abstract: Late preterm infants (LPIs), born between 34 and 37 weeks gestation, are at risk for a myriad of health conditions related to neuro-muscular and physiologic immaturity. However, relative stability allow many of these infants to avoid care in specialty nurseries and discharge home with their mothers after birth. Due to underlying immaturity, feeding difficulty is the most common issue LPIs experience, resulting in early breastfeeding cessation, increased risk for secondary diagnoses, and hospital readmission. The purpose of this study was to assess early breastfeeding behavior of LPIs, including testing inter-rater reliability of an assessment tool and the feeding patterns of infants over time. An extensive review of breastfeeding assessment tools resulted in the selection of the Premature Infant Breastfeeding Behavior Scale (PIBBS) based on its reliability and validity in the preterm infant population. A convenience sample of LPI dyads was recruited and used to conduct inter-rater reliability testing of PIBBS. A longitudinal one-group non-experimental study was used for observational follow-up. A strong statistical agreement of PIBBS scores occurred between mothers and a healthcare professional (Cohen’s kappa values of items ranged from .776 to 1.000, p = <.001). Participants continued using the PIBBS tool after hospital discharge until their infants expected due dates (40 weeks adjusted age). T-test analyses were conducted to examine changes in scores over time indicating increase in item scores (p = .003 - .193). PIBBS appears to be a valid and reliable tool to assess breastfeeding among LPI dyads. Incorporation of PIBBS into a comprehensive plan of care could better support and protect breastfeeding among the LPI population. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Nursing and Healthcare Innovation 2018

Maternal physiology and behavior change dramatically over the course of pregnancy to nurture the fetus and prepare for motherhood. Further, the experience of motherhood itself continues to influence brain functioning well after birth, shaping behavior to promote the survival of offspring. To meet these goals, cognitive abilities, such as spatial memory and navigation, may be enhanced to facilitate foraging. Existing studies on pregnant and maternal rats demonstrate enhanced cognitive function in specific spatial domains. However, in humans, anecdotal reports abound regarding impaired cognition during pregnancy, colloquially termed baby brain. Epidemiological studies indicate that 50 to 80 percent of pregnant women report problems with thinking and/or with memory. When tested objectively, the most consistent finding indicates impaired verbal memory. However, no studies to date have focused specifically on the effects of pregnancy and motherhood on human spatial cognition. We used analogous tests of spatial memory and navigation at matched phases of reproduction to study changes in spatial memory across pregnancy and motherhood in both rats and humans. Parallel studies with closely matched paradigms allowed us to better understand evolutionary conservation of the effects of pregnancy and motherhood on spatial abilities, while contributing to our knowledge of each species individually. Results indicated a persistent advantage in object-in-place memory of primiparous female rats that emerged during lactation not during pregnancy, and was not related to non-mnemonic factors of anxiety or neophobia. On a modified water maze task to assess learning strategy, both primiparous and nulliparous females learned the task at similar rates and accuracies, but neither group demonstrated a preference for place strategy or stimulus-response strategy. In humans, pregnant and lactating women were not objectively impaired compared to women who had never been pregnant when tested on several measures of spatial performance to assess object-in-place memory and spatial navigation. Despite objectively equivalent performance, both pregnant and lactating women subjectively rated themselves as more impaired on spatial tasks than never-pregnant women. Disparate results on the effects of pregnancy and motherhood on cognitive function in rats and humans calls into question the fitness of the rat model as applied to human cognition. / acase@tulane.edu

Thirty-six multiparous Holstein cows were assigned to one of three dietary levels of lasalocid· 0, 180, or 360 mg/hd/d in a completely randomized design Cows were assigned to treatments I wk postcalving and remained on treatment until II wk postcalving Basal diets were composed of ground corn, alfalfa hay, alfalfa haylage, corn silage, and soybean meal, fortified with vitamins and minerals as needed. All ingredients were ground and fed as a total mixed ration Daily rations were fed in two equal portions at 0500 and I 700 h at a rate to allow a 5- 10% refusal. Daily measurements included milk production and dry matter intake (OM 1). Milk composition (fat, protein, and somatic ii cells) was analyzed twice per week on Tuesdays and Fridays. Cow body weight (BW) and visual body condition were measured weekly. Production during previous lactation was used as a covariate in analyzing the data. Although milk production was not affected by dietary treatment, lasalocid tended to increase daily milk production by approximately 2.5 kg/d (P 13) at both the 180 and 360 mg/hd/d levels Percent milk fat and protein were not afl'ected by dietary lasalocid (P 84 and 78, respectively). Somatic cell count of the milk was not affected by dietary lasalocid (/' 17). Dietary lasalocid reduced DMI by approximately I 5 kg/d at both the 180 and 360 mg/hdld levels (P .02). At the 180 and 360 mg/hdld levels, lasalocid increased amount of milk produced per kg of DM consumed by 16 kg (I' 08). either BW (P 89) nor body condition (P = 90) were affected by dietary lasalocid at either level. No effect of treatments was observed on blood metabolites Glucose, nonesterified fatty acids, P-hydroxybutyrate, and cholesterol all tell within the normal ranges of blood serum.

Lactation curves of dairy cows have been studied by dairy scientists for many years. The effects of various hereditary end non-hereditary influences on the lactation curve have been observed. Factors have been developed to standardize production to a common basis, correcting for differences in age, length of lactation, milking per day, gestation and environment.

The relationship of quantity and quality of feed to milk production has been studied for many years. Feeding standards have been developed to systematize feeding of dairy cows according to their requirements. Recently, interest in efficiency of cows in converting feed nutrients into milk has increased.

Breastfeeding confers immunological, physiological and psychological benefits for the infant and mother as well as social and economic benefits to the nation. The United States Department of Health and Human Servcies (HHS), Healthy People 2020 has established national objectives for the initiation and duration of breastfeeding at 82% initiation, 61% at six months and 34% at one year. In addition, they have set goals for exclusive breastfeeding at 3 months to be 46% and 25% at 6 months of infant's age. Currently breastfeeding initiation is at the highest recorded level of 76.9%, yet significant disparities exist (CDC, 2012). The purpose of this study was to examine the association of acculturation and self-efficacy on breastfeeding behavior of a sample of Hispanic women. Initially the plan was to focus on women from Mexican, Cuban and Puerto Rican countries of origin. However recruitiment goals for only the Mexican population were reached. Two valid and reliable bidimensional instruments were used in addition to collecting contextual information to foster a more comprehensive understanding of the acculturation process. The roles of self-efficacy and social support and their relationship with acculturation measures and breastfeeding behavior was explored. The Non-Hispanic domain subscale of the Bidimensional Acculturation Scale scores were significantly different for those breastfeeding compared to those formula feeding, indicating higher levels of Non-Hispanic domain acculturation associated with not breastfeeding. Acculturation and self efficacy (general and parental) were not found to be related. Breastfeeding outcomes and parental self-efficacy were found to have a significant negative correlation, a finding that was in an unexpected direction, with higher parental self-efficacy associated with decreased breastfeeding intensity. Mixed feeding or Las Dos, is a common finding among Hispanic women especially for the Mexican origin community and exclusivity may not have been perceived as higher value then mixed feeding or formula feeding (Bunik et al., 2006). Rates for exclusive breastfeeding at three months are 33% for both the US as well as for Hispanic/Latino ethnicity (National Immunization Survey, 2007). At six weeks the practice of exclusively breastfeeding (not giving formula) was 17% and this is about half of the 46% goal set for exclusive breastfeeding at three months by (HHS) Healthy People 2020. Of those that were exclusively breastfeeding in the hospital only three were still exclusively breastfeeding at the six week follow up call. This presents a unique opportunity in which targeting Hispanic mothers after discharge may assist in increasing further the rates of exclusive breastfeeding and recommendations are provided.

No description available.

The mammary explant culture model has been a major experimental tool for studying hormonal requirements for milk protein gene expression as markers of secretory differentiation. Experiments with mammary explants from pregnant animals from many species have established that insulin, prolactin, and glucocorticoid are the minimal set of hormones required for the induction of maximal milk protein gene expression. However, the extent to which mammary explants mimic the response of the mammary gland in vivo is not clear. Recent studies have used microarray technology to study the transcriptome of mouse lactation cycle. It was demonstrated that the each phase of mouse lactation has a distinct transcriptional profile but making sense of microarray results requires analysis of large amounts of biological information which is increasingly difficult to access as the amount of literature increases. / The first objective is to examine the possibility of combining literature and genomic analysis to elucidate potentially novel hypotheses for further research into lactation biology. The second objective is to evaluate the strengths and limitations of the murine mammary explant culture for the study and understanding of murine lactogenesis. The underlying question to this objective is whether the mouse mammary explant culture is a good model or representation to study mouse lactogenesis. / The exponential increase in publication rate of new articles is limiting access of researchers to relevant literature. This has prompted the use of text mining tools to extract key biological information. Previous studies have reported extensive modification of existing generic text processors to process biological text. However, this requirement for modification had not been examined. We have constructed Muscorian, using MontyLingua, a generic text processor. It uses a two-layered generalizationspecialization paradigm previously proposed where text was generically processed to a suitable intermediate format before domain-specific data extraction techniques are applied at the specialization layer. Evaluation using a corpus and experts indicated 86-90% precision and approximately 30% recall in extracting protein-protein interactions, which was comparable to previous studies using either specialized biological text processing tools or modified existing tools. This study also demonstrated the flexibility of the two-layered generalization-specialization paradigm by using the same generalization layer for two specialized information extraction tasks. / The performance of Muscorian was unexpected since potential errors from a series of text analysis processes is likely to adversely affect the outcome of the entire process. Most biomedical entity relationship extraction tools have used biomedical-specific parts-of-speech (POS) tagger as errors in POS tagging and are likely to affect subsequent semantic analysis of the text, such as shallow parsing. A comparative study between MontyTagger, a generic POS tagger, and MedPost, a tagger trained in biomedical text, was carried out. Our results demonstrated that MontyTagger, Muscorian's POS tagger, has a POS tagging accuracy of 83.1% when tested on biomedical text. Replacing MontyTagger with MedPost did not result in a significant improvement in entity relationship extraction from text; precision of 55.6% from MontyTagger versus 56.8% from MedPost on directional relationships and 86.1% from MontyTagger compared to 81.8% from MedPost on un-directional relationships. This is unexpected as the potential for poor POS tagging by MontyTagger is likely to affect the outcome of the information extraction. An analysis of POS tagging errors demonstrated that 78.5% of tagging errors are being compensated by shallow parsing. Thus, despite 83.1% tagging accuracy, MontyTagger has a functional tagging accuracy of 94.6%. This suggests that POS tagging error does not adversely affect the information extraction task if the errors were resolved in shallow parsing through alternative POS tag use. / Microarrays had been used to examine the transcriptome of mouse lactation and a simple method for microarray analysis is correlation studies where functionally related genes exhibit similar expression profiles. However, there has been no study to date using text mining to sieve microarray analysis to generate new hypotheses for further research in the field of lactational biology. Our results demonstrated that a previously reported protein name co-occurrence method (5-mention PubGene) which was not based on a hypothesis testing framework, is generally more stringent than the 99th percentile of Poisson distribution-based method of calculating co-occurrence. It agrees with previous methods using natural language processing to extract protein-protein interaction from text as more than 96% of the interactions found by natural language processing methods coincide with the results from 5-mention PubGene method. However, less than 2% of the gene co-expressions analyzed by microarray were found from direct co-occurrence or interaction information extraction from the literature. At the same time, combining microarray and literature analyses, we derive a novel set of 7 potential functional protein-protein interactions that had not been previously described in the literature. We conclude that the 5-mention PubGene method is more stringent than the 99th percentile of Poisson distribution method for extracting protein-protein interactions by co-occurrence of entity names and literature analysis may be a potential filter for microarray analysis to isolate potentially novel hypotheses for further research. / The availability of transcriptomics data from time-course experiments on mouse mammary glands examined during the lactation cycle and hormone-induced lactogenesis in mammary explants has permitted an assessment of similarity of gene expression at the transcriptional level. Global transcriptome analysis using exact Wilconox signed-rank test with continuity correction and hierarchical clustering of Spearman coefficient demonstrated that hormone-induced mammary explants behave differently to mammary glands at secretory differentiation. Our results demonstrated that the mammary explant culture model mimics in vivo glands in immediate responses, such as hormone-responsive gene transcription, but generally did not mimic responses to prolonged hormonal stimulus, such as the extensive development of secretory pathways and immune responses normally associated with lactating mammary tissue. Hence, although the explant model is useful to study the immediate effects of stimulating secretory differentiation in mammary glands, it is unlikely to be suitable for the study of secretory activation.

Simultaneous measurements of energy and protein metabolism can provide valuable information about their interactions. Dietary lysine is limiting in typical feedstuffs fed to swine and, therefore, limits protein synthesis. Current recommendations for dietary amino acid and energy intakes may not be reflective of the requirements for modern, highly productive sows and, therefore, invalidate requirement estimates determined according to the factorial approach. Current feeding recommendations suggest a constant amino acid intake throughout gestation. However, the demands for amino acids changes from maternal tissue accretion in early-gestation to fetal, conceptus, and mammary tissue development in late-gestation. This thesis reports the method development associated with simultaneous measurements of energy and protein metabolism and its application to determine dietary lysine requirements in non-pregnant and pregnant sows using the indicator amino acid oxidation method. Two indirect calorimetry systems and an experimental feeding regimen were tested and validated for use in studies of amino acid requirements by stable isotope dilution. Protein and energy balance studies were performed in non-pregnant sows fed two distinct levels of energy and protein intake. The systems reacted appropriately to changes in gas concentrations induced by sow respiration. Protein and energy balance studies were also performed in pregnant and lactating sows fed typical diets. Sows appeared more anabolic during mid-gestation and were catabolic by late-gestation and through lactation, where additional energy intake provided by ad libitum feed intake increased milk energy output. The dietary lysine requirement in non-pregnant sows at maintenance was determined as 49 mg/kg0.75, 30% greater than current recommendations. The dietary lysine requirement was determined to be 10.1 g/d and 16.5 g/d, in early- and late-gestation, respectively. These results suggest that a constant diet formulation for the entirety of gestation is not appropriate. In conclusion, simultaneous measurements of energy and protein metabolism combining indirect calorimetry and stable isotope techniques may be used to define requirements for dietary amino acids in sows. Basic assumptions of the factorial approach to estimate requirements require further investigation, including the dietary lysine requirement. Application of phase feeding for sows during gestation can more correctly meet the demands for amino acids and energy, improving sow longevity. / Animal Science

Three experiments were conducted for this dissertation with the goals to; 1) determine conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) effects on net-energy balance (EBAL) and milk production parameters during periods of nutrient/energy stress, and 2) investigate temporal CLA effects on mammary lipogenic gene expression. Study one was designed to determine if abomasal CLA infusion could reduce milk fat synthesis and partition nutrients towards alternative milk components in feed restricted rotationally grazed dairy cows. Data indicate abomasally-infusing CLA reduced milk fat synthesis in nutrient restricted grazing dairy cows and improved calculated EBAL and milk protein production. Another period of transitory stress experienced by the lactating dairy cow is immediately postpartum and study two objectives were to feed rumen inert-CLA to evoke milk fat depression (MFD) and investigate production and bioenergetic parameters. Data indicated a high CLA dose (3 x greater than needed in established lactation) inhibited milk fat synthesis immediately postpartum and improved calculated EBAL in grazing dairy cows. A curvilinear relationship existed between the severity of CLA-induced MFD and milk yield response. Moderate CLA-induced MFD (<~35%) tended to increase milk yield whereas severe MFD (>~35%) diminished this response. Previous research speculated that extensive MFD might decrease Δ⁹-desaturase (stearoyl CoA desaturase; SCD) and subsequent membrane fluidity to such an extent as to adversely affect cellular functions and inhibit milk secretion, thus decreasing milk yield. However, SCD inhibition was temporally independent in the present study, offering little support for the aforementioned theory. Mammary sensitivity to CLA increased as lactation progressed and previous speculations attributed this to reduced contribution of de novo synthesised fatty acids or increased competition from circulating non-esterified fatty acids immediately postpartum. However, data indicate that de novo fatty acids and milk fat trans-10, cis-12 CLA content don’t appreciably change during early lactation, (even though MFD became more severe) offering little support for either hypothesis. Study three investigated the effects of intravenous CLA infusion on temporal expression of mammary lipogenic genes to determine if trans-10, cis-12 CLA down regulates expression of a key gene (i.e. acetyl CoA carboxylase, ACC, the rate limiting enzyme in de novo fatty acid synthesis) and reduction in other mammary lipid synthesis genes is due to lack of substrate (i.e. malonyl CoA), or an alternative indirect mechanism. Data indicated however, that mammary lipogenic genes (ACC, fatty acid synthetase and SCD) followed a similar temporal pattern, providing more support for a global regulator (i.e. sterol regulatory element binding protein-1, peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-γ or nuclear factor- κB) rather than a specific key enzyme effect.