University of Antwerp

About: University of Antwerp is a education organization based out in Antwerp, Belgium. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Large Hadron Collider. The organization has 16682 authors who have published 48837 publications receiving 1689748 citations. The organization is also known as: Universiteit Antwerpen & UAntwerp.

Interventions for improving adherence to treatment recommendations in people with type 2 diabetes mellitus

Abstract: Background Research suggests adherence to treatment recommendations is low. In type 2 diabetes, which is a chronic condition slowly leading to serious vascular, nephrologic, neurologic and ophthalmological complications, it can be assumed that enhancing adherence to treatment recommendations may lead to a reduction of complications. Treatment regimens in type 2 diabetes are complicated, encompassing life-style adaptations and medication intake. Objectives To assess the effects of interventions for improving adherence to treatment recommendations in people with type 2 diabetes mellitus. Search strategy Studies were obtained from searches of multiple electronic bibliographic databases supplemented with hand searches of references. Date of last search: November 2002. Selection criteria Randomised controlled and controlled clinical trials, before-after studies and epidemiological studies, assessing changes in adherence to treatment recommendations, as defined in the objectives section, were included. Data collection and analysis Two teams of reviewers independently assessed the trials identified for inclusion. Three teams of two reviewers assessed trial quality and extracted data. The analysis for the narrative part was performed by one reviewer (EV), the meta-analysis by two reviewers (EV, JW). Main results Twentyone studies assessing interventions aiming at improving adherence to treatment recommendations, not to diet or exercise recommendations, in people living with type 2 diabetes in primary care, outpatient settings, community and hospital settings, were included. Outcomes evaluated in these studies were heterogeneous, there was a variety of adherence measurement instruments. Nurse led interventions, home aids, diabetes education, pharmacy led interventions, adaptation of dosing and frequency of medication taking showed a small effect on a variety of outcomes including HbA1c. No data on mortality and morbidity, nor on quality of life could be found. Authors' conclusions Current efforts to improve or to facilitate adherence of people with type 2 diabetes to treatment recommendations do not show significant effects nor harms. The question whether any intervention enhances adherence to treatment recommendations in type 2 diabetes effectively, thus still remains unanswered.

Variable responses to large-scale climate change in European Parus populations

Abstract: Spring temperatures in temperate regions have increased over the past 20 years and many organisms have responded to this increase by advancing the timing of their growth and reproduction. However, not all populations show an advancement of phenology. Understanding why some populations advance and others do not will give us insight into the possible constraints and selection pressures on the advancement of phenology. By combining two decades of data on 24 populations of tits (Parus sp.) from six European countries, we show that the phenological response to large-scale changes in spring temperature varies across a species' range, even between populations situated close to each other. We show that this variation cannot be fully explained by variation in the temperature change during the pre- and post-laying periods, as recently suggested. Instead, we find evidence for a link between rising temperatures and the frequency of second broods, which results in complex shifts in the laying dates of first clutches. Our results emphasize the need to consider links between different life-history parameters in order to predict the ecological consequences of large-scale climate changes.

Search for top-squark pair production in the single-lepton final state in pp collisions at √s=8 TeV

Abstract: This paper presents a search for the pair production of top squarks in events with a single isolated electron or muon, jets, large missing transverse momentum, and large transverse mass. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 19.5 inverse femtobarns of pp collisions collected in 2012 by the CMS experiment at the LHC at a center-of-mass energy of sqrt(s) = 8 TeV. No significant excess in data is observed above the expectation from standard model processes. The results are interpreted in the context of supersymmetric models with pair production of top squarks that decay either to a top quark and a neutralino or to a bottom quark and a chargino. For small mass values of the lightest supersymmetric particle, top-squark mass values up to around 650 GeV are excluded.

Functional MRI of the vocalization-processing network in the macaque brain

Abstract: Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in awake behaving monkeys we investigated how species-specific vocalizations are represented in auditory and auditory-related regions of the macaque brain. We found clusters of active voxels along the ascending auditory pathway that responded to various types of complex sounds: inferior colliculus (IC), medial geniculate nucleus (MGN), auditory core, belt, and parabelt cortex, and other parts of the superior temporal gyrus (STG) and sulcus (STS). Regions sensitive to monkey calls were most prevalent in the anterior STG, but some clusters were also found in frontal and parietal cortex on the basis of comparisons between responses to calls and environmental sounds. Surprisingly, we found that spectrotemporal control sounds derived from the monkey calls (“scrambled calls”) also activated the parietal and frontal regions. Taken together, our results demonstrate that species-specific vocalizations in rhesus monkeys activate preferentially the auditory ventral stream, and in particular areas of the antero-lateral belt and parabelt.