Academics have a public duty to use their research to promote improvements in patient care and health. Here, we argue that there is an imperative to translate recent compelling evidence demonstrating the importance of the periconceptional period in determining the health of future generations, into improvements in pregnancy-related care and perinatal health. Taking this action has the potential...

Abstract Background Periconceptional folic acid (FA) supplementation not only reduces the incidence of neural tube defects, but also improves cognitive performances in offspring. However, genes or pathways that are epigenetically regulated by FA neurodevelopment were rarely reported. Methods To elucidate underlying mechanism, effect on methylation profiles brain tissue male rat offspring was as...

Exposure to poor maternal nutrition around the time of conception results in an early prepartum activation of the fetal pituitary-adrenal axis and in increased adrenal growth and stress response after birth associated with epigenetic changes in a differentially methylated region (DMR) of adrenal IGF2/H19. We have determined the effects of maternal undernutrition during the periconceptional peri...

Neural tube defects (NTDs) are a group of congenital malformations with worldwide distribution and complex etiopathogenesis. Folic acid plays a pivotal role in their prevention. We aimed to identify the protective effect of folic acid intake against NTDs and its dependence on different socioeconomic and environmental factors in a cohort of mothers in Egypt. A cross-sectional study was carried o...

Here it is shown that chaotic oscillations can appear after a series of period doublings in radiating diffusion flames when the activation temperature is high enough. It is also shown that period doubling cascades appear typically in very small regions and that they may not be observable if one starts with small perturbations of a steady flame.

We prove that the period doubling operator has an expanding di rection at the xed point We use the induced operator a Perron Frobenius type operator to study the linearization of the period dou bling operator at its xed point We then use a sequence of linear operators with nite ranks to study this induced operator The proof is constructive One can calculate the expanding direction and the rate ...

We show that the greedy spanner algorithm constructs a (1+ )-spanner of weight −O(d)w(MST) for a point set in metrics of doubling dimension d, resolving an open problem posed by Gottlieb [11]. Our result generalizes the result by Narasimhan and Smid [15] who showed that a point set in d-dimension Euclidean space has a (1+ )-spanner of weight at most −O(d)w(MST). Our proof only uses the packing ...

In this paper, we study the linear structure of sets A ⊂ Fn2 with doubling constant σ(A) < 2, where σ(A) := |A+A| |A| . In particular, we show that A is contained in a small affine subspace. We also show that A can be covered by at most four shifts of some subspace V with |V | ≤ |A|. Finally, we classify all binary sets with small doubling constant.