Knowledge Update

London, Sep 22 (IANS) Individual beliefs can play a potential role in worsening insomnia and pain experiences in patients with chronic pain conditions like back pain, fibromyalgia and arthritis, a team of researchers has found.

"I won't be able to cope with my pain if I don't sleep well," is the common way patients with chronic pain conditions think, the researchers said.

"Thoughts can have a direct and/or indirect impact on our emotion, behaviour and even physiology. The way how we think about sleep and its interaction with pain can influence the way how we cope with pain and manage sleeplessness," said Nicole Tang from the University of Warwick in Britain.

While some of these beliefs are healthy and useful, others are rigid and misinformed. Such conditions can be effectively managed by cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), the study added.

Based on these beliefs, the team developed a scale -- pain-related beliefs and attitudes about sleep (PBAS) -- to measure beliefs about sleep and pain.

The scale, when tested on four groups of patients suffering from long-term pain and bad sleeping patterns, showed that people who believe they won't be able to sleep as a result of their pain are more likely to suffer from insomnia, thus causing worse pain.

Further, the scale was vital in predicting patients' level of insomnia and pain difficulties. 

Current psychological treatments for chronic pain have mostly focused on pain management and a lesser emphasis on sleep.

However, the "PBAS scale provides a useful clinical tool to assess and monitor treatment progress during these therapies", noted Esther Afolalu from the University of Warwick. 

The study has provided therapists the means with which to identify and monitor rigid thoughts about sleep and pain that are sleep-interfering, allowing the application of the proven effective CBT for insomnia in people with chronic pain.

With better sleep, pain problems are significantly reduced, especially after receiving a short course of CBT for both pain and insomnia, the researchers concluded in the paper published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

Project evaluation in a private sector is purely based on the returns on cost factors but it is not the same in the case of public projects. The issue of selecting and implementing public projects is predominated by the political, social and economic dimensions. In the bargain methodological issues pertaining to the evaluation and objectivity take a back seat when political perspectives dominate the social and economic perspectives. International funding agencies and planned economies have emphasized the need for developing effective methodologies to give objective orientation to investments and the accrual of social benefits to the stakeholders who deserve the most. In this paper an attempt is made to evaluate the public projects by double scoring method which incorporates national priorities and the selection of public projects so that objectivity is maintained purely on the rationality of priority ranking. This method would be more meaningful to serve the community on need basis and increase their satisfaction. 

New York, Sep 22 (IANS) Studying hundreds of new genomes from across the globe, researchers, one of them of Indian-origin, have found compelling evidence that essentially all non-Africans alive today descend from a single migration out of Africa some 72,000 years ago.

The findings are supported by three new genome sequencing studies published in the journal Nature.

One of the studies led by Harvard Medical School (HMS) geneticists sequenced samples from 142 smaller populations, most of which were previously understudied.

"We wanted to go out into the world and pull together as many of the ethnically, linguistically and anthropologically diverse samples as we possibly could," said first author of the study Swapan Mallick from Harvard Medical School. 

The Harvard geneticists and their international team of colleagues began by selecting two genomes each from 51 populations represented in a collection called the Human Genome Diversity Project. 

Next, they assembled samples from members of 91 other groups, including diverse Native American, South Asian, and African populations not previously included in genome-wide studies, and sent the DNA for sequencing. In all, the project analysed the genomes of 300 people.

A key conclusion -- that the vast majority of modern human ancestry in non-Africans derives from a single population that migrated out of Africa -- is also supported by two other whole-genome sequencing studies appearing simultaneously in Nature. 

One, led by an Estonian group, focused on 379 whole genome sequences; the other, led by a Danish group, analysed 108 Australians and New Guineans.

Together, the three studies put to rest a lingering question about whether indigenous peoples of Australia, New Guinea and the Andaman Islands descend in large part from a second group that left Africa earlier and skirted the coast of the Indian Ocean. 

They do not, the Harvard researchers said.

"Our best estimate for the proportion of ancestry from an early-exit population is zero," David Reich, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School.

The study that analysed 108 Australians and New Guineans estimated that around 72,000 years ago, an ancestral population common to Aborginal Australians, Europeans and East Asians left the African continent. 

"Discussions have been intense as to what extent Aboriginal Australians represent a separate Out-of-Africa exit to those of Asians and Europeans," said Professor Laurent Excoffier of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the University of Bern said. 

"We find that, once we take into account admixture with archaic humans, the vast majority of the Aboriginal Australian genetic makeup comes from the same African exit as other non-Africans," Excoffier explained.

The HMS-led study further revealed that the common ancestors of modern humans began to differentiate at least 200,000 years ago, long before the out-of-Africa dispersal occurred.

"It had been unclear whether the group that expanded out of Africa represented a large subset of the populations within Africa," said Mallick. 

"This really shows that there was a lot of substructure prior to the expansion," Mallick noted.

Creativity in advertisements in the form, structure, content and the technology is required to hold the attention span of the viewers. Product placement or embedded advertisements is an alternative strategy adopted by advertisers to overcome limitations of effectiveness and legal restrictions of traditional commercial communication. The paper describes the communication effectiveness of product placement of three different types of products placed in three different movies and resumes the small body of research in the field with the help of a empirical research. A quasi-experimental study is carried out in UAE was designed in order to identify awareness and attitude effects of the product placements as well as general evaluations of conventional advertisements. The results indicate small effectiveness of communication by the product placement especially in recognizing the brand, though not always it leads to product enquire, but it generates awareness and interest in the product because of realistic appeal produced by the product placement in a world of realism. Product Placement in movies enhances the effects of celebrity endorsement of the products because it is in a movie setting and reveals the product utility and its features without directing the consumer unlike in a conventional advertisement. Therefore it makes product placement more acceptable. The research highlighted the enhancement of product assessment in the new form of advertisements.

Succession planning is an important activity for continuing businesses without which organizations starts fading out due to absence of leaders who can lead the organization after the successfull leader. In this article a five step process of succession planning is discussed and provides guidelines for organizations to think in the direction of succession planning. The five steps begin with identify critical positions that can shape the organization, identify competencies of incumbent leaders, identify strategies of succession planning, document and implement succesion plan, evaluate the effectiveness of the process and the leader. This process can be equally applicable in small, medium and large organizations with appropriate modification to the context. 

New York, Sep 21 (IANS) Loneliness is linked to poor physical and mental health, and a new study of more than 10,000 people has found that the risk for feeling lonely is at least partially due to genetics.

Genetic risk for loneliness is also associated with neuroticism -- long-term negative emotional state -- and depressive symptoms, said the study published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

"For two people with the same number of close friends and family, one might see their social structure as adequate while the other doesn't," said lead researcher Abraham Palmer, Professor of Psychiatry at University of California - San Diego School of Medicine in the US.

"And that's what we mean by 'genetic predisposition to loneliness' -- we want to know why, genetically speaking, one person is more likely than another to feel lonely, even in the same situation," Palmer noted.

In their latest research, Palmer and his team examined genetic and health information from 10,760 people aged 50 years and older that was collected by the Health and Retirement Study, a longitudinal study of health, retirement and aging sponsored by the National Institute on Aging at the US National Institutes of Health. 

The researchers found that loneliness, the tendency to feel lonely over a lifetime, rather than just occasionally due to circumstance, is a modestly heritable trait -- 14 to 27 per cent.

The researchers also determined that loneliness tends to be co-inherited with neuroticism and a scale of depressive symptoms. 

The study, however, suggests that although feeling lonely is partially due to genetics, environment plays a bigger role.

The team is now working to find a genetic predictor -- a specific genetic variation that would allow researchers to gain additional insights into the molecular mechanisms that influence loneliness.

​London, Sep 17 (IANS) Alterations in alignment of teeth, which is a common dental problem, can lead to poorer control of posture as well as static balance, Spanish researchers have confirmed.

Misaligned teeth, or occlusion, may include teeth that do not touch perfectly such as a shifted midline, gaps between teeth, crowding, crossbites and missing teeth.

Dental occlusion is the contact made between the top and bottom teeth when closing the mouth. Teeth may be perfectly aligned or they may present alterations with varying levels of severity.

Dental occlusion's association with postural control may seem statistically weak, but grows stronger when a person experiences fatigue or when instability is a factor, the study said.

"Postural control is the result of a complex system that includes different sensory and motor elements arising from visual, somatosensory -- denoting a sensation such as pressure, pain, or warmth -- and vestibular information -- regarding motion, equilibrium, and spatial orientation," agenciasinc.es quoted Sonia Julia-Sanchez, researcher at the University of Barcelona in Spain, as saying.

Further, malocclusion -- imperfect positioning of the teeth when the jaws are closed -- has also been associated with different motor and physiological alterations, especially when people were fatigued than when they were rested.

But postural control was shown to improve -- both in static and dynamic equilibrium -- when different malocclusions are corrected by positioning the jaw in a neutral position.

"When the subjects were tired their balance was worse under both stable and unstable conditions. Under static conditions, the factor that had the greatest impact on imbalance was fatigue, Julia-Sanchez added. 

In contrast, a significant relationship between exhaustion and dental occlusion was observed under conditions of maximum instability, Julia-Sanchez said.

However, this relationship can play a crucial role in athletes in how well they ultimately perform as well as in the prevention of injuries such as sprains, strains and fractures caused by unexpected instability as fatigue increases and motor control capacity decreases.

"Therefore, it would be helpful for both the general population and athletes to consider correcting dental occlusions to improve postural control and thus prevent possible falls and instability due to a lack of motor system response," Julia-Sanchez concluded, in the paper published in the journal Motor Control and Neuroscience Letters.

​London, Sep 21 (IANS) Children who spend just 15 minutes or more a day watching their favourite cartoons on television may be at an increased risk of losing their creative minds as compared to those who read books or solve jigsaw puzzles, a study says.

"There was clear evidence that children came up with less original ideas immediately after watching television,"said Sarah Rose, Lecturer at Staffordshire University in Britain," although adding "these effects disappeared after a short time."

However, "if children are less creative in their play, this could, over time, negatively impact their development," Rose said.

There is a belief that slow-paced programmes are more educational but our findings do not support this, Sarah said. 

In the study, the team looked at the immediate impact of television on three-year-old's creativity. They compared children who watched -- Postman Pat, with those who read books or played jigsaw puzzles. 

The children were tested for throwing up maximum original creative ideas.

The study is potentially useful to those who produce children's television shows, early year educators, as well as parents.

The findings were presented at the British Psychological Developmental Conference in Belfast, recently.