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Our goal was to compare brief behavioral treatment for insomnia (BBTI) to a progressive muscle relaxation training (PMRT) control condition among veterans with insomnia, examining psychosocial functioning as a primary outcome and sleep-related outcomes, mood, cognition, and pain as secondary outcomes.

Veterans were randomly assigned to either BBTI or PMRT (N = 91; 24-74 years; M = 49 years). BBTI consisted of two in-person (60-min and 30-min sessions) and two telephone sessions (20-min each), and the PMRT control condition was matched to BBTI for session duration and type. Veterans were assessed through clinical interview at baseline and self-report measures at pre-, mid-, and posttreatment, as well as 6-month follow-up for the BBTI condition to assess sustained response. Measures also included continuous sleep monitoring with sleep diary.

Intent-to-treat analyses demonstrated that individuals who completed BBTI versus PMRT reported greater improvements in work, home, social and cognitive functioning, insomnia symptom severity, mood, and energy. Improvements in psychosocial functioning, insomnia symptoms, and mood were maintained 6-months following BBTI treatment completion.

Veterans who received BBTI improved and maintained gains in psychosocial functioning, insomnia, and mood. BBTI is a treatment that can be implemented in primary care, mental health, or integrated care settings and provide symptom relief and improved functioning among those with insomnia, one of the most commonly reported mental health problems among veterans.

NCT02571452.

NCT02571452.Most reproductive biologists who study female gametes will agree with the 16th century anatomist William Harvey’s doctrine ‘Ex Ovo Omnia’. This phrase, which literally translates to ‘everything from the egg’, recognizes the centrality of the egg in animal development. Eggs are most impressive cells, capable of supporting development of an entirely new organism following fertilization or parthenogenetic activation. Not so uniformly embraced in the field of reproductive biology is the nomenclature used to refer to the female germ cell. What is an oocyte? What is an egg? Are these terms the same, different, interchangeable? Here we provide functional definitions of the oocyte and egg, and how they can be used in the context of mammalian gamete biology and beyond.Although numerous studies have found horizontal transposon transfer (HTT) to be widespread across metazoans, few have focused on HTT in marine ecosystems. To investigate potential recent HTTs into marine species, we searched for novel repetitive elements in sea snakes, a group of elapids which transitioned to a marine habitat at most 18 Ma. Our analysis uncovered repeated HTTs into sea snakes following their marine transition. The seven subfamilies of horizontally transferred LINE retrotransposons we identified in the olive sea snake (Aipysurus laevis) are transcribed, and hence are likely still active and expanding across the genome. A search of 600 metazoan genomes found all seven were absent from other amniotes, including terrestrial elapids, with the most similar LINEs present in fish and marine invertebrates. The one exception was a similar LINE found in sea kraits, a lineage of amphibious elapids which independently transitioned to a marine environment 25 Ma. Our finding of repeated horizontal transfer events into marine snakes greatly expands past findings that the marine environment promotes the transfer of transposons. Transposons are drivers of evolution as sources of genomic sequence and hence genomic novelty. We identified 13 candidate genes for HTT-induced adaptive change based on internal or neighboring HTT LINE insertions. One of these, ADCY4, is of particular interest as a part of the KEGG adaptation pathway “Circadian Entrainment.” This provides evidence of the ecological interactions between species influencing evolution of metazoans not only through specific selection pressures, but also by contributing novel genomic material.

Tobacco uptake in adolescents is associated with a range of predictors. We examined the predictors of cigarette smoking, smokeless tobacco (ST) consumption and use of both ST and cigarettes among adolescents in four South Asian countries.

We analysed the Global Youth Tobacco Surveys (GYTS) data for Bangladesh (2013), India (2009), Pakistan (2013), and Sri-Lanka (2015), using multinomial regression to examine associations between several predictors and tobacco use.

Data from 23,681 adolescents were analyzed. Overall, 82.8% of the study population were between 13 and 15 years and 52.7% were girls, 2% were cigarette smokers, 6.5% were ST users and 1.1% used both ST and cigarettes, in the past 30-days. Exposure to smoking in public places was associated with past 30-days smoking (RRR 5.59, 95%CI 4.28-7.28), ST use (RRR 2.07, 95%CI 1.84-2.32) and use of both ST and cigarettes (RRR 11.42, 95%CI 7.44-17.54). Exposure to tobacco use in electronic media and being offered free tobacco products were associated with all forms of tobacco use. Shopkeepers’ refusal to sell cigarettes protected adolescents from smoking (RRR 0.47, 95%CI 0.36-0.63) and ST use (RRR 0.65, 95%CI 0.45-0.95). However, exposure to anti-tobacco mass media messages was not protective for any form of tobacco use. Adolescents taught at school about harmful effects of tobacco were less likely to use ST; no evidence of this association was observed for smoking.

The associations between tobacco use and pro-tobacco factors were strong but the associations with anti-tobacco factors lacked strength and consistency in this study population.

The associations between tobacco use and pro-tobacco factors were strong but the associations with anti-tobacco factors lacked strength and consistency in this study population.Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of a single genotype to produce different phenotypes in response to environmental variation. The importance of phenotypic plasticity in natural populations and its contribution to phenotypic evolution during rapid environmental change is widely debated. Here, we show that thermal plasticity of gene expression in natural populations is a key component of its adaptation evolution to novel thermal environments increases ancestral plasticity rather than mean genetic expression. We determined the evolution of plasticity in gene expression by conducting laboratory natural selection on a Drosophila simulans population in hot and cold environments. After more than 60 generations in the hot environment, 325 genes evolved a change in plasticity relative to the natural ancestral population. this website Plasticity increased in 75% of these genes, which were strongly enriched for several well-defined functional categories (e.g., chitin metabolism, glycolysis, and oxidative phosphorylation). Furthermore, we show that plasticity in gene expression of populations exposed to different temperatures is rather similar across species.