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The behavioral activity of laying hens in an aviary is indicative of their welfare and health. Furthermore, hens' usage of the different locations within an aviary has been shown to influence laying performance and egg quality. For example, hens that spent a longer duration of time in the nest during laying were observed to have lower laying performance. Therefore, understanding genetics of laying hens' usage of the aviary could be important for predicting egg quality, production traits and health and welfare. The objectives of this study were to estimate genetic parameters for duration of time spent at different locations within the aviary and an adjacent winter garden using a multivariate repeatability model and to compare correlations between time spent in these locations. For this study, a total of 1,106 Dekalb white laying hens (Hendrix Genetics) were genotyped using a proprietary 60K SNP array. These hens had access to 5 different zones within the aviary, which included the top level tier, nest box tier, lower level tier, floor littered area and a winter garden. Hens were in the aviary for a total of 290 d and daily records of duration were collected for each hen visit to any location in the aviary, culminating in a total of 937,740 records. Heritability estimates ranged from 0.05 (0.01) to 0.28 (0.03) for the duration of time spent in the different zones. The lowest heritability was estimated for time spent at the lower level tier, while a higher heritability was estimated for time spent in the floor littered area. A moderately high negative genetic correlation of -0.59 (0.08) was observed between time spent in the top level tier and time spent in the floor littered area, while a favorable correlation of 0.37 (0.14) was found between time spent in the lower level tier and time spent in the winter garden. The findings of this study show that the duration of time spent at different zones within an aviary has genetic basis and could be used for selecting animals for better performance and higher welfare.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.psj.2023.103369 | DOI Listing |
J Med Internet Res
September 2025
Department of Precision Medicine, Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, Maastricht University, Universiteitssingel 40, Maastricht, 6229 ER, The Netherlands, 31 433883549.
Background: Making informed decisions about clinical trial participation can be overwhelming for patients due to the complexity of trial information, potential risks and benefits, and the emotional burden of a recent diagnosis. Patient decision aids (PDAs) simplify this process by providing clear information on treatment options, empowering patients to actively participate in shared decision-making with their doctors. While PDAs have shown promise in various health care contexts, their use in clinical trials, particularly in the form of trial-specific patient decision aids (tPDAs), remains underused.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGeroscience
September 2025
NUS Bia-Echo Asia Centre for Reproductive Longevity and Equality, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore.
In the past century, the human Lifespan has doubled. However, this is not equivalent to Healthspan which refers to the number of years spent healthy and free from disease. Women have an additional level of complexity on the path to optimal healthspan where health resilience dramatically decreases following menopause and this is due to their ovaries aging by midlife.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBehav Res Methods
September 2025
Department of Psychology, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland.
Over the past several decades, decision-making research has been dominated by the study of binary choice tasks, with key models assuming that people remain equally cautious regardless of how long they have spent on the choice problem. Recent research has begun to place a greater focus on studying tasks with a continuous-response scale, as well as models that allow for decreases in caution over decision time; however, these research topics have remained separate from one another. For instance, proposed models of continuous-response scales have assumed constant caution over time, and studies investigating whether caution decreases over time have focused on binary choice tasks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClin Exp Optom
September 2025
Department of Vitreoretinal Diseases, Sankara Nethralaya, Chennai, India.
Clinical Relevance: Dry eye disease (DED) is associated with use of video screen based gadgets and long hours spent looking through microscopes. Use of 3D goggles to view 3D screens leads to eye strain and worsening of dry eye symptoms. It is important to identify and treat the symptoms in professions carrying a high risk of DED.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAppl Clin Inform
September 2025
Pediatric Critical Care, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, United States.
Background: Time spent in the electronic health record (EHR) is an important measure of clinical activity. Vendor-derived EHR use metrics may not correspond to actual EHR experience. Raw EHR audit logs enable customized EHR use metrics, but translating discrete timestamps to time intervals is challenging.
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