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Community and environment as determinants of health
Published in Ben Y.F. Fong, Martin C.S. Wong, The Routledge Handbook of Public Health and the Community, 2021
Thomas Man-chi Dao, Bean S.N. Fu
People share a common goal of healthy longevity. Determinants of health are the factors which affect the health status of an individual, a family or a population. These factors could be individual factors such as genetic predisposition and risky health behaviours; contact between people in the same community, or interactions between human, other animal species and our environment. Governments, scientists and health care professionals are trying to identify, stratify and modify different health risks in the communities and environments. This chapter will introduce how we can understand health among population structure inside a community. We will then discuss how environmental factors affect human health. Finally, we will describe the “One Health” approach to investigate the interconnection between human, animal and the environment, as it could possibly provide a solution for mitigating global health risks through interdisciplinary collaboration. We will also examine the practicability of adoption of “One Health”.
Principles and theories
Published in Emily Ying Yang Chan, Disaster Public Health and Older People, 2019
Age structure and disease patterns can be tracked and studied though demography and epidemiology. Demography is the study of population structure that may be affected by changes in births, deaths and migration. It helps describe the size, characteristics and future trend predictions in a human group or population. Epidemiology is the study of disease distribution in a population and risk factors determining this disease distribution and progression. Epidemiology is a vital tool of public health practice and uses statistical methods to measure disease occurrence and make comparisons between population groups in order to help us understand how health conditions are distributed among a population and risk factors or causes associated with those conditions. Demographic and epidemiological profile will provide important information for anticipating current and future public health threats as well as evidence for implementing interventions for disease prevention and health promotion. Over the past century, age structures and disease patterns have changed significantly worldwide. These changes have altered population dynamics and health needs accordingly.
Motoo Kimura (1924–1994)
Published in Krishna Dronamraju, A Century of Geneticists, 2018
Kimura’s talent in manipulating the Kolmogorov equations and applying them to significant evolutionary problems was outstanding. Here are a few of Kimura’s significant findings. I have already mentioned the “stepping stone” model of population structure, which has been the starting point for investigations by many authors. He discovered the phenomenon of “quasi-linkage equilibrium.” He showed that with loose linkage, the population generates just enough linkage disequilibrium to cancel the epistatic variance, so that the additive variance, without epistatic terms, is the best predictor of change under selection. He analyzed a case of meiotic drive in Lilium. He investigated genetic load and wrote a review in 1961. In one study, he showed that the mutation load can be reduced with epistasis, but only when there is sexual reproduction. He was also the first to consider the mutation and segregation loads in finite populations. His first calculations, done when computers were primitive, involved some very inventive, and to some critics dubious, approximations. Later computer work has vindicated them.
Intraocular Pressure, Age, and Central Corneal Thickness in a Healthy Chinese Children Population: The Handan Offspring Myopia Study
Published in Ophthalmic Epidemiology, 2022
Qiang Zhou, Tie Ying Gao, Su Jie Fan, Yi Peng, Lei Li, Zhong Lin, Wei Han, Hai Shuang Lin, Ning Li Wang, Yuan Bo Liang
The limitation of our study is that about 30% of the eligible subjects did not participate in the study. More than half (58.9%) of these subjects had left the county for seeking higher education. 19.0% of the potential population worked outside the county for more than 6 months. That is why the sample amount in aged 15+ years old group is relative less than other age groups. The same situation also occurred in preschool children groups, because children less than 7 years old often following their parents left the county for a job. Estimates for IOP in these subgroups may not be as stable as for the rest of the population. To our best, the HOMS examined about 70% of the eligible Han Chinese offspring aged 6–18 years old of The Handan Eye Study participants living in a rural region of north China. As we have mentioned, our sample was enrolled from nature population in North China.27 The population in Guangzhou twin eye study11 was from South China. Although their twin sample was enrolled from a population-based twin registry, the population structure might different from ours. Whether our results were suit for all Chinese children need further investigation in multicenter population study in China or comparative study with other similar studies in other Chinese area in future.
Evaluation of the genetic structure of Bromus inermis populations from chemically and radioactively polluted areas using microsatellite markers from closely related species
Published in International Journal of Radiation Biology, 2022
Elena V. Antonova, Marion S. Röder
Microsatellite analysis is often used to study population structure (Jarne and Lagoda 1996). This is due to the fact that they are neutral and codominant; thus, microsatellites allow assessment of the deviation in the genotype frequencies from the theoretical relationships (Luikart and England 1999). However, microsatellite primers have not yet been designed for B. inermis. Therefore, the goals of our research were: (1) screening of B. sterilis, B. tectorum and Triticum aestivum microsatellite markers to assess the transferability of primers from closely related species to B. inermis; (2) analysis of genetic variation in B. inermis compared with some species from the Poaceae family; and (3) assessment of the genetic structure and differentiation of background and affected populations of B. inermis growing under chemical and radionuclide contamination. Based on published data, we hypothesized that: (1) the smooth brome will have a level of microsatellite loci variability comparable to that of related species; (2) a decrease in genetic diversity is possible with an increase in toxic and radiation load; (3) in affected populations, the frequencies of rare and/or unique (private) alleles will be higher than in control samples; and (4) within each technogenic area, the differentiation of B. inermis populations will be lower than between areas.
Candidate-gene association analysis for a continuous phenotype with a spike at zero using parent-offspring trios
Published in Journal of Applied Statistics, 2020
Nadja Klein, Andrew Entwistle, Albert Rosenberger, Thomas Kneib, Heike Bickeböller
The GAW16 Framingham data (accession number phs000128.v1.p1, obtained from the Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP), http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gap) provided extended pedigrees with actual measured genotypes. Thus, any population structure is inherent in these genotype data. Our work based on these data is in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (1964) and was approved by the local institutional review board as well as subsequently by dbGaP based on this approval. CAC scores (with 200 data replicates) were simulated by the data providers [13] based on a latent mixture distribution of Gaussian variables, setting negative values to zero, and applying piecewise linear age adjustments. The expected value of the latent variable is basically created as a mixture of (a) total cholesterol and high density lipoprotein (HDL) which are both Gaussian mixture distributions including major genes and polygenes, (b) three effects created by five SNPs of which only rs17714718 was generated to display a measurable additive main effect. SNP rs213952 displays overdominance as heterozygotes are enriched in the spike, and two interacting or epistatic SNP pairs (each SNP with