The concept of culture: A core issue in health disparities

Contemporary discourse contains numerous examples of use of the concept of culture by social and behavioral scientists. Simple reification, where the speaker makes culture into a thing capable of action exemplifies one usage in public discourse. Some quantitative social scientists attempt to characterize people’s cultural identities by means of a single categorical variable, which often “lumps” people into categories such as “Hispanic” or “Black” that in fact have numerous culturally bounded subcategories. Approaches that emphasize cultural process are preferable to those who attempt to categorize; more complex measures of acculturation help investigators to make convincing analyses of circumstances in which health disparities occur. Examples in which investigators make appropriate use of cultural characterizations demonstrate their utility in investigating health disparities in Haitian American women, injecting and noninjecting drug users, Hispanic youth, and adult Hispanics at risk of HIV infection. Focus on culture in the study of health disparities can identify entanglements between structural factors such as poverty and lack of education and cultural factors such as beliefs about health. Qualitative methods coupled with quantitative methods have great potential to improve investigators’ grasp of cultural nuance while capturing the distribution of qualitatively derived behaviors.     

Discussing options between patients and health care professionals in genetic diagnosis: ethical and legal criteria

The specific characteristics of genetic data lead to ethical-legal conflicts in the framework of genetic diagnosis. Several international organisations, including UNESCO and the Council of Europe, have enacted rules referring to the use of genetic information. This paper discusses possible legal and ethical criteria that could be used in genetic testing.     

Correlation of fetal posture and congenital dislocation of the hip

A statistical study was carried out on the incidence of CDH associated with mechanical factors in the uterus, including congenital genu recurvatum. There were 72 cases of CDH among 6559 infants (1.1 per cent). The incidence of CDH was 0.7 per cent in cephalic presentation, 2 per cent in footling presentation and 20 per cent in single-breech presentation. In another series, CDH was found in six of seven infants with congenital genu recurvatum. These findings suggest that a fetal posture with the hip flexed and the knee extended predisposes to the development of CDH.     

Changes in central dopaminergic systems with the expression of Shh or GDNF in mice perinatally exposed to bisphenol-A.

In the previous study, we reported that exposure to bisphenol-A induced the potentiation of dopamine receptor functions in the mouse limbic area, resulting in supersensitivity to methamphetamine-induced pharmacological actions. The present study was undertaken to investigate whether prenatal exposure to bisphenol-A could produce morphological change in dopaminergic neuron and the pattern of expression of genes regulating the dopaminergic neuron development. Here we found that prenatal and neonatal exposures to bisphenol-A increased the tyrosine hydroxylase- and dopamine transporter-like immunoreactivities in the adult mouse limbic area. The present molecular biological study shows that chronic bisphenol-A treatment produced a significant decrease in the dopaminergic neuron development factors, sonic hedgehog and glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor, which were also decreased by prenatal exposure to bisphenol-A. These results suggest that chronic exposure to bisphenol-A could disrupt the dopaminergic neurotransmission in the process of dopaminergic neuron development.     

Protein–protein interactions in the mammalian brain

Recent genome-wide high-throughput (HTS) analyses of protein–protein interactions (PPIs) provide molecular-based information to uncover functions of cells and tissues, such as those of the mammalian brain. However, the HTS PPI data contain much false-negatives and false-positives, which should be primarily addressed in experiments. Integrating PPI data sets with other genome-wide data, such as expression profiles and phenotype data sets, provides novel biological insights. Such integration analysis is valuable for addressing the complexity of the mammalian brain. Discovery of novel interactions followed by a detailed analysis is a successful approach to uncover the function of proteins. For example, extensive PPI screens for parkin , a hereditary Parkinson's disease gene, elucidated the function of parkin as an E3 ubiquitin ligase, with localization and activity regulated by contact with its interaction partners, uncovering at least a part of the molecular pathogenesis of Parkinson's disease.