McGill University Thèses et mémoires par auteur commençant par B

The phosphodiesterase (PDE) inhibitors Pentoxifylline (PTX), a general inhibitor, and Rolipram (ROL), a type 4 inhibitor, have been shown to have anti-inflammatory effects. They elevate intracellular CAMP levels and suppress the production of inflammatory cytokines such as tumor necrosis factor (TNF)alpha, interferon (IFN)gamma, and interleukin-12 (IL-12). These drugs have also been reported to modulate the immune response in favor of Th2 responses and to be therapeutically effective in various models of autoimmune and/or inflammatory disorders. Their effects on nitric oxide (NO) production are not well studied. Inflammatory cytokines and NO are important mediators implicated in islet beta-cell destruction. In the …  Read more

Contexte:Avec la nouvelle évolution vers des soins de santé centrés sur le patient, les soins chirurgicaux pédiatriques ont connu une augmentation de l'utilisation des mesures des résultats rapportés par les patients (PROMs) ces dernières années. En fait, l'utilisation des PROMs dans les populations pédiatriques est d'une grande importance car les préoccupations et les perceptions des enfants concernant leurs maladies doivent être entendues et comprises. Leur utilisation est d'autant plus importante chez les patients souffrant d'anomalies congénitales, car ces enfants souffrent souvent de multiples comorbidités, et nécessitent donc un suivi à long-terme. Bien que les PROMs soient devenus plus répandus, leur …  Read more

Motor memory consolidation is a process by which motor memories encoded during the practice of a motor skill are transformed from an initial fragile state to a more solid and stable state (Widmaier et al., 2016). Motor memories encoded by older adults are easily disrupted when another task is practiced soon after practice, during the first stages of consolidation (Roig et al, 2014). However, the neural mechanisms underlying this higher susceptibility to memory interference in older individuals are not known. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a non-invasive stimulation (NIBS) technique that can be used to manipulate brain activity, thus providing …  Read more

This research is concerned with menstruation as it is experienced and presented by women involved in feminist groups in Montreal. Biomedical discourse hegemony in the production of a discourse on women's body has been sometimes reinforced and sometimes questioned by feminist movements. The interviews reveal that despite the impact of feminist discourses, women's experience seems deeply influenced by biomedical and hygienist discourses and by negative stereotypes commonly found in society at large. Feminist discourses allow these women to open spaces of freedom and criticism in their practices and thoughts regarding menstruation.  Read more

Ricard, François (Supervisor)  Read more

Gauvin, Raynald (Internal/Supervisor)  Read more

Background: Ulcerative colitis (UC) is an idiopathic inflammatory bowel disease that results in chronic inflammation of the colon with potential serious complications. Symptomatic control is currently considered insufficient and endoscopic healing of the mucosa is nowadays considered a key goal. We still do not know what the role of histologic healing on disease outcome is.Aim: To determine the role of complete remission defined as both endoscopic mucosal healing and histologic inactivity on the risk of disease relapse. Methods: We performed a prospective cohort study with a 1-year follow-up period at the McGill University Health Center between 2013 and 2015. We …  Read more

Gray-Donald, Katherine (Internal/Supervisor)  Read more

Cette étude porte sur les propriétés physiques d'un nouvel ionomère, un aromatique carboxylé, ainsi que son précurseur. Seul le système ayant un poids équivalent de 600 fut étudié en profondeur, sous forme de membranes d'une épaisseur de ca. 150 um. […]  Read more

Cette thèse se penche sur l'étude cas-témoins de cohorte prévalente avec relance, un sujet qui n'a pas été abordé dans la littérature. Dans plusieurs études épidémiologiques, une cohorte témoin, exempte d'une maladie d'intérêt, est suivie dans le but de déterminer les covariables associées avec l'acquisition de ladite maladie. Pour certaine de ces covariables, des contraintes de logistique sur l'acquisition de données ou les coûts prohibitifs des analyses en laboratoire empêchent les chercheurs d'obtenir toute l'information possible sur les covariables pour tous les participants avec relance. L'étude cas-témoins permet de lever certaines de ces difficultés, puisque à chaque événement, l'information complète …  Read more

Kemp, H. (Supervisor)  Read more

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a cancer of the blood characterized by an increase in the number of immature blood cells (blasts) in the bone marrow, which cause hematopoietic insufficiency. Chemotherapies used for AML have mostly stayed the same for the last 40 years and involve extremely intense toxic treatment, yet approximately 40% of AML is resistant to initial treatment or eventually relapse. The survival rate 5 years after diagnosis of pediatric AML patients is poor (approximately 60%) and accounts for almost half of the leukemic deaths in children. This is partially due to the chemoresistant nature of the leukemic …  Read more

Cette étude explore les efforts employés par l’ancien président bolivien– Evo Morales– afin de construire des alliances rhétoriques avec la Russie et la Chine. Morales, président de Bolivie entre 2006 et 2019, est devenu un ardent défenseur du développement d’alliances politiques, économiques, et personnelles avec la Russie. À la suite de l’invasion de l’Ukraine par la Fédération de Russie en 2022, des nombreux dirigeants latino-américains ont abordé l’alliance avec ce pays avec un mélange de condamnation et d’ambivalence, ce qui rend le soutien prolifique de Morales unique parmi ses pairs. En revanche, Morales a fait preuve d’une mesure inhabituelle dans …  Read more

Ducharme, Simon (Supervisor1)  Read more

This dissertation explores the relationship between gender, identity, musical labor, and women’s agency in mid-century Poland. I focus on lives and careers of two key female figures who shaped the country’s contemporary music culture: composer Grażyna Bacewicz (1909–69) and musicologist Zofia Lissa (1905–80). Throughout their careers, Bacewicz’s and Lissa’s creative, intellectual, administrative, and care-labour depended on, challenged, and reinforced prevailing ideas about gender roles in music and academia in Polish interwar and postwar society. Simultaneously, their lives provide a case study to examine agency that women composers and musicologists exerted with changing politics of gender and national belonging. Notably, Lissa …  Read more

This project is an effort to study the influence of unionization upon the wages of labour, a subject in which the writer has been interested for some time. The importance of this question is one which needs little demonstration. The economic life of the modern world has been characterized, particularly during the present century by the vast growth of organized labour within the productive processes. The unions of to-day can control the supply or labour in given industries and can bargain on terms of equality with management.  Read more

This thesis examines the writing in poetry and prose of a small group of English feminist writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The best known of these authors was Mary Astell (1666-1731). The influence on the feminists' ideas of the philosophies of Descartes and of the most prominent English thinkers of the period, the Cambridge Platonists, is described. The thesis focuses on three main themes in the seventeenth century feminists' writing. These were occupation, education and marriage. Emphasis is put on education as the most important of the feminists' concerns. They believed that the poor education women …  Read more

The present thesis has examined in detail the dynamics of adrenomedullary glucocorticoid (GC) receptors at various concentrations of steroid, the regulation of levels of receptor following various treatments, and the regulation of phenylethanolamine N-methyltransferase (PNMT) activity following acute exposure to GCs and various time delays, providing evidence that GC regulation of adrenomedullary catecholamine biosynthesis is more dynamic than was classically thought. We report that adrenomedullary GC receptors are translocated, both in response to nM concentrations of GCs, and in response to higher concentrations of GCs encountered by the glands during stress. We show that long-term increases in cyclic nucleotide second …  Read more

Canadian hard rock mine extraction practices have commonly created shallow stopes, 12% of which have caved to surface, from instabilities originating from stope hangingwalls, crowns or footwalls. To date, however, mine operators have applied few of the available data gathering and design tools to strike a balance between maximum economic excavation dimension and stope viability. The preference has been to use personal mining experience. Several common rock mass environments are surveyed as well as the various ways in which shallow stopes have failed. It has been found that these rock masses develop gravity-induced movement in the form of plug failures, …  Read more

Recent work has shown that while Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been able to achieve high performance on a variety of vision tasks, they remain unable to generalize well, and can be easily fooled. These CNNs have also been shown to exhibit a cue bias, focusing on local textures rather than global shape information. In contrast, biological vision systems are robust to a variety of image conditions and have the ability to efficiently adjust and extrapolate to new objects. While biological visual systems are still being researched, there is considerable evidence that shape information is vital to their internal representations. …  Read more

Under the Treaty Establishing the European Community, corporations are entitled to free establishment. Recently, the European Court of Justice's Inspire Art decision has clarified its scope and has in principle introduced place of incorporation doctrine as choice-of-law rule, thus granting corporations free choice of the Member State of incorporation. In the US, free choice has caused the "Delaware Effect". This paper analyzes if Inspire Art will cause a similar development in the EU. The EU and US contexts will be compared. Germany will serve as an example. As different circumstances exist in the EU, free choice is more limited and …  Read more

Parathyroid hormone (PTH) and PTH-related peptide (PTHrP) stimulate signal transduction in target cells by binding to the same G protein-linked receptor (PTHR). The PTHR mediates PTH signaling in kidney and bone, and PTHrP binding to the receptor has been shown to be essential for normal endochondral bone formation in humans and mice. Expression of the murine PTHR gene is controlled by two promoters that are regulated differently. Whereas the activity of the upstream promoter (P1) is mainly restricted to the kidney, where it provides the bulk of the gene transcription, the downstream promoter (P2) is more widely active. We characterized …  Read more

This thesis consists of theoretical investigations of the process of electron capture by ions passing through gases. Electron capture phenomena were first observed experimentally by Henderson in 1922. Apart from its intrinsic interest this phenomenon is of importance because the range of ions depends strongly on their charge. There is now a large quantity of experimental data on various data on various capture processes, much of which is summarized by Massey and Burhop.  Read more

The human pupil undergoes size changes not only in response to changes in light level but also to changes in perception and cognition. Pupillometry was used across three studies to investigate cognitively mediated pupil responses to low-level visual stimuli. The three studies involved illusory motion perception, object perception, and symmetry perception. The motion illusion experiments revealed that the perception of illusory motion within a pattern produces a pupil dilation response, and that this response is correlated with participants’ subjective enjoyment of the experience. Though an experimental reduction of the perceived intensity of the illusion did not similarly reduce the dilation …  Read more

This thesis addresses two problems that have applications in evolution and phylogenetics: (i) estimating and accounting for evolutionary rate heterogeneity in a phylogenetic context (Chapters 2 and 3); (ii) detecting synonymous selection upon a set of codons (Chapter 4). Chapter 2 presents a fast algorithm (DistR) to estimate gene/protein evolutionary rates based on pairwise distances between pairs of taxa derived from gene/protein sequence data. Simulation studies indicate that this algorithm accurately estimates rates and is robust to missing data. Moreover, by including evolutionary rates estimated by the DistR algorithm as additional parameters into a phylogenetic model, a significantly improved fit …  Read more

Cette thèse explore la relation entre l'éducations libérale/séculiers et religieux. Je commence par tracer ce que je crois être la source de tension entre éducations libérale/laïques et religieux à deux théories libérales très influent qui ont affecté l'éducation civique en particulier. Je commence par une analyse de l'approche naturaliste John Dewey à la métaphysique et la religion, en faisant valoir que l'attitude de Dewey aux traditions religieuses, lorsqu'il est utilisé comme une base pour l'éducation civique, est insuffisante. Plus précisément, je soutiens que dans la conception de Dewey, les doctrines religieuses, les principes, les idéaux, les croyances et traditions religieuses …  Read more

The copper-catalyzed synthesis of functionalized pyridines and partially reduced pyridine derivatives has been developed and the results are presented herein. These studies have shown that pyridines (and related aromatic heterocycles) in the presence of chloroformates will undergo effective coupling with terminal alkynes and organoindium reagents using simple copper (I) salt catalysts to give good yields of dihydropyridine products. In addition, performing these reactions in tandem with base or oxidative additives has led to the copper-catalyzed one-pot preparation of substituted aromatic pyridines.  Read more

Les systèmes pédagogiques Anishinaabeg existaient bien avant les contacts entre les colons et l’occupation subséquente des terres Anishinaabes. Ces systèmes sont composés de connaissances traditionnelles enracinées dans la terre, qui ont été historiques et partagées à travers des générations d’intellects Anishinaabeg. D’un point de vue ontishinaabe ontologique, les Anishinaabeg reconnaissent la terre comme notre premier enseignant: la terre est la base de toute vie et, par conséquent, la base de tous les enseignements culturels au cœur de l’éducation Anishinaabe. Les pédagogies d’enseignement et d’apprentissage Anishinaabeg sont maintenues par l’éducation / l’apprentissage basé sur la terre. Cela positionne les apprenants pour …  Read more

The aim of this work is to give a coherent account of experiments designed and carried out to try to illuminate our knowledge of the behavior of humans under conditions of isolation. The particular emphasis will be on susceptibility to changes in attitude produced by such conditions and on an attempt to discover something of the psychological variables involved. Finally, there will be an attempt to formulate some sort of explanatory principles which will give, or at least lead to, a predictive theory of such variations as may be observed in normal behavior.  Read more

Les soins centrés sur le patient et la famille (SCPF) sont largement reconnus comme un pilier des soins de santé de haute qualité, mais leur mise en œuvre dans les unités de soins intensifs pour adultes reste limitée en raison d'obstacles systémiques, logistiques et culturels. La pandémie de COVID-19 a mis en évidence la fragilité des pratiques d'engagement familial dans les soins intensifs et a suscité une exploration urgente des stratégies virtuelles pour soutenir les soins centrés sur le patient et la famille lorsque la présence en personne est restreinte. Cette thèse comble les principales lacunes de la littérature en …  Read more

This thesis is a study of stability and numerical methods in optimization and control systems. Our first goal is to investigate different types of stability: continuity of the feasible set mapping, stability and controllability of dynamical systems and control processes, and stability of numerical algorithms. The second goal is implementation of polynomial-time algorithms for solving problems of optimization, stabilization, modelling, and input optimization of control systems. We are using polynomial-time interior-point methods and analytic center cutting plane methods. In particular, we study relations between abstract optimization problems and their finite-dimensional discretizations.  Read more

This thesis describes the design and implementation of a content-based image retrieval system that improves on classical appearance-based methods of retrieval. The motivation is to build a system capable of retrieving complex scenes in unconstrained environments. In this work, we use principal components analysis as a parameterization of the images. The analysis, however, is not performed on the level of the intensity values of image pixels as in traditional approaches, but on the level of two intermediate representations. We use the magnitude of the Fourier Transform as a relevant and stable comparison feature to retrieve complex scenes, and zero crossings …  Read more

Methylmercury (MeHg) is an environmental contaminant mainly present in fish and seafood. The long-term consumption of these fish and seafoods could pose a health risk to pregnant women and their children. Animal studies were conducted to assess the effects of MeHg exposure on reproduction and offspring development as well as the potential benefits of nutrient supplementation. Adult female rats were treated by gavage with MeHg at dose levels of 0.5, 1.0 or 2.0 mg/kg/day for 4 weeks prior to mating and throughout pregnancy, and then were allowed to deliver. In a second study, adult female rats were treated with MeHg …  Read more

The majority of marketed drugs and fine chemicals contain some sort of cyclic structure, emphasizing the need for these types of structures in industry. Seven-membered rings however are uncommon, possibly due to the limited methods to synthesize them in an expedient fashion with good stereoselectivity. Despite the existence of several oxazepane containing bioactive molecules and natural products, little effort has been put into synthesizing these structures. In this thesis, we explore the synthesis of 1,4-oxazepanes via a key halocycloetherification reaction. We investigate the substrate scope of the reaction as well as details of the mechanism. The regioselectivity and relative stereochemistry …  Read more

Willie, Bettina (Supervisor2)  Read more

Avant-propos: La radiothérapie demeure un composant majeur dans les protocoles de traitements chez les patients atteints de cancers au niveau de la tête et du cou. Alors que la plupart des complications causées par la radiothérapie sont temporaires, la perte d’audition sensorielle elle, est tardive et définitive. À ce jour, aucune étude n’a abordé les effets de la radiothérapie fractionnelle sur la perte de l’ouïe sensorielle sur un modèle animal. De plus, la combinaison des effets qu’engendrent la radiothérapie et d’autres stimulis auditifs tels que l’ototoxicité des aminoglycosides ou des traumatismes acoustiques n’a pas été reportée dans la littérature scientifique.Objectif …  Read more

This paper reports a study of the relation between the daily gain of bacon hogs from weaning to market weight, and the individual feed fractions of the standard chemical analysis (protein, ether extract, ash, crude fitre, and nitrogen-free extract) as compared to the fractions of the modified scheme proposed by Crampton and Maynard (protein, ether extract, ash, cellulose, lignin, and other carbohydrates). The data was analyzed statisticallv bv two methods,(1) partial regressions using the error variance, and (2) partial correlations using the between-lot variance: The method of partial regression was found to be unsatisfactory for this type of data. Partial …  Read more

This thesis is dedicated to establishing ways in which the image of Calderon was perceived and constructed by the thinkers of the Enlightenment, of both conservative and reformist convictions, as part of their efforts to create and impose their own understanding of what Spanish national identity is or should be like. The thesis concentrates on the writings of several of the most important intellectuals of the XVIII century who took part in the heated debate as to the value of Calderon's work: Blas Nasarre y Ferriz, Tomas Erauso y Zabaleta, Nicolas Fernandez de Moratin, Cristobal Romea y Tapia, Jose Clavijo …  Read more

Oswin, Natalie (Internal/Cosupervisor2)  Read more

Des protéines spécifiques ont été identifiées qui régulent l'association membranaire et facilitent le transport intracellulaire des protéines prénylées des familles Rho et Rab, mais on ne sait pas si les protéines cellulaires remplissent des rôles similaires pour d'autres espèces prénylées, telles que les protéines de la famille Ras. Nous avons utilisé une méthode décrite précédemment pour évaluer comment plusieurs protéines cellulaires, précédemment identifiées comme des partenaires de liaison potentiels (mais pas des effecteurs) de K-Ras4B, influencent la dynamique de l'association de K-Ras avec la membrane plasmique.La surexpression de PDE-Delta ou de PRA1 améliore, alors que l'inactivation de l'une ou l'autre …  Read more