John A. Powell

Serum testosterone concentrations in the evaluation of androgen-producing tumors

During a 5-year study period 18 women with a serum testosterone concentrations of greater than 2 ng/ml were evaluated for a possible androgen-producing tumor. All subjects were hirsute and had menstrual irregularities, with the exception of one postmenopausal woman. The majority of the women were obese and 72% were greater than 50% over ideal body weight. Only two of 11 women undergoing operative and histologic evaluation of the ovaries were found to have an androgen-producing neoplasm. Seven additional women with serum testosterone concentration of greater than 2 ng/ml have been followed for over 1 year with no additional evidence of an androgen-producing neoplasm. The poor predictive value of a serum concentration of greater than 2 ng/ml in identification of an androgen-producing neoplasm is partially explained by the apparent prevalence of high testosterone concentrations in chronically anovulatory, hyperandrogenic obese women and by the large coefficient of variation observed in this study when analyzing testosterone concentrations were analyzed over an 8-hour interval (range, 3% to 42%). In the absence of an adnexal mass or rapidly progressive virilization, it is suggested that the use of venography or operative exploration to diagnose an androgen-producing neoplasm be reserved for women with a mean testosterone concentration derived from three daily samples that is at least 2.5 times greater than the upper range of normal in the given laboratory.

Race, poverty, and urban sprawl: Access to opportunities through regional strategies

This article attempts to demonstrate the need for social justice and urban civil rights advocates to focus on sprawl as well as concentrated poverty. The article posits that these are as much civil rights issues as environmental or land use issues and that sprawl has frustrated civil rights efforts. Indeed, there is strong evidence that racialized concentrated poverty is both a cause and product of sprawl and that, due to this interrelationship, concentrated poverty cannot be addressed without addressing sprawl. To examine this relationship, the author explores how the phenomena of gentrification and cities. Finally, the author argues that concentrated poverty and sprawl are regional issues that can only be addressed on a regional level; therefore, it is a mistake for social justice and urban civil rights advocates to leave the regional discussion to environmentalists and land use planners.

The impact of societal systems on black male violence

ABSTRACT Domestic violence in African American communities has been under-studied and under-theorized. An understanding of the distinct nature of this violence requires an investigation of the interactions of marginalization, persistent structural inequality, masculinity, power, poverty, popular culture, identity, and stress. This article explores the complex interplay of influences on African American men that often leads to domestic violence within African American communities. The article includes a nuanced discussion of personal agency and responsibility against a backdrop of social structures. The reader is challenged not only to identify and understand the many conditions that transmit and perpetuate violence in our society but also to remember that forgiveness and redemption are integral to the solution.

This Could be the Start of Something Big: How Social Movements for Regional Equity are Reshaping Metropolitan America, by Manuel Pastor Jr., Chris Benner, and Martha Matsuoka

For those interested in studying the linkage of race, place, and crime, Peterson and Krivo have become household names. Over the years, this duo has published at least a dozen significant studies that articulate the sources of ethnic and racial residential segregation in the United States and explain how it is linked with structurally inequitable neighborhood environments for whites, African Americans, Latinos, and others. Divergent Social Worlds reflects a culmination of decades of work in this area combined with years of data collection and sophisticated analyses, all of which document how the increasingly prominent role of place and the continuing role of race, coupled with the effects of policy, largely account for racial and ethnic differences in crime. As the title suggests, the book’s organizing concept is the racial-spatial divide—an arrangement in which racial inequality in social and economic circumstances and power in society is combined with segregated and unequal residential locations across racial and ethnic groups. The racial-spatial divide is hierarchical, with whites in the most advantaged and powerful positions and African Americans in the most disadvantaged and least powerful positions. Other groups, such as Latinos and Asians, occupy varying and more fluid positions in between blacks and whites. Poverty overlaps strongly with race along the racial-spatial divide, and this racial concentration of poverty and other socioeconomic disadvantages, according to Peterson and Krivo, leads to a racial concentration of violence. This is because the racial-spatial divide uniquely situates neighborhoods with distinct ethnoracial compositions in terms of the local conditions that encourage (or discourage) and control (or fail to control) crime. A significant contribution of the book is its integrated theoretical perspective, one that combines insights from the fields of criminology, urban sociology, and racial and ethnic stratification. Within this framework, residential segregation is the linchpin that connects the overall racial order with dramatic racial and ethnic differentials in crime across communities. It does this by reinforcing the complicated web of social and institutional inequalities that privilege white neighborhoods compared to African American, Latino, and other types of neighborhoods. Segregation, thus, is at the heart of why the social worlds of people in the US are so divergent by neighborhood color, and why neighborhood crime is so racialized.

Use of a synthetic peptide adjuvant for the immunization of baboons with denatured and deglycosylated pig zona pellucida glycoproteins**This project was funded by contract no. 359 from Program Applied Research Fertility Regulation to B.S.D. and V.C.S.

Baboons were immunized using a synthetic peptide adjuvant with two purified pig zona pellucida glycoproteins. The major zona pellucida glycoprotein (ZPI) was purified by preparative isoelectric focusing, and the 80 K deglycosylated zona pellucida protein (ZPIII) was purified by preparative sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. The immunogenicity as well as the antigenicity of these proteins were evaluated by characterizing antibodies using the enzyme-linked immunoassay and by immunoblotting of zona pellucida proteins separated by high-resolution two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. Both groups of animals developed antibodies that recognize the major zona pellucida glycoprotein, (ZPI) and immunoblotting procedures provide evidence that two of the major porcine zona pellucida glycoprotein families (ZPI and ZPIII) contain shared antigenic determinants. The animals immunized with ZPI showed decreased levels of estrogen throughout their menstrual cycles, and two of the animals ceased ovulation. All animals in the group immunized with ZPIII had a significant reduction in the numbers of antral follicles as compared with control animals. Although ovarian cyclicity was not altered significantly within a few months after immunization, two of the five animals in this group became amenorrheic by 8 months. Histologic analysis of ovarian tissue shows that follicles were absent or frequently abnormal in animals of both groups following long-term immunization. These studies demonstrate that the synthetic adjuvant is effective in inducing antibodies (to purified zona pellucida glycoproteins) that recognize antigenic determinants to either denatured or deglycosylated zona pellucida glycoproteins, and that some of these antibodies may interfere with normal ovarian function.