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To explore whether fractional exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO) non-suppression identifies corticosteroid resistance, we analysed inflammatory mediator changes during a FeNO suppression test with monitored high-intensity corticosteroid therapy. In linear mixed-effects models analysed over time, the 15 clinically distinct ‘suppressors’ (ie, ≥42% FeNO suppression) normalised Asthma Control Questionnaire scores (mean±SD, start to end of test: 2.8±1.4 to 1.4±0.9, p2 (254 (89–894) to 93 (49–209) pg/mL, p=0.004) and numerically decreasing other type-2 cytokine, chemokine and alarmin levels. In comparison, the 19 non-suppressors had persistent sputum eosinophilia (10% (1%–67%) despite high-intensity therapy) with raised end-test inflammatory mediator levels (1.9 (0.9–2.8)-fold greater than suppressors). FeNO non-suppression during monitored treatment implies biological corticosteroid resistance.

Item does not contain fulltext The principles of political economy that informed the Russell government’s measures to terminate the Famine crisis were broadly addressed in journalism, political and economic pamphlets, but also in literature. As this chapter shows, fiction, in particular, engaged with three aspects of political economy: the government’s politics of non intervention, the Malthusian discourses that many supporters of political economy employed and the stereotype of Irish indolence by which the ideology of political economy was often imbued. As will be demonstrated, the fact that these works of literature responded to these societal discussions on the Irish Question is accompanied by generic shifts. In examining the Famine present or past, these literary texts explored the boundaries of genre, developing new fictional registers and forms.

The organisation of chromatin is closely intertwined with biological activities of chromosome domains, including transcription and DNA replication status. Scaffold attachment factor A (SAF-A), also known as Heteronuclear Ribonucleoprotein Protein U (HNRNPU), contributes to the formation of open chromatin structure. Here we demonstrate that SAF-A promotes the normal progression of DNA replication, and enables resumption of replication after inhibition. We report that cells depleted for SAF-A show reduced origin licensing in G1 phase, and consequently reduced origin activation frequency in S phase. Replication forks progress slowly in cells depleted for SAF-A, also contributing to reduced DNA synthesis rate. Single-cell replication timing analysis revealed that the boundaries between early- and late-replicating domains are blurred in cells depleted for SAF-A. Associated with these defects, SAF-A-depleted cells show elevated γH2A phosphorylation and tend to enter quiescence. Overall we find that SAF-A protein promotes robust DNA replication to ensure continuing cell proliferation.

The attitudes of young men and women to breastfeeding were examined including perceived incentives and barriers to the practice in cross sectional survey and focus group discussion. The study involoved 177 (100%) fifth and final year students of both sexes and a subsample of 48 students in 6 focus groups in three post primary schools in an Irish midland town. Overall 28% reported that they themselves were breastfed. The most frequent sources of information were the media rather than home or school. A majority of girls (86%) and boys (77%) agreed that breastfeeding was the best method of feeding, but less intended the practice for their children (54%), girls being significantly less likely than boys. There were no patterns in relation to social class and lifestyle. Reasons for breastfeeding in the focus groups included its naturalness, facility of feeding and adequate nourishment. Reasons against related to embarrassment in public, but mainly related to perceived problems with the practicalities of feeding. Health promotion strategies need to reach young people before they initiate pregnancies. Skills based health education courses would be helpful and girls should be aware of the positive attitudes of boys generally.

Lady Morgan wrote in her Memoirs (1862) that she had been ‘caricatured to the uttermost - abused, calumniated, misrepresented, flattered, eulogized, persecuted; supported as party dictated or prejudice permitted […]; the poor butt that reviewers, editors and critics have set up’. This acute awareness of her own literary celebrity offers a neat encapsulation of Lady Morgan’s aptitude for self-fashioning. Her careful cultivation of multiple identities was never more complex than in its relationship to nationality: Morgan’s claim that she was born aboard ship while her English mother and Irish father crossed the Irish Sea is a notable instance of her preoccupation with cultural hybridity and transition.\ud \ud Morgan’s alertness to ideas of cultural transmission is evident not only in her\ud commodification of her Irish identity, as she embodied her fictional heroine Glorvina for enraptured English markets. Her national tales themselves provide a self-conscious account of the cultural circulation of Irish identity, foregrounding themes of representation, performance and perception. Morgan’s writing demonstrates a profound awareness of contemporary theories of cultural change, offering a self-reflexive narrative of historical transition in its critique of Enlightenment models of stadial historical progress. In The Wild Irish Girl (1806), O’Donnel (1814), Florence Macarthy (1818) and The O'Briens and the O'Flahertys (1827), Morgan locates Ireland within a global framework of linguistic, political, historical and geographical divisions, considering the various ways that Enlightenment discourses of sensibility, commerce and civility create dialogues between disparate cultures, nations and historical time frames. In doing so, she reimagines a more conventionally ‘Romantic’ formulation of cosmopolitan national identity and historical progress for the future, offering critics new ways of reading the interactions between the cultural movements\ud of Enlightenment and Romanticism.\ud \ud This brand of Romantic cosmopolitanism reflects Morgan’s wider interests, which extend beyond Ireland to consider transnational geographies and histories. Her non-Irish fiction is set against a wide variety of geographical and historical backdrops, including sixteenth-century France in The Novice of Saint Dominick (1805), late eighteenth-century Greece in Woman; or, Ida of Athens (1809), seventeenth-century Portugal and India in The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811) and newly-independent 1830s Belgium in The Princess; or, The Beguine (1835). Morgan’s non-fiction, in particular her controversial travelogues France (1817) and Italy (1821), demonstrates a keen awareness of Britain’s role within a global nexus of shifting and dynamic cultural forces.\ud \ud Furthermore, Morgan’s pioneering role in establishing the Romantic national tale shows an acute self-consciousness about the novel form and its impact on historical and cultural transition. Her reference in the 1846 preface of The Wild Irish Girl to the novel as ‘a fictitious narrative, founded on national grievances, and borne out by historic fact’ belies the ambivalent status of the Romantic national tale as a dynamic and transitory form that operates in perpetual dialogue with contemporary historiography. Morgan’s frequent references to the rehearsing and staging of national identity in the novels themselves reflect the ambiguities inherent to the national tale as a narrative form founded on the literary performance of nationality. Morgan’s own reflections on her role as literary innovator – as demonstrated in her assertion that The Wild Irish Girl was ‘the first attempt at a genuinely Irish novel’ that might fill the ‘long pause in the national literature of Ireland’ – reveal her own alertness to the emergence of a concept of Irish literature as a recognizable body of work with a distinct relationship to historical chronology. Her writing not only offers a complex\ud and self-conscious reflection on historical change; it provokes and shapes literary transition as an integral component in the Romantic reconfiguration of the novel.