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BACKGROUND: Health-promoting interventions tailored to support older persons to remain in their homes, so-called "ageing in place" is important for supporting or improving their health. The health-promoting programme "Elderly Persons in the Risk Zone," (EPRZ) was set up for this purpose and has shown positive results for maintaining independence in activities of daily living for older persons 80 y

Lime-hemp concrete (LHC) is a building material consisting of a lime-based binder combined with hemp shiv that is suitable for various building applications. This thesis aimed to elucidate the possibilities for using LHC for exterior walls in a cold, wet climate through investigating mechanical, thermal and moisture-related properties of the material. The mechanical properties of LHC containing bo

Splatting photons onto primary view samples, rather than gathering from a photon acceleration structure, can be a more efficient approach to evaluating the photon-density estimate in interactive applications, where the number of photons is often low compared to the number of view samples. Most photon splatting approaches struggle with large photon radii or high resolutions due to overdraw and insu

Preparedness and resilience planning for critical infrastructure networks requires evaluating the impact to the network when its components are disrupted. We extend the well-studied problem of component importance measures in single-commodity networks to multi-commodity networks by integrating a flow based multi-commodity optimization model with a multi-criteria decision analysis tool. A three-sta

Modern society is becoming increasingly dependent on a continuous supply of electricity. In order to maintain the safety and security of society and its citizens, it is therefore necessary that electricity networks are resilient toward disruptions whether caused by natural disasters, sinister attacks, or other. Margin and sensitivity are two crucial aspects of the resilience concept which have so

Catalytic processes have tremendous importance in our everyday life. Most chemicals, pharmaceuticals, plastics etc. are, in fact, produced with the help of catalysts. What is probably even more important is that the toxic wastes produced in great amounts by modern factories and plants are recycled or transformed into less poisonous substances by means of catalytic units. One example from our everyThe present work is devoted to atomic scale structural studies of the surfaces of model heterogeneous catalysts relevant to oxidation reactions. A novel approach using high-energy surface X-ray diffraction combined with mass-spectrometry measurements is employed to perform in situ structural characterization of Pd(100) and Pd(553) single crystal surfaces acting as catalysts in the process of CO ox

BACKGROUND: MIF is a critical mediator of the host defense, and is involved in both acute and chronic responses in the lung. Neutralization of MIF reduces neutrophil accumulation into the lung in animal models. We hypothesized that MIF, in the alveolar space, promotes neutrophil accumulation via activation of the CD74 receptor on macrophages.METHODS: To determine whether macrophage CD74 surface ex

A method and a model are presented aiming at enabling collection, structuring and analyzes of data concerning interdependencies between critical infrastructures and societal functions. A key distinction of the approach is the separation of actors and flows, where dependencies between actors, ranging from small municipal authorities to international private companies, are mediated through flows. Fl

Pulmonary infection is a major cause of mortality and morbidity, and the magnitude of the lung inflammatory response correlates with patient survival. Previously, we have shown that neutrophil migration into joints is regulated by arthritis severity quantitative trait loci (QTLs). However, it is unclear whether these QTLs contribute to the regulation of lung inflammation in pneumonias. Therefore,

Neuroendocrine abnormalities are common in Parkinson's disease (PD) and include disruption of melatonin secretion, disturbances of glucose, insulin resistance and bone metabolism, and body weight changes. They have been associated with multiple non-motor symptoms in PD and have important clinical consequences, including therapeutics. Some of the underlying mechanisms have been implicated in the pa

OBJECTIVE: We hypothesized that specific mutations in the β-glucocerebrosidase gene (GBA) causing neuropathic Gaucher's disease (GD) in homozygotes lead to aggressive cognitive decline in heterozygous Parkinson's disease (PD) patients, whereas non-neuropathic GD mutations confer intermediate progression rates.METHODS: A total of 2,304 patients with PD and 20,868 longitudinal visits for up to 12.8

Abnormalities of tau protein are central to the pathogenesis of progressive supranuclear palsy, whereas haplotype variation of the tau gene MAPT influences the risk of Parkinson disease and Parkinson's disease dementia. We assessed whether regional MAPT expression might be associated with selective vulnerability of global brain networks to neurodegenerative pathology. Using task-free functional ma

BACKGROUND: Impaired olfaction is an important feature in Parkinson's disease (PD) and other neurological diseases. A variety of smell identification tests exist such as "Sniffin' Sticks" and the University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test (UPSIT). An important part of research is being able to replicate findings or combining studies in a meta-analysis. This is difficult if olfaction has

Understanding human embryonic ventral midbrain is of major interest for Parkinson's disease. However, the cell types, their gene expression dynamics, and their relationship to commonly used rodent models remain to be defined. We performed single-cell RNA sequencing to examine ventral midbrain development in human and mouse. We found 25 molecularly defined human cell types, including five subtypes

BACKGROUND: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) influences phenotypic variation in Parkinson's disease (PD), and is usually an indication for statin therapy. It is less clear whether cardiovascular risk factors influence PD phenotype, and if statins are prescribed appropriately.OBJECTIVES: To quantify vascular risk and statin use in recent-onset PD, and examine the relationship between vascular risk, PD

Recently it has been shown that there is impaired cerebral endothelial function in many chronic neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease. Such problems have also been reported in Parkinson's disease, in which α-synuclein aggregation is the pathological hallmark. However, little is known about the relationship between misfolded α-synuclein and endothelial function.

Pre-B-cell leukemia homeobox (PBX) transcription factors are known to regulate organogenesis, but their molecular targets and function in midbrain dopaminergic neurons (mDAn) as well as their role in neurodegenerative diseases are unknown. Here, we show that PBX1 controls a novel transcriptional network required for mDAn specification and survival, which is sufficient to generate mDAn from human s

Parkinson's disease impairs the inhibition of responses, and whilst impulsivity is mild for some patients, severe impulse control disorders affect ∼10% of cases. Based on preclinical models we proposed that noradrenergic denervation contributes to the impairment of response inhibition, via changes in the prefrontal cortex and its subcortical connections. Previous work in Parkinson's disease found