This clinical quandary details a Mexican man, aged 77 years, who presented to the oncology clinic with a sternal mass. Based on the results, the patient fulfilled the 2016 American College of ...Rheumatology/European League Against Rheumatism classification criteria for Sjögren syndrome, thus the diagnosis triggered by immune checkpoint inhibitors was definitively established.
Purpose
Infertility is a major problem affecting children, adolescents, and young adults (AYAs) with cancer, either due to the disease itself or because of oncologic treatment. Oncofertility (OF) ...focuses on counseling cancer patients about fertility risks and preservation options. However, OF and fertility preservation (FP) conversations on Twitter and their impact are unknown. We aim to characterize the users and type of content of these conversations.
Materials and Methods
This observational study analyzed tweets with the hashtags “#Oncofertility” and “#FertilityPreservation” over eight months. We classified Twitter accounts by user type and country. Tweets were categorized by content type, and retweets and likes were quantified. Descriptive statistics were used for analysis.
Results
A total of 399 tweets from 223 different accounts were evaluated. Twitter accounts comprised 22 countries and stemmed from high, upper-middle, and lower-middle-income countries in 86.5%, 5.4%, and 6.3%, respectively; no accounts from low-income countries were found. Accounts were mostly from physicians (37%) and healthcare centers (20%); we did not find any patient accounts. The most common content category was informative tweets directed to patients (30.8%), followed by discussion/sharing of medical papers (25.6%). Only 14.5% of tweets contained information about children and adolescents. Still, only 4.5% were aimed at children. Retweets were absent in 16.5% of the tweets, and 80.7% did not have comments.
Conclusion
OF and FP discussions on Twitter were limited to interactions among medical professionals. Also, advocacy groups showed limited activity on social media. Even though a significant proportion of tweets directed to patients were found, no active involvement of patients was observed. Finally, limited number of tweets (4.5%) were directed to children and adolescents. There is a need to raise awareness about the effects of cancer on fertility in this group. Currently, Twitter is not a resource of information for children and AYAs with cancer who need OF counseling and fertility preservation. Our results open a debate on how to promote the use of social media in the future to improve the quality of OF information available, awareness, and care since there is an unmet need for fertility preservation access in young cancer patients.
Introduction
The survival of patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC) has improved dramatically due to novel systemic treatments. However, mRCC mortality continues to rise in Latin ...America.
Methods
A retrospective, multicenter study of patients diagnosed with mRCC between 2010-2018 in Mexico City was conducted. The aim of the study was to evaluate the impact of healthcare insurance on access to treatment and survival in patients with mRCC.
Results
Among 924 patients, 55.4%, 42.6%, and 1.9% had no insurance (NI), social security, (SS) and private insurance (PI), respectively.
De novo
metastatic disease was more common in NI patients (70.9%) compared to SS (47.2%) and PI (55.6%) patients (p<0.001). According to IMDC Prognostic Index, 20.2% were classified as favorable, 49% as intermediate, and 30.8% as poor-risk disease. Access to systemic treatment differed by healthcare insurance: 36.1%, 99.5%, and 100% for the NI, SS, and PI patients, respectively (p<0.001). NI patients received fewer lines of treatment, with 24.8% receiving only one line of treatment (p<0.001). Median overall survival (OS) was 13.9 months for NI, 98.9 months for SS, and 147.6 months for NI patients (p<0.001). In multivariate analysis, NI status, brain metastases, sarcomatoid features, bone metastases, no treatment were significantly associated with worse OS.
Conclusion
OS in mRCC was affected by insurance availability in this resource-limited cohort of Mexican patients. These results underscore the need for effective strategies to achieve equitable healthcare access in an era of effective, yet costly systemic treatments.
Green synthesis (GS), referred to the synthesis using bioactive agents such as plant materials, microorganisms, and various biowastes, prioritizing environmental sustainability, has become ...increasingly relevant in international scientific practice. The availability of plant resources expands the scope of new exploration opportunities, including the evaluation of new sources of organic extracts, for instance, to the best of our knowledge, no scientific articles have reported the synthesis of zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO NPs) from organic extracts of
T. recurvata
, a parasitic plant very common in semiarid regions of Mexico.
This paper presents a greener and more efficient method for synthesizing ZnO NPs using
T. recurvata
extract as a reducing agent. The nanoparticles were examined by different techniques such as UV–vis spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and BET surface analysis. The photocatalytic and adsorptive effect of ZnO NPs was investigated against methylene blue (MB) dye in aqueous media under sunlight irradiation considering an equilibrium time under dark conditions. ZnO nanoparticles were highly effective in removing MB under sunlight irradiation conditions, showing low toxicity towards human epithelial cells, making them promising candidates for a variety of applications. This attribute fosters the use of green synthesis techniques for addressing environmental issues.
This study also includes the estimation of the supported electric field distributions of ZnO NPs in their individual spherical or rounded shapes and their randomly oriented organization, considering different diameters, by simulating their behavior in the visible wavelength range, observing resonant enhancements due to the strong light-matter interaction around the ZnO NPs boundaries.
Several studies indicate that bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates may have a role in the development of metabolic diseases using different molecular pathways, including epigenetic regulatory mechanisms. ...However, it is unclear whether exposure to these chemicals modifies serum levels of miRNAs associated with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) risk. In the present study, we evaluated the serum levels of miRNAs associated with GDM (miR-9-5p, miR-16-5p, miR-29a-3p and miR-330-3p) and urinary levels of phthalate metabolites (mono-n-butyl phthalate (MBP), mono-isobutyl phthalate (MiBP), mono-benzyl phthalate (MBzP) and mono(2-ethyl hexyl) phthalate (MEHP)) and bisphenol A in GDM patients and women without GDM during the second trimester of gestation. We observed higher levels of miR-9-5p, miR-29a-3p and miR-330-3p in sera of patients with GDM compared to non-diabetic subjects. Phthalates were detected in 97-100% of urine samples, while BPA only in 40%. Urinary MEHP and BPA concentrations were remarkably higher in both study groups compared to previously reported data. Unadjusted MEHP levels and adjusted BPA levels were higher in non-diabetics than in GDM patients (
= 0.03,
= 0.02). We found positive correlations between adjusted urinary MBzP levels and miR-16-5p expression levels (
< 0.05), adjusted MEHP concentrations and miR-29a-3p expression levels (
< 0.05). We also found negative correlations between unadjusted and adjusted MBP concentrations and miR-29a-3p expression levels (
< 0.0001,
< 0.05), unadjusted MiBP concentrations and miR-29a-3p expression levels (
< 0.01). Urinary MEHP levels reflect a striking exposure to di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) in pregnant Mexican women. This study highlights the need for a regulatory strategy in the manufacture of several items containing endocrine disruptors in order to avoid involuntary ingestion of these compounds in the Mexican population.
Health workers cohort study: methods and study design Denova-Gutiérrez, Edgar; Flores, Yvonne N; Gallegos-Carrillo, Katia ...
Salud pública de México/Salud pública de México,
11/2016, Letnik:
58, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
To examine different health outcomes that are associated with specific lifestyle and genetic factors.
From March 2004 to April 2006, a sample of employees from three different health and academic ...institutions, as well as their family members, were enrolled in the study after providing informed consent. At baseline and follow-up (2010-2013), participants completed a self-administered questionnaire, a physical examination, and provided blood samples.
A total of 10 729 participants aged 6 to 94 years were recruited at baseline. Of these, 70% were females, and 50% were from the Mexican Social Security Institute. Nearly 42% of the adults in the sample were overweight, while 20% were obese.
Our study can offer new insights into disease mechanisms and prevention through the analysis of risk factor information in a large sample of Mexicans.
Diagnosis of colorectal cancer in patients under 45 years old should alert us to possible hereditary forms of this neoplasia. Most cases of hereditary colorectal cancer correspond to Lynch syndrome ...which is caused by mutations in DNA mismatch repair genes, particularly
and
. The dysfunction is associated with microsatellite instability which occurs in 95% cases of this syndrome and in 15% of sporadic colorectal cancer. In sporadic colon tumors, downregulation of
is observed in cases with the
V600E variant, which induces hypermetylation of the
promoter. Mutation screening for hereditary cancer has impacted the diagnosis, genetic counseling, and early tumor detection in families affected by hereditary colorectal cancer syndromes but mutation screening technologies are seldom available in public health care centers in developing countries. This study aimed to describe immunohistochemistry and microsatellite instability abnormalities in tumor samples archived in a public hospital in Mexico. Paraffin-embedded samples of patients with colorectal cancer, diagnosed at under 50 years old, were studied to analyze correlations among clinical variables, MLH1 and MSH2 protein expression (immunohistochemistry), microsatellite instability (fluorescent PCR-based assay), and
V600E variant (real time PCR). Forty-seven tumor specimens from patients with TNM stage II and above were analyzed. Tumors were mainly located in the proximal colon segment and displayed histologic intestinal variety and infiltration to serosa. Twenty samples showed decreased expression of mismatch repair proteins and 10 of these presented microsatellite instability (7 high and 3 low instability patterns, respectively). There were no instances of
V600E mutation found. Altered
or
expression was found in 42.5% of the samples and microsatellite instability was observed in 21.3% of the tumors. These results suggested that about a fifth of the patients were candidates for family assessment and genetic counseling.
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