxicating drinking, but not with marital status or the frequency of non-intoxicating drinking. Together, the regressors accounted for 21% of the total variance of blackouts.

Ship hull surface using finite elements

Abstract: The paper describes a new method using finite elements for ship hull surface design. A constrained variational principle is proposed in which the fairness criterion is included in the actual functional and the given design coefficients are as constraints. Constraints can be treated by using Lagrangian multipliers or penalty functions. The finite element method is used to solve the variational problem. The final resulting equations in both the cases are derived. Some examples employing rectangular and triangular elements are presented.

Publish in a visible journal of perish? assessing citation performance of nordic cancer research

Abstract: This paper deals with three types of questions concerning the application of citation analysis. First, it studies the use of citation analysis for assessing national research performance in a research subfield; second, it discusses methodological problems related to the definition of research subfields and to data acquisition; and third, as the data concern four Nordic countries, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, attention will be devoted to special problems arising from the application of citation analysis to relatively small countries. These problems are of both methodological and interpretative character.

Aspartylglucosaminidase (AGA) is efficiently produced and endocytosed by glial cells: implication for the therapy of a lysosomal storage disorder

Abstract: Background Aspartylglucosaminuria (AGU) represents diseases affecting the central nervous system and is caused by a deficiency of a lysosomal enzyme, aspartylglucosaminidase (AGA). AGA, like lysosomal enzymes in general, are good targets for gene therapy since they move from cell to cell using the mannose-6-phosphate receptor. Consequently, only a minority of target cells need to be corrected. Here, we wanted to determine which cell type, neurons or glia would better produce AGA to be transported to adjacent cells for use in possible treatment strategies. Methods Adenoviruses containing tissue-specific glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) promoter and neuron-specific enolase (NSE) promoter were generated to target expression of AGA in Aga-deficient mouse primary glial and neuronal cell cultures. In addition an endogenous AGA promoter was used. The experimental design was planned to measure the enzymatic activities in the cells and media of neurons and glia infected with each specific virus. The endocytosis of AGA was analyzed by incubating neuronal and glial cells with media produced by each virus-cell combination. Results AGA promoter was shown to be a very powerful glia promoter producing 32 times higher specific AGA activity in glia than in neurons. GFAP and NSE promoters also produced a clear overexpression of AGA in glia and neurons, respectively. Interestingly, both the NSE and GFAP promoters were not cell-specific in our system. The amount of exocytosed AGA was significantly higher in glial cells than neurons and glial cells were also found to have a greater capacity to endocytose AGA. Conclusions These data indicate the importance of glial cells in the expression and transport of AGA. Subsequently, new approaches can be developed for therapeutic intervention. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.