An increasing proportion of older adults with Alzheimer's disease or other dementias are now surviving to more advanced stages of the illness. Advanced dementia is associated with feeding problems, including difficulty in swallowing and respiratory diseases. Patients become incompetent to make decisions. As a result, complex situations may arise in which physicians and families decide whether a...

Prostaglandin (PG)E1 may play an important part in the affective disorders, with an excess being present in mania and a deficiency in depression. Platelets from manic patients produce more PGE1 than normal while those from depressive patients produce less. Ethyl alcohol stimulates PGE1 production whereas lithium inhibits it. Alcoholics will tend to have raised PGE1 concentrations while drinking...

In developing countries, protein undernutrition occurs predominantly in young children, whereas in developed countries, it is most commonly seen in long-term care. Similarly, isolated vitamin deficiencies, such as pellagra, beri-beri, and Wernicke’s encephalopathy, occur in developing countries, whereas these are rare in developed countries, being replaced by vitamin B12 deficiency and hypovita...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition of heterogeneous etiology, categorized by social communication deficits, repetitive or restrictive behaviors and interests. Epidemiological studies display that the incidence of autism is increasing, and the treatment of autism is vitally important. There...

Hypothalamic 5'-adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase (AMPK) senses intracellular metabolic stress, i.e., an increase in the cellular AMP:ATP ratio, and integrates diverse hormonal and nutritional signals to restore energy balance. Recent evidence suggests that different nutrients can modulate AMPK activity in the hypothalamus, thereby controlling weight gain through a leptin-indepen...

We compared nutritional knowledge, eating attitudes and chronic dietary restraint scores among 17 men (10 with bulimia nervosa and 7 with anorexia nervosa) and 50 women (20 with bulimia nervosa and 30 with anorexia nervosa), who were consecutive patients at a major treatment center in Brazil. There were no differences in nutritional knowledge and concern with food between men and women. For bot...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Nutritional assessment in the elderly is difficult and different from that performed in younger people. There are specific tools for that purpose, such as the Geriatric Nutritional Risk Index (GNRI). The study objective was to compare this index to the Nutritional Risk Index (NRI). MATERIALS AND METHODS A retrospective, observational analytical study including 113 hos...

Malnutrition plagues a disproportionately large number of children in India compared with most other countries. National-level data on child malnutrition in India have, however, been scarce. Recognizing this gap, India’s 1992–93 National Family Health Survey (NFHS) collected anthropometric data on the height and weight of children below four years of age. The NFHS is based on a large, nationall...

Ariel Higgins-Steele, Piyali Mustaphi, Sherin Varkey, Humayoun Ludin, Najibullah Safi and Zulfiqar A. Bhutta UNICEF Afghanistan Country Office, UNOCA Jalalabad Road, Kabul, Afghanistan, Ministry of Public Health, Kabul, Afghanistan, Center of Excellence in Women and Child Health, The Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan, and Centre for Global Child Health, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto,...

There are parallels between the effects of laboratory selection and nutritional manipulation on the expression of lifespan and other fitness-related characters in Drosophila melanogaster. However, little is known about the effects of laboratory selection and nutritional manipulation when applied simultaneously. Given that D. melanogaster is one of the major model organisms for testing theories ...