Women who used e-cigarettes were more likely than women who used conventional cigarettes or no tobacco/NRT to report symptoms of depression. Women who used e-cigarettes and women who used conventional cigarettes were more likely than women who used no tobacco/NRT to report a history of severe mental health conditions, alcohol use during pregnancy, and marijuana or other drug use during preconception. Conclusions In this sample, 4% of women used e-cigarettes during preconception and/or pregnancy and most also used conventional cigarettes. Increased efforts by providers to screen for tobacco (including use of e-cigarette) and polysubstance use and to provide cessation services could improve outcomes of mothers and children.Although progress has been made to show the role of raw flaxseed and flaxseed extracts in health promotion, identification of mechanism(s) of action and molecule(s) underpinning beneficial effects largely remain unknown. The present study evaluated the efficacy of an aqueous flaxseed extract (AFE) to correct alloxan-induced diabetes in mice. Mice were divided into five groups one nondiabetic (negative control) and four diabetic. Diabetic mice were treated with AFE, gallic acid (GA) (major component of AFE), insulin (positive control), or remained untreated (positive control). Oral administration of AFE strongly improved serum glucose, oral glucose tolerance, insulin tolerance, body weight, and polyphagia in diabetic mice. AFE was effective in controlling lipid peroxidation (thiobarbituric acid-reactive substances) and antioxidant enzymes (glutathione peroxidase, superoxide dismutase, and catalase) in liver and kidney, which undergo diabetes-related complications due to hyperglycemia. These results demonstrated that GA alone was sufficient to account for the beneficial health effects of AFE against diabetes.Purpose The language processing of Mandarin-accented English (MAE) by older hearing-impaired (OHI), older normally hearing (NH), and younger NH listeners was explored. We examined whether OHI adults have more difficulty than NH listeners in recognizing and adapting to MAE speech productions after receiving brief training with the accent. Method Talker-independent adaptation was evaluated in an exposure training study design. Listeners were trained either by four MAE talkers or four Australian English talkers (control group) before listening to sentences presented by a novel MAE talker. Speech recognition for both the training sentences and the experimental sentences were compared between listener groups and between the training accents. Results Listeners in all three groups (OHI, older NH, younger NH) who had been trained by the MAE talkers showed higher odds of speech recognition than listeners trained by the Australian English talkers. The OHI listeners adapted to MAE to the same degree as the NH groups despite returning lower overall odds of recognizing MAE speech. Conclusions Older listeners with mild-to-moderate hearing loss were able to benefit as much from brief exposure to MAE as did the NH groups. This encouraging result suggests that OHI listeners have access to and can exploit the information present in a relatively brief sample of accented speech and generalize their learning to a novel MAE talker.Purpose Toddlers with late language emergence have difficulty acquiring an object vocabulary that is well defined by shape early in development.  https://www.selleckchem.com/products/ABT-869.html  Without object words, subsequent language growth is delayed. The current study tested an intervention scaffold that highlights object shape during word teaching so that toddlers with late language emergence may establish themselves in the early stages of object word learning. Method Four toddlers with late language emergence participated in a brief dose of two interventions that differed only in semantic scaffold-a co-speech shape gesture or a co-speech indicator gesture. Co-speech refers to the word model and gesture occurring simultaneously. Shape gestures explicitly conveyed object form, whereas indicator gestures directed attention to the object. A single-subject experimental design tracked naming of taught objects and untaught exemplars. The study compared the mean number of phonemes produced in names between conditions. Results The four participants (a) extended more names to novel exemplars, (b) named more exemplar types, and (c) named more exemplar tokens when learned with shape gestures than with indicating gestures. The shape gesture advantage was confirmed with "percentage of nonoverlapping data" analysis. Not only did the shape gesture increase naming over the indicator gesture but more sounds were also mapped on average in the shape condition. Conclusion The current study used a semantic approach to the word learning problem in toddlers with late language emergence. We conclude that co-speech shape gestures led to semantic enrichment and facilitated phonological binding of the word representation. Future experiments should focus on a component analysis in parent-implemented interventions for greater carryover in the child's natural environment (i.e., external validity).Objectives Because medical, midwifery and law students in Ghana constitute the next generation of health care and legal practitioners, this study aimed to evaluate their attitudes towards abortion and their perceptions of the decision-making capacity of pregnant adolescents.Methods We conducted a cross-sectional survey among 340 medical, midwifery and law students. A pretested and validated questionnaire was used to collect relevant data on respondents' sociodemographic characteristics, attitudes towards abortion and the perceived capacity and rationality of pregnant adolescents' decisions. The χ2 test of independency and Fischer's exact test were used where appropriate.Results We retained 331 completed questionnaires for analysis. Respondents' mean age was 21.0 ± 2.9 years and the majority (95.5%) were of the Christian faith. Women made up 77.9% (n = 258) of the sample. Most students (70.1%) were strongly in favour of abortion if it was for health reasons. More than three-quarters (78.0%) of the students strongly disagreed on the use of abortion for the purposes of sex selection.