Testosterone,testosterone therapy and prostate cancer

Abstract

With prostate cancer not observed in eunuchs and total androgen suppression by castration an effective first-line treatment for advanced prostate cancer, the dramatic regression seen in tumour symptoms after castration, lead to the theory that high levels of circulating androgens were a risk factor for prostate cancer. This theory however, ignored the effects testosterone variations within a physiologic range could have on early tumour events and since the early 2000s, clinical evidence discounting testosterone as a linear mechanistic cause of prostate cancer growth mounted, with alternative mechanistic hypotheses such as the saturation model being proposed. Together with a growing understanding of the negative health effects and decreased quality of life in men with testosterone deficiency or hypogonadism, a paradigm shift away from testosterone as a prostate cancer inducer occurred allowing clinicians to use testosterone therapy as potential treatment for men with difficult and symptomatic hypogonadism that had been previously treated for prostate cancer. In this review we contextualise the idea of testosterone as a risk factor for prostate cancer inducement and compile the most current literature with regards to the influence of testosterone and testosterone therapy in prostate cancer.     

Parent Involvement in Head Start and Children's Development: Indirect Effects Through Parenting

The authors examined the extent to which parent involvement in Head Start programs predicted changes in both parent and child outcomes over time, using a nationally representative sample of 1,020 three‐year‐old children over 3 waves of the Family and Child Experiences Survey. Center policies that promote involvement predicted greater parent involvement, and parents who were more involved in Head Start centers demonstrated increased cognitive stimulation and decreased spanking and controlling behaviors. In turn, these changes in parenting behaviors were associated with gains in children's academic and behavioral skills. These findings suggest that Head Start programs should do even more to facilitate parent involvement because it can serve as an important means for promoting both parent and child outcomes.     

The Persistence of a Stigmatized Practice: A Study of Competitive Intelligence

Studies on the diffusion of practices provide valuable insights into how organizations adopt, adapt, sustain and abandon practices over time. However, few studies focus on how stigmatized practices diffuse and persist, even when they risk tainting the adopters. To address this issue and understand how firms manage stigmatized practices, we study US organizations associated with the practice of competitive intelligence (CI) between 1985 and 2012. CI includes legitimate information gathering practices that are sometimes also associated with infringements and espionage. Our findings suggest that CI became highly diffused and persisted despite the risk of stigmatizing its adopters. We identified three factors to explain CI's persistence: (1) keeping it opaque to avoid the negative effects of stigmatization, (2) ‘constructing’ usefulness to justify its ongoing use by leveraging accepted beliefs and invoking fear of unilateral abandonment and (3) adapting it by developing multiple versions to increase its zone of acceptability. These three factors contribute to practice persistence by allowing firms to dilute the potential stigma from use of the practice. Our contribution lies in explaining the adoption, diffusion and ongoing use of a stigmatized practice whose benefits cannot be overtly acknowledged or made public.     

Iranian College Students’ Attitudes Toward Premarital Sex,Marriage, and Family Before and After the Islamic Revolution

ABSTRACT. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to examine Iranian college students’ attitudes toward premarital sex and marriage before and after the Islamic Revolution. Methods: Responses to a survey from 526 students at University of Shiraz in 2011 were compared to those from another study of 392 students from the same university who completed the same survey in 1977 (2 years before the Islamic Revolution). Results: No substantial changes were observed to indicate that college students adopted theocratic views on premarital sex and marriage after the Islamic Revolution. Conclusions: The Islamic regime's efforts to cultivate conservative attitudes toward sexuality and marriage have not achieved their goals.     

REQUIREMENTS PLANNING FOR CONTROL OF INFORMATION RESOURCES

Producing reports assembled from files, records, and raw data is a major function of the computer in modern organizations. Transaction processing, records management, file organization, and data-base management are aspects of the information production function that have received a good deal of attention. But planning, scheduling, and controlling the production of information products have been neglected. For complex applications involving assembly of reports from multilevel information sources, the requirements planning model is suggested as an effective alternative to present methods. Thus, our suggestion is that the computer be used to plan, schedule, and control computer production of information products. Presently available material requirements planning software may be employed with minor modifications that depend on the given information system characteristics. In this paper an example of requirements planning as applied to production of information in a satellite control system is presented.     

Parenting Gains in Head Start as a Function of Initial Parenting Skill

Using data from the Head Start Impact Study (n = 3,696), this article examines whether one year of Head Start differentially benefited parents as a function of their initial parenting behaviors. Four outcomes are examined, namely, parents' rates of engaging in cognitive stimulation, reading to their child, and spanking, as well as their depressive symptoms. In general, most parents demonstrated improvements in their reading practices and cognitive stimulation regardless of their parenting behaviors at baseline. However, depressive symptoms and spanking behavior showed improvements only among parents who began the Head Start program with the most depressive symptoms and the most frequent spanking, respectively. These findings suggest that treatment‐induced changes in parenting can vary by parents' incoming attributes and that heterogeneity of effects should be considered. Implications for Head Start and other parenting interventions are discussed.     

Learning‐related Social Skills as a Mediator between Teacher Instruction and Child Achievement in Head Start

Using a subsample of the Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) 2006, this study examined the associations between the amount of teacher instruction in 292 Head Start classrooms with changes in young children's (n = 936) early academic achievement and learning‐related social skills from ages three to five. In general, during the early years, children exhibited relatively stable academic and learning‐related social skills. Although the amount of teacher instruction did not predict children's short‐term academic growth directly, it did predict it indirectly through improvements in learning‐related social skills, with benefits lasting through the end of kindergarten. These findings demonstrate that gains in children's learning‐related social skills may be necessary before academic gains can be realized.     

Stability and sequence of center-based and family childcare: Links with low-income children's school readiness

The school readiness of a large sample (n = 2682) of ethnically and linguistically diverse, low-income children was examined as a function of whether children remained in family childcare (FCC) or center-based care (CBC) throughout their three and four-year-old preschool years, or whether they switched to the other type of childcare or to a public school pre-K program at age four. Children's pre-academic development (cognition, fine motor, and language) was assessed with the Learning Accomplishment Profile — Diagnostic (LAP-D), and teachers and parents rated children's social skills and behavior concerns with the Devereux Early Childhood Assessment (DECA) at three time points over two years. All children, regardless of childcare sequence, demonstrated some gains in school readiness. However, children receiving stable CBC over the two years made moderate gains in pre-academic skills and teacher-reported social skills. Children in stable FCC exhibited some gains in fine motor, language, and teacher reported-social skills but lost ground relative to national norms in cognitive skills. Children who switched between CBC and FCC did not show as much pre-academic growth (with those who switched to FCC gaining the least); however, children who switched from CBC to FCC did demonstrate strong teacher-reported social skills. Children who switched to public school pre-K programs at age four showed the strongest school readiness and were the only group to score above national averages in language and cognition.