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Background The association between cocaine- and amphetamine-regulated transcript prepropeptide gene (CARTPT) and obesity-related outcomes has shown in the epidemiological studies. Nevertheless, there is lack of data regarding the CARTPT gene–diet interactions in terms of antioxidant potential of diet. So, this study aimed to test CARTPT gene–dietary non-enzymatic antioxidant capacity (NEAC) interactions on cardio-metabolic risk factors in obese individuals. Methods and material The present cross-sectional study was carried out among 288 apparently healthy obese adults within age range of 20–50 years. Antioxidant capacity of diet was estimated by calculating the oxygen radical absorbance capacity (ORAC), ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP), total radical-trapping antioxidant parameter (TRAP) and Trolox equivalent antioxidant capacity (TEAC) using a semiquantitative food frequency questionnaire (FFQ). Genotyping for CARTPT rs2239670 polymorphism was conducted by polymerase chain reaction–restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR–RFLP) method. Results A significant interaction was revealed between CARTPT rs2239670 and dietary ORAC on BMI (PInteraction = 0.048) and fat mass percent (FM%) (PInteraction = 0.008); in A allele carriers, higher adherence to the dietary ORAC was related to lower level of BMI and FM%. And, the significant interactions were observed between FRAP index and rs2239670 in relation to HOMA (PInteraction = 0.049) and QUICKI (PInteraction = 0.048). Moreover, there were significant interactions of rs2239670 with TRAP (PInteraction = 0.029) and TEAC (PInteraction = 0.034) on the serum glucose level; individuals with AG genotype were more respondent to higher intake of TRAP. Conclusion The present study indicated that the relationships between CARTPT rs2239670 and obesity and its-related metabolic parameters depend on adherence to the dietary NEAC. Large prospective studies are needed to confirm our findings.

Background Multidimensional Prognostic Index (MPI) is useful as a prognostic tool in hospitalized older patients, but our knowledge is derived from retrospective studies. We therefore aimed to evaluate in a multicenter, longitudinal, cohort study whether the MPI at hospital admission is useful to identify groups with different mortality risk and whether MPI at discharge may predict institutionalization, rehospitalization, and use of home care services during 12 months. Methods This longitudinal study, carried out between February 2015 and August 2017, included nine public hospitals in Europe and Australia. A standardized comprehensive geriatric assessment including information on functional, nutritional, cognitive status, risk of pressure sores, comorbidities, medications, and cohabitation status was used to calculate the MPI and to categorize participants in low, moderate, and severe risk of mortality. Data regarding mortality, institutionalization, rehospitalization, and use of home care services were recorded through administrative information. Results Altogether, 1,140 hospitalized patients (mean age 84.1 years, women = 60.8%) were included. In the multivariable analysis, compared to patients with low risk group at admission, patients in moderate (odds ratio [OR] = 3.32; 95% CI: 1.79–6.17; p < .001) and severe risk (OR = 10.72, 95% CI: 5.70–20.18, p < .0001) groups were at higher risk of overall mortality. Among the 984 older patients with follow-up data available, those in the severe-risk group experienced a higher risk of overall mortality, institutionalization, rehospitalization, and access to home care services. Conclusions In this cohort of hospitalized older adults, higher MPI values are associated with higher mortality and other negative outcomes. Multidimensional assessment of older people admitted to hospital may facilitate appropriate clinical and postdischarge management.

MPI_AGE is a European Union co-funded research project aimed to use the Multidimensional Prognostic Index (MPI), a validated Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment (CGA)-based prognostic tool, to develop predictive rules that guide clinical and management decisions in older people in different European countries. A series of international studies performed in different settings have shown that the MPI is useful to predict mortality and risk of hospitalization in community-dwelling older subjects at population level. Furthermore, studies performed in older people who underwent a CGA before admission to a nursing home or receiving homecare services showed that the MPI successfully identified groups of persons who could benefit, in terms of reduced mortality, of specific therapies such as statins in diabetes mellitus and coronary artery disease, anticoagulants in atrial fibrillation and antidementia drugs in cognitive decline. A prospective trial carried out in nine hospitals in Europe and Australia demonstrated that the MPI was able to predict not only in-hospital and long-term mortality, but also institutionalization, re-hospitalization and receiving homecare services during the one-year follow-up after hospital discharge. The project also explored the association between MPI and mortality in hospitalized older patients in need of complex procedures such as transcatheter aortic valve implantation or enteral tube feeding. Evidence from these studies has prompted the MPI_AGE Investigators to formulate recommendations for healthcare providers, policy makers and the general population which may help to improve the cost-effectiveness of appropriate health care interventions for older patients.

Vocal music remains a central part of the cultural life of native tradition in the interior of Alaska even as language shift from Athabascan languages to English has accelerated in the last 30 years. The elders are still engaged in musical composition and documentation, but their number is quickly diminishing. Many elders have shown a concern for the continuation of song-making which is essential above all in memorial ceremonies. Young people have also developed the ambition to learn and to carry on this practice. This chapter focuses on the on-going processes in the middle to lower Tanana River area and the situation of language knowledge and song-making there. Song and language are closely related and how the two interact in the learning and practicing situations will be explored. It will also consider the interplay among elders, younger learners, Athabascan language teachers, teachers of music in school, archivists and researchers in processes of transmission.

We investigate the prosodic realization of discourse structure in Dena’ina based on two narratives. We assume that a Dena’ina text consists of informational and prosodic “building blocks” of different sizes that we call paragraphs, story units, intonation units, and prosodic words. After outlining semantic and syntactic criteria for each of these, we demonstrate that story units and intonation unit boundaries are cued by prosodic markers including pitch, rhyme length, and following pause. This enables us to formulate a model of Dena’ina narrative discourse.

This paper provides a detailed phonetic, synchronic description of the oral vowels of Upper Tanana, an Athabascan language spoken in eastern interior Alaska and the western Yukon Territory. Upper Tanana has, depending on the dialect, six or seven oral monophthongs that can be modified for (low) tone, nasalization, and length. Previous accounts are auditory. They disagree regarding the articulation of two of the vowels (which we represent as /ɘ/ and /ʌ/), and raise the question of whether ‘length’ indicates a quantity or a quality distinction. In contrast to earlier accounts, we provide acoustic measurements of F1, F2, and the duration of the vowels of two Alaskan dialects of Upper Tanana: Northway and Tetlin. We find that the phonetic realization of one of the vowels is quite different from the earlier auditory descriptions. For the other vowels and for the quantity distinction, our findings support earlier descriptions while supplying new details. Several co-articulation effects, previously undescribed, are also identified.

Jicarilla Apache is an Eastern Apachean language, a member of the Athabaskan family of North American languages. The speech described here is that of one of the authors, Merton Sandoval of Dulce, New Mexico. The Apachean group is comprised of Western Apachean (Navajo; the Western Apache dialects Cibecue, San Carlos, and White Mountain; and Chiricahua and Mescalero) Eastern Apachean (Jicarilla, Lipan) and Plains Apache (formerly called Kiowa Apache). The other major groups of Athabaskan languages include the northern group of languages spoken in Alaska and Canada, and the Pacific Coast group spoken in Oregon and California. While the western Apachean languages have a well-documented member in Navajo, the eastern group is less well known, being best documented so far in the works of Goddard (1911), Hoijer (1938, 1945, 1946a, 1946b) and Jung (1999). Differences between the western and eastern groups concentrate in consonant development and the evolution of stem shape, and, to some extent, in the lexicon; however, Jicarilla resembles all other Athabaskan languages in bearing a close morphological relationship to all its relatives.

The community of Minto lies about 130 miles northwest of Fairbanks, Alaska. The Athabascan language spoken in Minto is the last dialect surviving of the language known as Tanana or Lower Tanana. It is extremely endangered, with no native speakers under the age of 70, and fluent elders passing on. The elder leaders in Minto decided that songs should be studied. Several generations of Minto elders have participated in sharing their culture with formal researchers in many disciplines. They have also supported religious and secular community organizers, language learners, and interested visitors. The project reported on here (NEH HD-50298-08, Minto songs) set out to integrate archived Minto music present in the ANLC Archive and other archives with information from elders and other sources. The activities in this project included archival organization, workshops, linguistic/musical sessions and transcription. A student technician spent the period of the project listening to 44 Minto recordings in the Alaska Native Language Center in real time, defining points of transition within them, and marking the presence of music. These recordings were presented to the elders and discussed with them, at workshops in Minto and Fairbanks and in smaller sessions, mainly held at the researcher’s or elders’ houses..., Language Documentation and Description, Vol. 10 (2012): Special Issue on Humanities of the lesser-known: New directions in the description, documentation and typology of endangered languages and musics

This paper is an initial exploration of conversational patterns in Upper Tanana, an Athabascan language spoken in eastern interior Alaska. While there are a small number of discourse and narrative studies on Athabascan languages in general (Thompson 1989, McCreedy 1989, Saxon 1993, Lovick 2005, 2010a; Berez forthcoming, Lovick & Tuttle forthcoming, to name but a few) and at least one study of conversational patterns in Navajo (Field 2007), the present study is, to our knowledge, the first concerned with the structure of conversation in a Northern Athabascan language. We believe there are several reasons for this. First, the great complexity of Athabascan phonology and morphology is often forbidding to researchers interested in speech above the sentence level. A substantial amount of linguistic analysis (transcription, translation, and at least some morphological analysis) has to be done before analysis of texts and conversations can take place. Second, the severe endangerment of many Athabascan languages makes it difficult to record naturalistic conversation. Many fluent speakers are capable of producing monologues, but at least in the setting of our work, most conduct their everyday conversations in English, even when the other speakers present are all fluent. As a result, conversation in the native Athabascan..., Language Documentation and Description, Vol. 10 (2012): Special Issue on Humanities of the lesser-known: New directions in the description, documentation and typology of endangered languages and musics

This article investigates the question of word definition in a polysynthetic language, Ahtna Athabascan. Syntactic models of polysynthetic languages cannot explain why some syntactic strings constitute sentences and others words, since they represent both in the same component. In the most articulated of such theories, e.g., Rice (2000) and Hale (2001) for Athabascan languages, it is explicit that words are formed based on prosodic principles. It follows that there should be unambiguous cues to the left and right edge of the word. Two possibilities for these cues are explored: acoustic evidence for consonant fortition and phonological evidence from lexicon search. Consonant fortition does not mark edges of Ahtna words, but stem-initial consonants undergo fortition, and there may be fortition of the first conjunct prefix following the disjunct boundary. Other cues include stress, consonant cluster patterns in prefix strings, and stem-final laryngeal neutralizations. In addition, while stress and syllabification patterns can help a listener shape words in Ahtna, lexical knowledge is also required. Morphological designations such as prefix and suffix are still essential. Given these requirements, a substantial role for morphology is indicated in addition to syntax and prosody.