Problem
Which is the prevalence and seroprevalence of celiac disease (CD) in women with recurrent reproductive failure?
Method of study
Retrospective study performed in a single infertility clinic ...from September 2016 to December 2017. A total of 690 women with unexplained history of recurrent miscarriage and/or recurrent implantation failure were consecutively recruited. IgA anti‐transglutaminase 2 (TG2) antibody data were collected, as well as IgG anti‐TG2 and IgA/IgG anti‐deamidated gluten peptide (DGP) data in most cases, and IgG anti‐gliadin antibodies occasionally. In selected women, HLA‐DQ genotyping was requested. Biopsy was suggested to all women with positive serological results or belonging to CD risk groups. Reproductive outcomes were recorded from women with high suspicion of CD and a control group comprised of 49 women.
Results
Anti‐TG2–positive women comprised 1% of the sample. An additional 4% was observed considering less‐specific antibodies (31 women). Only 39% of sero‐positive women accepted duodenal biopsy. HLA and biopsy data discarded CD in 14 sero‐positive cases (37%), only one with anti‐TG2 antibodies. CD was suggested in 10 sero‐positive and three sero‐negative women (1.9%). Compared with controls, the live birthrate of the studied women with probable CD was significantly decreased before gluten removal of the diet (P = .015), but significantly increased after that (P = .020).
Conclusion
One percent CD prevalence should be expected after anti‐TG2 serological screening. However, more sensitive approaches should be explored, especially considering the potential beneficial effect of the gluten‐free diet on the reproductive outcomes of women with CD.
Coastal lagoons are among the marine habitats with the highest biological productivity, and supports a great variety of human activities and pressures that makes them especially vulnerable to trophic ...imbalances. While dystrophic crises are common in many lagoons, others like the Mar Menor show homeostatic mechanisms, high resilience and clear waters. This paper analyses the water column descriptors dynamic during the last 22 years in this lagoon, in the context of a eutrophication process produced by an increase in nutrient inputs, mainly derived from agriculture. Despite the increase in nitrate loads, the lagoon maintained two decades of homeostatic regulation, keeping the water transparency and relatively low levels of nutrients and chlorophyll a (Prebreak phase), followed by a sudden change of state in 2016 with an abrupt increase in nutrients and chlorophyll a concentration and loss of water transparency (Break phase), and a relatively rapid recovery after the reduction of nutrient discharges (Recovery phase). The activation of the regulation mechanisms is manifested by an ammonium production, as a consequence of the trophic web activity. The low relationship between chlorophyll and nutrients, mainly at small spatio-temporal scales, disagrees with the eutrophication traditional models, suggesting a rapid response of primary producers to nutrient inputs and a zooplankton control in the short-term, which in turn is controlled by the rest of the trophic web components. Homeostatic properties that provide resistance to the Mar Menor lagoon to deal with eutrophication are based on several mechanisms: channelling its production towards the benthic system (maintaining high biomasses of primary producers, filter feeders and detritivores), a top-down control of the pelagic trophic web exerted by ichthyoplankton and jellyfish, and exporting surplus production outside the system. Resilience of the system would be based on the high turnover in the species composition related to the restricted connectivity with the sea, the spatio-temporal variability of the environmental conditions, and the multiplicity of spatial-temporal scales involved in lagoon processes. TRIX index was sensitive to the water quality changes. However, in our study, its current score does not allow to anticipate or alert the eutrophication risk and the trophic breakpoint of the system.
The chief objective of this research was to analyze how the industrial heritage of three European capitals—Madrid, Brussels, and Copenhagen—has been integrated into the dynamics of their urban ...tourism, thereby generating new resources and cultural spaces. In regards to the latter point, this study poses the working hypothesis that industrial heritage can function as a tool for cultural sustainability, which allows for deconcentration away from historic city centers subjected to significant overtourism. To verify this hypothesis, a methodology has been designed based on the selection of specific indicators and the creation of maps, taking as reference data from the Tripadvisor travel portal. The results obtained are truly encouraging, and it would be interesting to expand this study by incorporating new case studies to allow us to discern additional patterns of behavior around urban industrial tourism.
•A preliminary analysis of EJ in the two main Spanish cities, Madrid and Barcelona.•Proposal of a baseline methodology for EJ evaluation.•The goodness-of-fit test and an ‘EJ scale’ are effective ...tools for comparative assessment.•Elderly people and immigrants’ areas tend to bear an unequal level of NO2 burden.
The concept of environmental justice (EJ) has recently gained currency, both as a factor for and a goal of sustainable development. Its implementation in practice implies establishing current environmental injustice patterns and analysing planning policies, with the aim to reduce socio-demographic inequalities in the negative environmental impact borne by different population groups. This paper proposes a method to assess differential exposure to excessive pollution levels by socio-demographic groups in intra-urban spaces.
The approach developed in this paper is based upon GIS and quantitative spatial analysis techniques. It incorporates the idea of an ‘environmental justice weighting scale’ for policy-making, using normative pollution thresholds to measure inequalities more objectively and consistently. Spain’s two largest cities, Madrid and Barcelona, have been chosen as case-studies, taking nitrogen dioxide as the pollutant, and the geographic distribution of six vulnerable population groups (children, elderly people and international immigrants) in the year 2010. The results reveal that a large part of these groups suffer exposure to air pollution exceeding the maximum permitted levels disproportionately, which would imply a case of environmental injustice.
Concurrent with the expansion of visual culture, film tourism has experienced a significant boost in recent decades, and the motivation to visit places where series made for television or similar ...platforms were filmed has been added to this modality. In this context, and taking the city of Madrid as a reference, this work proposes a line of research wherein analysis of the relationships between geographical and audiovisual spaces through cultural and tourist use unites the representation of both, by way of social networks (specifically, Twitter). As regards methodology, an ‘application programming interface’ has been designed which permits the download of a sample of tweets useful for both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The main results indicate the impacts that fiction series have had on recognition of the city (or certain of its elements) as well as relationships established between the narrative and geographical spaces when the latter are referenced via on-site activities. Theoretically, this research focuses on the relationship between real geographies, imagined geographies, and simulacra, as well as their involvement in the commodification of space and in the construction of vicarious geographical experiences.
Online social networks allow powerless people to gain enormous amounts of control over particular people’s lives and profit from the anonymity or social distance that the Internet provides in order ...to harass other people. One of the most frequently targeted groups comprise women, as misogyny is, unfortunately, a reality in our society. However, although great efforts have recently been made to identify misogyny, it is still difficult to distinguish as it can sometimes be very subtle and deep, signifying that the use of statistical approaches is not sufficient. Moreover, as Spanish is spoken worldwide, context and cultural differences can complicate this identification. Our contribution to the detection of misogyny in Spanish is two-fold. On the one hand, we apply Sentiment Analysis and Social Computing technologies for detecting misogynous messages in Twitter. On the other, we have compiled the Spanish MisoCorpus-2020, a balanced corpus regarding misogyny in Spanish, and classified it into three subsets concerning (1) violence towards relevant women, (2) messages harassing women in Spanish from Spain and Spanish from Latin America, and (3) general traits related to misogyny. Our proposal combines a classification based on average word embeddings and linguistic features in order to understand which linguistic phenomena principally contribute to the identification of misogyny. We have evaluated our proposal with three machine-learning classifiers, achieving the best accuracy of 85.175%. Finally the proposed approach is also validated with existing corpora for misogyny and aggressiveness detection such as AMI and HatEval obtaining good results
•Social computing and sentiment analysis technologies can be applied to misogyny detection.•Performance of misogyny identification improves when combining linguistic features and word-embeddings.•Release of a balanced corpus in Spanish regarding misogyny.•Differences among dialects and cultural background in Spanish hinders misogyny identification.•Offensive language, grammatical gender, and grammatical errors and misspellings are discerning linguistic features.
Background Parathyroid carcinoma (PC) is an uncommon disease that generally is detected postoperatively and traditionally is associated with a poor prognosis. Our purpose was to evaluate treatment ...outcomes, prognostic factors, and usefulness of some proposed staging systems for this disease. Methods A multicenter review of patients with surgically resected PC was performed, led by the Spanish Association of Surgery. All surgical units affiliated with its endocrine surgery section were invited to answer a questionnaire that collected several hospital-related, clinical, biochemical, operative, pathologic, and follow-up data. Their relationships with prognosis were assessed by both univariate and multivariate analysis, as well as the effectiveness of three staging systems for parathyroid carcinoma. Result Of the 6,863 patients undergoing parathyroidectomy, 62 (0.9%) had PC. Of them, 12 (19.3%) died, in 5 cases (8%) because of disease, and 14 (22.6%) suffered recurrence, after a median follow-up of 55 months. The most predictive independent variables on tumor recurrence were intraoperative tumor rupture (hazard ratio HR 6.22; 95% confidence interval CI 1.19–32.36; P = .030); the presence of mitotic figures within tumor parenchyma cells (HR 4.76; 95% CI 1.24–18.21; P = .022); and allocation in class III according to Schulte differentiated staging classification (HR 5.23; 95% CI 1.41–19.31; P = .013). As to disease-specific survival, poor outcomes were associated with intraoperative tumor rupture (HR 58.71; 95% CI 2.39–1,439.96; P = .013) and distant recurrence (HR 38.74; 95% CI 3.44–435.62; P = .003). Conclusion In addition to factors associated with tumor histopathology and stage, prognosis of PC is greatly influenced by surgeon's performance, which emphasizes the importance of preoperative diagnosis.
Herein, we present, for the first time, a 2D-MOF based on copper and 4-hydroxypyrimidine-5-carbonitrile as the linker. Each MOF layer is perfectly flat and neutral, as is the case for graphene. High ...pressure X-ray diffraction measurements reveal that this layered structure can be modulated between 3.01 to 2.78 Å interlayer separation, with an evident piezochromism and varying conductive properties. An analysis of the band structure indicates that this material is conductive along different directions depending on the application of pressure or H doping. These results pave the way for the development of novel layered materials with tunable and efficient properties for pressure-based sensors.
A copper and 4-hydroxypyrimidine-5-carbonitrile based MOF presents a flexible 2D-layered structure in which, as shown by high pressure X-ray diffraction, the interlayer separation is modulated between 3.01 to 2.78 Å with varying conductive properties.
During gestation, essential and non-essential trace elements are transferred from the pregnant females to embryos. This study aimed to determine and compare the concentrations of seven essential ...trace elements (Fe, Zn, Se, Cu, Mn, Cr, Co) and six non-essential trace elements (As, Cd, V, U, Tl, Ag) in the muscle and the liver of a Munk’s pygmy devil ray pregnant female,
Mobula munkiana
, and its embryo. Transfer evidence of essential and non-essential trace elements was detected in
M. munkiana
tissues. Arsenic was found in elevated concentrations in the pregnant female and the embryo tissues. Elevated levels of Cd, V, U, and Ag were found in the pregnant female liver, but were minimal in the embryo tissue. This is the first study to investigate maternal transfer of essential and non-essential trace elements in these species and their reproductive strategy.
Population trends lean towards urban settings. Its rapid expansion has created inequalities and poverty in urban areas around the world. This research is part of a series of recent publications on ...Spanish cities (Barcelona and Madrid). The work attempts to evaluate the current situation of urban socio-environmental vulnerability in Bilbao, a city located in the north of Spain. Three spatial scales have been considered: census tract, neighbourhood and district. The 277 census tracts that make up the municipality are analysed through the Synthetic Indicator of Relative Socio-environmental Vulnerability (RSEVuSI). Subsequently, the census tracts identified as vulnerable by the indicator were analysed in depth through a qualitative methodology. Among the main findings, we highlight the spatial distribution patterns of socio-environmental vulnerability in Bilbao. In general, the least vulnerable areas are located near the centre and the Bilbao estuary, while the most vulnerable are located in the peripheral districts (i.e. Otxarkoaga-Txurdinaga and Rekalde). However, some census tracts that present high vulnerability values are located in a central district (i.e. Ibaiondo). In fact, one of the main challenges to be addressed is the gentrification of this area, as many authors argue. The qualitative evaluation reveal that, in general, there is an acceptable level of maintenance and cleaning of public spaces and urban furniture. However, with respect to the urban landscape, there are significant differences between the census tracts with the highest and lowest RSEVuSI values. It should be done more qualitative research so that planning and renewal actions can be implemented where they are really needed.