Environmental exposures unlikely to alter thyroid function of pregnant women, fetuses

ScienceDaily (Sep. 20, 2012) ? Exposures to perchlorate (ClO4), a compound found at low levels in the environment, and thiocyanate (SCN), a compound found in cigarette smoke and some foods, is unlikely to alter thyroid function in pregnant women and fetuses, according to new data presented at the 82nd Annual Meeting of the American Thyroid Association (ATA) in Qu?bec City, Qu?bec, Canada.

"The developing fetus is reliant on maternal iodine for thyroid hormone production for normal neurodevelopment. Environmental exposures to ClO4 and SCN exposures during pregnancy could potentially decrease thyroidal iodine uptake in the mother and/or her fetus and subsequent thyroid hormone synthesis," said Elizabeth Pearce, MD, of Boston Medical Center, Program Co-Chair of the ATA Annual Meeting and co-author of the study.

Led by Angela Leung at the Boston University School of Medicine in Boston, Mass., a team of researchers thus sought to determine for the first time the urinary CIO4 and SCN concentrations in Canada. They recruited 150 pregnant women from four low-risk antenatal outpatient clinics in Toronto, Canada, to provide a spot urine sample for the measurement of both compounds. The women were in their second and third trimesters, primarily Caucasian, well educated, and relatively affluent. The median urinary CIO4 concentration was 3.2 lg/L (range, 0.5-48.1 lg/L), and the median urinary SCN concentration was 351lg/L (range, 28-1195lg/L). These women were iodine sufficient (median urinary iodine concentration 227.1lg/L), as was previously presented at the 2011 American Thyroid Association meeting.

Researchers noted that low levels of both CIO4 and SCN are comparable to those previously reported by in iodine-deficient and sufficient pregnant women from Wales, Italy, Argentina, and the United States where environmental exposures had no effect on maternal thyroid function.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by American Thyroid Association, via Newswise.

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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/vuITIe6RZMU/120920153115.htm

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Steve Bing donates $30 million to Motion Picture & Television Fund

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Watson, the supercomputer genius, heads for the cloud

Paul Marks, chief technology correspondent (Image: IBM/AP/Press Association Images)

Watson, the Jeopardy-winning supercomputer developed by IBM, could become a cloud-based service that people can consult on a wide range of issues, the company announced yesterday. "Watson is going to be an advisor and an assistant to all kinds of professional decision-makers, starting in healthcare and then moving beyond. We're already looking at a role for Watson in financial services and in other applications," says John Gordon, Watson Solutions Marketing Manager at IBM in New York.

Watson is a modular supercomputer made up of at least 90 servers with 16,000 gigabytes of RAM, giving its smart learning software plenty of working memory for interpeting the meaning of the natural-language questions asked of it. And as New Scientist revealed a month ago, Watson's ability to sift through and make sense of hundreds of evidence-based, peer-reviewed cancer research papers and clinical guidelines is already proving to be a powerful diagnostic aid to oncologists, in trials at least.

In addition to improving Watson's machine-learning capabilities to increase the range of options the system gives clinicians - including nuancing these to cater for patient preferences, such as choosing chemotherapy that does not cause hair loss, for instance - the race is now on at IBM to make the system far more widely available.

"We want broad exposure for Watson. We want physicians all over the planet to be able to use it," says Gordon. "And we are now looking at ways of delivering Watson as a service to make sure that it is something that is very accessible and which doesn't require a significant level of technology investment by the user.

"We hope to expand Watson's scope by delivering it as a cloud-based service. We have a number of other application areas under consideration."

Whatever applications IBM settles on, with the cloud already making computer storage available to us in ways similar to utilities like gas and electricity, it will be fascinating to see if artificial intelligence is the next commodity it delivers.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/23ad390b/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Conepercent0C20A120C0A90Cwatson0Ethe0Esupercomputer0Egeniu0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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