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© 2019 Asia Oceania Association for the Study of Obesity Background: Severe mental illness is characterised by a 15-year mortality gap driven by cardiometabolic disease. Antipsychotic treatment leads to increased appetite and rapid weight gain. The 12-week lifestyle pilot intervention improved dietary intake and prevented antipsychotic-induced weight gain. Here we report two-year outcomes. Method: Participants were exposed to an extended program. Weight and waist circumference were measured, and food frequency questionnaire completed. Results: Diet quality was higher, and discretionary food intake was 40% lower, at two-years compared to baseline. Weight and waist-circumference did not increase. Conclusion: This pilot study demonstrated sustained effectiveness of a dietetic intervention in youth with first-episode psychosis with improvements in diet quality and no increase in weight secondary to antipsychotic medication initiation.

A novel approach to the evaluation of bit error rate performance for directive optical wireless links, which takes into account shot noise, fluorescent lighting and intersymbol interference (ISI) is presented. The evaluation technique is based on nonclassical Gauss Quadrature Rules, with the fluorescent light and the ISI from high pass filtering being modeled mathematically. As an application of this method the BER performance of NRZ-OOK and Manchester modulation has been evaluated and numerical results are presented. It is shown that Manchester modulation is quite robust in combating fluorescent lighting interference and its performance is not critical on the selection of the HPF cutoff frequency.

Currently, there is considerable interest in infrared as an alternative medium to radio for indoor wireless communications, particularly for computer networking applications. This paper describes a novel IR-LAN link topology that employs an optical spatial-angular mapping technique which minimizes link losses and facilitates high link rates, whilst maintaining a useful coverage area. Blocking probability effects and overall system performance are examined in terms of aggregate transmission rates.

Background: Recent technological advances in epigenome profiling have led to an increasing number of studies investigating the role of the epigenome in obesity. There is also evidence that environmental exposures during early life can induce persistent alterations in the epigenome, which may lead to an increased risk of obesity later in life. Method: This paper provides a systematic review of studies investigating the association between obesity and either global, site-specific or genome-wide methylation of DNA. Studies on the impact of pre- and postnatal interventions on methylation and obesity are also reviewed. We discuss outstanding questions, and introduce EpiSCOPE, a multidisciplinary research program aimed at increasing the understanding of epigenetic changes in emergence of obesity. Results: An electronic search for relevant articles, published between September 2008 and September 2013 was performed. From the 319 articles identified, 46 studies were included and reviewed. The studies provided no consistent evidence for a relationship between global methylation and obesity. The studies did identify multiple obesity-associated differentially methylated sites, mainly in blood cells. Extensive, but small, alterations in methylation at specific sites were observed in weight loss intervention studies, and several associations between methylation marks at birth and later life obesity were found. Conclusions: Overall, significant progress has been made in the field of epigenetics and obesity and the first potential epigenetic markers for obesity that could be detected at birth have been identified. Eventually this may help in predicting an individual's obesity risk at a young age and opens possibilities for introducing targeted prevention strategies. It has also become clear that several epigenetic marks are modifiable, by changing the exposure in utero, but also by lifestyle changes in adult life, which implies that there is the potential for interventions to be introduced in postnatal life to modify unfavourable epigenomic profiles Refereed/Peer-reviewed