Central and peripheral nervous system involvement during acute COVID-19 is well known. Although many patients report some subjective symptoms months after the infection, the exact incidence of ...neurological and cognitive sequelae of COVID-19 remains to be determined. The aim of this study is to investigate if objective neurological or cognitive impairment is detectable four months after SARS-CoV-2 infection, in a group of patients who had mild–moderate COVID-19. A cohort of 120 health care workers previously affected by COVID-19 was examined 4 months after the diagnosis by means of neurological and extensive cognitive evaluation and compared to a group of 30 health care workers who did not have COVID-19 and were similar for age and co morbidities. At 4 month follow-up, 118/120 COVID-19 cases had normal neurological examination, two patients had neurological deficits. COVID-19 patients did not show general cognitive impairment at MMSE. In COVID-19 cases the number of impaired neuropsychological tests was not significantly different from non COVID-19 cases (mean 1.69 and 1 respectively, Mann–Whitney
p
= n.s.), as well as all the mean tests’ scores. Anxiety, stress and depression scores resulted to be significantly higher in COVID-19 than in non COVID-19 cases. The results do not support the presence of neurological deficits or cognitive impairment in this selected population of mild–moderate COVID-19 patients four months after the diagnosis. Severe emotional disorders in patients who had COVID-19 in the past are confirmed.
The term “biobanking” is often misapplied to any collection of human biological materials (biospecimens) regardless of requirements related to ethical and legal issues or the standardization of ...different processes involved in tissue collection. A proper definition of biobanks is large collections of biospecimens linked to relevant personal and health information (health records, family history, lifestyle, genetic information) that are held predominantly for use in health and medical research. In addition, the International Organization for Standardization, in illustrating the requirements for biobanking (ISO 20387:2018), stresses the concept of biobanks being legal entities driving the process of acquisition and storage together with some or all of the activities related to collection, preparation, preservation, testing, analysing and distributing defined biological material as well as related information and data. In this review article, we aim to discuss the basic principles of biobanking, spanning from definitions to classification systems, standardization processes and documents, sustainability and ethical and legal requirements. We also deal with emerging specimens that are currently being generated and shaping the so-called next-generation biobanking, and we provide pragmatic examples of cancer-associated biobanking by discussing the process behind the construction of a biobank and the infrastructures supporting the implementation of biobanking in scientific research.
Human cases of gastric anisakiasis caused by the zoonotic parasite Anisakis pegreffii are increasing in Italy. The disease is caused by ingestion of larval nematodes in lightly cooked or raw seafood. ...Because symptoms are vague and serodiagnosis is difficult, the disease is often misdiagnosed and cases are understimated.
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, it emerged that the risk of severe outcomes was greater in patients with co-morbidities, including cancer. The huge effort undertaken to fight the pandemic, affects ...the management of cancer care, influencing their outcome. Despite the high fatality rate of COVID-19 disease in cancer patients, rare cases of temporary or prolonged clinical remission from cancers after SARS-CoV-2 infection have been reported. We have reviewed sixteen case reports of COVID-19 disease with spontaneous cancer reduction of progression. Fourteen cases of remission following viral infections and two after anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccination. The immune response to COVID-19, may be implicated in both tumor regression, and progression. Specifically, we discuss potential mechanisms which include oncolytic and priming hypotheses, that may have contributed to the cancer regression in these cases and could be useful for future options in cancer treatment.
Function as a service (FaaS) is a serverless cloud execution model offering cost-efficiency, scalability, and simplified development by enabling developers to focus on code and delegate server ...management and application scaling to the serverless platform. Early FaaS implementations provided no control to users over function placement, but raising data locality-bound scenarios motivated new implementations with user-defined constraints over function allocations, e.g., to keep functions accessing a database close to the latter, with the aim of reducing latency, enhancing security, or complying with regulations. In this article, we show how, by leveraging the Allocation Priority Policies language—used for controlling function scheduling—and state-of-the-art planning tools, it is possible to enforce security properties and data-locality constraints, thereby guiding the definition of fine-grained serverless scheduling policies.
Obesity is now recognized as a worldwide health issue and has reached epidemic proportions, affecting both developed and developing countries. The World Obesity Federation stated that "Obesity is a ...chronic relapsing disease process": as a result, obesity has been recognized internationally as a chronic disease. The primary cause of the metabolic syndrome and increase of the cardiovascular risk have been identified in "sick fat", a condition then defined as adiposopathy. Heart attacks, strokes and renal failures are pathologies that have mid-risk factors such as dyslipidemia, hypertension and diabetes, which in turn are caused by obesity, whose primary risk factor is represented by the diet. The aim of the present review is to consider the importance of body composition, together with chronic inflammation and a new gut microbiota data that may turn out to be crucial elements of some target treatment of human obesity.
In this review, we performed research using PubMed database reviewing the evidence in the literature of evidence information regarding the link between obesity and body composition in the development of metabolic disease via inflammation markers and in particular, the new role exerted by gut microbiota.
Several papers were evaluated searching for differences in fat mass and disease risk. We also identified the same papers dealing with differences in body composition and metabolic syndrome. Our attention focuses also on a new frontier of gut microbiota composition in the body weight decrease and anti-inflammatory effects.
To the saving of lean mass, for the prevention of cardiometabolic diseases, also considering the relationship with obesity, it is necessary to reduce the inflammatory state, acting on the gut-microbiota and on the intestinal permeability. To improve the health of the intestinal flora, we propose a 4P medicine and treatment with probiotics, prebiotics, postbiotics, and polyphenols.
Adult Renal Stem/Progenitor Cells (ARPCs) have been recently identified in the human kidney and several studies show their active role in kidney repair processes during acute or chronic injury. ...However, little is known about their immunomodulatory properties and their capacity to regulate specific T cell subpopulations. We co-cultured ARPCs activated by triggering Toll-Like Receptor 2 (TLR2) with human peripheral blood mononuclear cells for 5 days and 15 days and studied their immunomodulatory capacity on T cell subpopulations. We found that activated-ARPCs were able to decrease T cell proliferation but did not affect CD8
and CD4
T cells. Instead, Tregs and CD3
CD4
CD8
double-negative (DN) T cells decreased after 5 days and increased after 15 days of co-culture. In addition, we found that PAI1, MCP1, GM-CSF, and CXCL1 were significantly expressed by TLR2-activated ARPCs alone and were up-regulated in T cells co-cultured with activated ARPCs. The exogenous cocktail of cytokines was able to reproduce the immunomodulatory effects of the co-culture with activated ARPCs. These data showed that ARPCs can regulate immune response by inducing Tregs and DN T cells cell modulation, which are involved in the balance between immune tolerance and autoimmunity.
The association between exposure to air pollution and acute cardiovascular (CV) events is well documented; however, limited data are available evaluating the public health safety of various “doses” ...of particular matter (PM) below currently accepted safety thresholds. We explored the cross-sectional association between PM with aerodynamic diameter <10 μm (PM10) and daily CV hospitalizations in Brescia, Italy, using Poisson regression models adjusted for age, gender, and meteorologic indices. Average daily exposure to PM10 obtained from arithmetic means of air pollution data were captured by 4 selected monitoring stations. PM10 data were expressed as daily means (lag 0-day) or 3-day moving averages (lag 3-day) and categorized according to the European Union daily limit value of 50 μg/m3 . From September 2004 to September 2007, data from 6,000 acute CV admissions to a tertiary referral center were collected. An increase of 1 μg/m3 PM10 at lag 0-day was independently associated with higher rates of acute hospitalizations for composite CV-related events (relative risk RR 1.004, 95% confidence interval CI 1.002 to 1.006), acute heart failure (RR 1.004, 95% CI 1.001 to 1.008), acute coronary syndromes (RR 1.002, 95% CI 0.999 to 1.005), malignant ventricular arrhythmias (RR 1.004, 95% CI 0.999 to 1.010), and atrial fibrillation (RR 1.008, 95% CI 1.003 to 1.012). Similar results were obtained using PM10 lag 3-day data. The excess PM10 CV hospitalization risk (by lag 0-day and lag 3-day) did not vary significantly above and below the 50 μg/m3 safety threshold or by age and gender. In conclusion, increased levels of PM10, even below the current limits set by the European Union, were associated with excess risk for admissions for acute CV events.
Extracellular vesicles (EVs) have been isolated in different body fluids, including urine. The cargo of urinary EVs is composed of nucleic acids and proteins reflecting the physiological and possibly ...pathophysiological state of cells lining the nephron and the urinary tract. Urinary EVs have been confirmed to contain low amounts of various types of RNA that play a role in intercellular communication by transferring genetic information. This communication through EV RNAs includes both continuation of normal physiological processes and conditioning in disease mechanisms. Although proteins included in urinary EVs represent only 3% of the whole-urine proteome, urinary EVs can influence cells in the renal epithelia not only by delivering RNA cargo, but also by delivering a wide range of proteins. Since urine is a readily available biofluid, the discovery of EVs has opened a new field of biomarker research. The potential use of urinary EV RNAs and proteins as diagnostic biomarkers for various kidney and urologic diseases is currently being explored. Here, we review recent studies that deal in identifying biomarker candidates for human kidney and urologic diseases using urinary EVs and might help to understand the pathophysiology.
Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are human carcinogens, based on sufficient evidence for melanoma and limited evidence for non-Hodgkin lymphoma and breast cancer. Few data are available for liver ...cancer, although PCBs cause it in rats and determined liver damage in poisoned people. We investigated the association between PCB serum levels and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) with a case-control study in a PCB-polluted area in North Italy. We enrolled prospectively 102 HCC incident cases and 102 age and gender-matched hospital controls. Serum concentrations of 33 PCB congeners were determined by a gas chromatograph coupled to mass spectrometry. Of 102 HCC cases, 62 who had lost < 3 kg of body weight in past 3 years were included in the analysis (67.7% males, mean age 68 years). The odds ratio (OR) for HCC for 3rd compared to 1st tertile of PCB distribution was 1.76 (95% confidence interval 0.62-5.03) for total PCB, adjusting for socio-demographic variables and risk factors for HCC by logistic regression. For most PCB congeners, ORs > 1.5 or 2 were found, although the 95% CIs included the null value for almost all of them. This preliminary study suggests that PCBs might play a role in HCC development.
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