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Objective: To study the relationship between maternal affective disorders (AD) before and during pregnancy, and pre-term birth. Design: Retrospective observational study. Location: Sexual and reproductive health units at the Institut Català de la Salut (ICS) in Catalonia, Spain. Participants: Pregnant women with a result of live-born child from 1/1/2012 to 30/10/2015. Interventions: Data were obtained from the ICS Primary Care electronic medical record. Main measurements: Diagnosis of AD before and during pregnancy, months of pregnancy, and possible confusion factors were collected. Descriptive statistical analysis (median, interquartile range, and absolute and relative frequency), bivariate analysis (Wilcoxon test and Chi-square test), and multivariate analysis (logistic regression) were performed. Results: 102,086 women presented valid information for the study. Prevalence of AD during pregnancy was 3.5% (4.29% in pre-term and 3.46% in term births; p

Background: DNA methylation (DNAm) is associated with time-varying environmental factors that contribute to major depressive disorder (MDD) risk. We sought to test whether DNAm signatures of lifestyle and biochemical factors were associated with MDD to reveal dynamic biomarkers of MDD risk that may be amenable to lifestyle interventions. Methods: Here, we calculated methylation scores (MS) at multiple p-value thresholds for lifestyle (BMI, smoking, alcohol consumption, and educational attainment) and biochemical (high-density lipoprotein (HDL) and total cholesterol) factors in Generation Scotland (GS) (N=9,502) and in a replication cohort (ALSPACadults, N=565), using CpG sites reported in previous well-powered methylome-wide association studies. We also compared their predictive accuracy for MDD to a MDD MS in an independent GS sub-sample (N=4,432). Findings: Each trait MS was significantly associated with its corresponding phenotype in GS (βrange=0.089–1.457) and in ALSPAC (βrange=0.078–2.533). Each MS was also significantly associated with MDD before and after adjustment for its corresponding phenotype in GS (βrange=0.053–0.145). After accounting for relevant lifestyle factors, MS for educational attainment (β=0.094) and alcohol consumption (MSp-valuerange=-0.069–0.083) remained significantly associated with MDD in GS. Smoking (AUC=0.569) and educational attainment (AUC=0.585) MSs could discriminate MDD from controls better than the MDD MS (AUC=0.553) in the independent GS sub-sample. Analyses implicating MDD did not replicate across ALSPAC, although the direction of effect was consistent for all traits when adjusting for the MS corresponding phenotypes. Interpretation: We showed that lifestyle and biochemical MS were associated with MDD before and after adjustment for their corresponding phenotypes (pnominalALSPAC=565; NGS=9,502), potentially due to demographic differences or low statistical power, but effect sizes were consistent with the direction reported in GS. DNAm scores for modifiable MDD risk factors may contribute to disease vulnerability and, in some cases, explain additional variance to their observed phenotypes. Funding: Wellcome Trust.

Engagement creates many positive individual and organisational outcomes and recent research suggests that there are individual differences in employees’ tendencies to be engaged (e.g., Akhtar et al., 2015). However, previous research has not examined how specific facets of emotional intelligence can promote or hinder engagement as a function of the psychological resources they provide to employees. The current study investigated how individual facets of Trait Emotional Intelligence predicted engagement levels amongst a sample of three hundred and six employees. Structural Equation Modelling revealed that a facet-level approach explained nearly twice the variance in engagement compared to taking a global representation of emotional intelligence. Results specifically revealed that employees with higher dispositional Happiness, who are good at influencing others’ emotions (Emotion Management), are motivated by an internal need for achievement (Self-Motivation) but who experience greater fluctuations in emotion (Emotion Regulation) experience higher levels of engagement. It is argued that these traits act as an employee's personal resource that facilitate experiences of engagement. The findings are discussed in relation to selection, development, training, and leadership in order to facilitate engagement levels in organisations. Limitations with accompanying directions for future research are also discussed.

Recovery and management of an endangered population requires the use of all available tools. Besides the genealogical data (often scarce) molecular information should be used to refine the genetic relationships between individuals within the programme. Phenotypic information on a diagnostic trait could also be integrated as a management criterion, but this strategy could conflict with the objective of maintaining the highest levels of genetic diversity. In this study we used data from 19 individuals, founders of the recovery programme of the Iberian pig Dorado strain and genotyped for 19 microsatellites, to test the optimal way to combine all information (i.e. pedigree, molecular markers and values for a morphological index) and the consequences of each decision on the genetic structure of the population. Results show that it is possible to find equilibrium solutions where, for example, 43% of increase in the average levels of the trait of interest can be reached with just a 4% of loss in genetic diversity and almost no increase in the inbreeding coefficient. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.