Wellcome Trust

This is not an article about ‘shell-shock’. It explores the military-medical response to the nervous disorders of pilots of the Royal Flying Corps. The First World War exposed the propensity of pilots to the nervous and psychological rigours of aerial warfare, but their unique experiences have been overlooked in favour of ‘trauma’ in infantrymen. This represents a critical lacuna in the historiography of military medicine, for flying personnel were studied apart from ‘shell-shocked’ soldiers. This article will show that flyers were believed to be medically-different, and what set them apart from men in the trenches was their unique employment. The war necessitated, and provided the conditions for, the study of the medical problems of flying, including the significant nervous strains. Medical officers quickly established that flying not only affected bodily functions, but also wore down the nerves that regulated psychological responses. This article will therefore present the medical view. It will study the research of air-minded medical officers and the conclusions reached on the nervous disorders of flying personnel.

Objective To estimate the prevalence rate of gout and to explore the social factors that contributed to its development in the various sub-populations in medieval Cambridge. Materials 177 adult individuals from four medieval cemeteries located in and around Cambridge, UK. Methods Lesions were assessed macroscopically and radiographically. Elements with lytic lesions were described and imaged using micro-computed tomography (μCT) to determine their morphology. Results Gout was identified in 3 % of the population. Individuals buried in the friary had highest prevalence (14 %), with low prevalence rates in the Hospital (3 %) and town parish cemetery (2 %), with no cases in the rural parish cemetery. Gout was more prevalent during the 14th–15th centuries than the 10th–13th centuries. Conclusion The high prevalence rate of gout in the friary is at least partly explained by the consumption of alcohol and purine-rich diets by the friars and the wealthy townsfolk. Medieval medical texts from Cambridge show that gout (known as podagra) was sometimes treated with medications made from the root of the autumn crocus. This root contains colchicine, which is a medicine that is still used to treat gout today. Significance This is one of the first studies to assess the epidemiology of gout in medieval England and suggests that gout varied with social status. Limitations Our sample size precludes statistical analysis. Suggestions for further research Additional studies that assess the epidemiology of gout in medieval Europe is needed in order to be able to fully contextualize these findings.

On behalf of the Public Health Research Data Forum the Wellcome Trust commissioned research in October 2014 to explore the opportunities and barriers for data linkage in the context of public health research. Data linkage simply means bringing together two or more sources of information which relate to the same individual event institution or place. This project focussed on the potential to link datasets within the context of health research -- including datasets collected for the purposes of research and those collected for other purposes (for example information from electronic patient records cancer registries or socio-economic surveys). The work was undertaken by an international team comprising researchers based at the University of the West of England (UK) the University of Cape Town (South Africa) and the Centre for Injury Prevention Research Bangladesh. The research used a mix of literature review case studies and expert interviews. It looked at low- middle- and high-income ...

To date, early developmental ablation of leptin receptor (LepRb) expression from circumscribed populations of hypothalamic neurons (e.g., arcuate nucleus (ARC) Pomc- or Agrp-expressing cells) has only minimally affected energy balance. In contrast, removal of LepRb from at least two large populations (expressing vGat or Nos1) spanning multiple hypothalamic regions produced profound obesity and metabolic dysfunction. Thus, we tested the notion that the total number of leptin-responsive hypothalamic neurons (rather than specific subsets of cells with a particular molecular or anatomical signature) subjected to early LepRb deletion might determine energy balance. We generated new mouse lines deleted for LepRb in ARC Ghrh neurons or in Htr2c neurons (representing roughly half of all hypothalamic LepRb neurons, distributed across many nuclei). We compared the phenotypes of these mice to previously-reported models lacking LepRb in Pomc, Agrp, vGat or Nos1 cells. The early developmental de...

Preeclampsia is a serious complication of pregnancy, affecting both maternal and fetal health. In genome-wide association meta-analysis of European and Central Asian mothers, we identify sequence variants that associate with preeclampsia in the maternal genome at ZNF831/20q13 and FTO/16q12. These are previously established variants for blood pressure (BP) and the FTO variant has also been associated with body mass index (BMI). Further analysis of BP variants establishes that variants at MECOM/3q26, FGF5/4q21 and SH2B3/12q24 also associate with preeclampsia through the maternal genome. We further show that a polygenic risk score for hypertension associates with preeclampsia. However, comparison with gestational hypertension indicates that additional factors modify the risk of preeclampsia.