Foot care practices of diabetic patients in Saudi Arabia

Diabetic foot is a serious complication that causes lower extremity amputations. The aim of this study was to identify the patient’s awareness about risk factors for diabetic foot disease and to explore the knowledge and foot care practices among diabetic patients in a Saudi population. This cross-sectional study was conducted in King Khalid University Hospital (KKUH), King Abdulaziz University Hospital (KAUH), King Fahad Medical City, National Guard Hospital, Military Hospital, and Prince Salman Hospital capital city of Saudi Arabia. Patients were eligible if they had diabetes foot disease, signed the consent form, and completed the questionnaire. We selected 350 patients from different hospitals between November-2011 and April-2012. The majority of patients (68%) were selected from King Saud University hospitals. The mean age of patients was 50.87 ± 15.9 years with a range of 20–90 years. The majority of patients were male (64.3%) and had a family history of hypertension (55.4%), high total cholesterol (58.6%), and other diabetes (58.9%). A family history of smoking, a major risk factor for diabetic foot, was found in 20.3% of cases. Sixty percent of the patients were using oral medications, 27.1% were using insulin therapy, 10% were using both oral and insulin therapies, and 10% were on diet. In our study, 19.4% of participants were illiterate while 80.6% had a high school or university level education. Our findings also revealed that some patients had a lack of knowledge concerning diabetic foot disease and future complications. Patients are unaware of the risk factors for diabetes foot and practice poor foot care. Awareness programs should be mandatory in all hospitals and diabetes clinics to help compensate for the lack of awareness and lack of podiatric educational services. Such programs may decrease the risk of diabetes foot disease.     

Environmentally induced morphological variation in the Barnacle Goose,Branta leucopsis

The environmental conditions to which juvenile barnacle geese (Branta leucopsis) were exposed during growth were found to affect their body size at fledging as well as their final adult body size. Small juveniles showed compensatory growth from the time of fledging up to one year of age, but this did not fully compensate the differences in body size that were established before fledging. The variation in protein content in plants eaten during growth could probably explain the observed body size differences, sometimes of more than 10%, between different categories of adult geese. Our results imply that one cannot infer selection on morphological characters from differences between samples of adult birds from different localities or from different cohorts within a population, without first showing that environmental conditions during growth do not affect the development of the characters under study.     

Can transposable element copy number distribution parameters be estimated from natural populations of Drosophila melanogaster?

The copy frequency distribution of a transposable element family in a Drosophila melanogaster natural population is generally characterised by the values of the Charlesworths' model parameters α and β (Charlesworth & Charlesworth, 1983). The estimation of these parameters is made using the observed distribution of the occupied sites in a population sample. Several results have been interpreted as due either to the influence of stochastic factors or to deterministic factors (transposition, excision, selection…). The accuracy of this method was tested by estimations performed on samples from simulated populations. The results show that with the sample size usually used for natural population studies, the confidence intervals are too large to reasonably deduce either the element copy number distribution or the values of transposition and excision rate and selective coefficients.     

A short-range endemic species from south-eastern Atlantic Rain Forest shows deep signature of historical events: phylogeography of harvestmen Acutisoma longipes (Arachnida: Opiliones)

The Brazilian Atlantic Rain Forest is amongst the most diverse biomes in the world, but the processes that shaped its biodiversity are still poorly understood. We used one mitochondrial and two nuclear markers to evaluate the phylogeographic patterns of the endemic harvestman Acutisoma longipes and its closely related species to investigate the biogeographic history of this biome. The results showed low intrapopulation diversity and strong population structure, suggesting poor dispersion amongst locations. Phylogenetic analyses pointed to three main mitochondrial lineages congruent with the geomorphology of the south-eastern region of Brazil (Serra do Mar, Serra da Mantiqueira, and interior plateau). These older divergences occurred in the middle-Neogene, suggesting that events in this period drove the diversification of the species, but Quaternary events also affected the populations locally. We detected some congruence between A. longipes demographic patterns and the areas of endemism delimited for harvestmen, suggesting that some regions of the distribution could have been more stable in the past (especially in Serra da Mantiqueira). Our findings corroborate that harvestmen are a suitable group for the study of ancient biogeographic events in the Atlantic Rain Forest, even at small-scale ranges. Acutisoma hamatum is here considered as a new junior synonym of A. longipes.