High-performance aromatic polyamides García, José M.; García, Félix C.; Serna, Felipe ...
Progress in polymer science,
05/2010, Letnik:
35, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Wholly aromatic polyamides (aramids) are considered to be high-performance organic materials due to their outstanding thermal and mechanical resistance. Their properties arise from their aromatic ...structure and amide linkages, which result in stiff rod-like macromolecular chains that interact with each other via strong and highly directional hydrogen bonds. These bonds create effective crystalline microdomains, resulting in a high-level intermolecular packing and cohesive energy. The better known commercial aramids, poly(
p-phenylene terephthalamide) and poly(
m-phenylene isophthalamide), are used in advanced technologies and have been transformed into high-strength and flame resistant fibers and coatings, with applications in the aerospace and armament industry, bullet-proof body armor, protective clothing, sport fabrics, electrical insulation, asbestos substitutes, and industrial filters, among others. Owing to their chemical structure, they exhibit extremely high transition temperatures that lie above their decomposition temperatures, are sparingly soluble in common organic solvents and, accordingly, can only be transformed upon solution. Research efforts are therefore underway to take advantage of their properties, enhance their processability and solubility, and incorporate new chemical functionalities in the polyamide backbone or lateral structure, so that their applicability is expanded and remains on the forefront of scientific research.
Aim
To analyse the effect of mindfulness training on levels of burnout among nurses.
Background
Burnout syndrome is a common occupational hazard for nursing staff. Mindfulness training has been ...proposed as a valid intervention for burnout.
Design
Systematic review and meta‐analysis.
Data sources
The CINAHL, LILACS, Medline, ProQuest, PsycINFO, Scielo and Scopus databases were consulted, using the search equation ‘Nurs * AND burnout AND mindfulness’. There was no restriction on the year of publication.
Review methods
Papers were selected for analysis in accordance with the PRISMA guidelines. The meta‐analysis was carried out using Review Manager 5.3 software.
Results
The sample was of 17 articles including 632 nurses. Mindfulness training reduces levels of burnout, producing lower scores for emotional exhaustion and depersonalization and higher for personal accomplishment. The differences in the means were 1.32 (95% CI: −9.41–6.78), 1.91 (95% CI: −4.50–0.68) and 2.12 (95% CI: −9.91–14.14), respectively, between the intervention and control groups.
Conclusion
Mindfulness training reduces the emotional burden and hence levels of burnout, among nurses. However, further randomized clinical trials are required.
目的分析正念训练对护士职业倦怠程度的影响。背景倦怠综合征对护理人员来说是一种常见的职业危害。而正念训练被认为是一种有效的职业倦怠干预措施。设计系统评估与荟萃分析。数据来源通过使用搜索方程‘Nurs*和倦怠与正念’在CINAHL、LILACS、Medline、ProQuest、Psychinfo、Scielo和Scopus数据库中进行检索(不限制文献出版年份)。评估方法根据PRISMA指南选择论文进行分析。使用Review Manager 5.3软件进行荟萃分析。结果共选取17篇文献,包括632名护士。结果显示,正念训练可降低职业倦怠程度,而情绪衰竭和人格解体得分较低,个人成就感得分较高。干预组和对照组之间的平均值差异分别为1.32(95%CI:‐9.41‐6.78)、1.91(95%CI:‐4.50‐0.68)和2.12(95%CI:‐9.91‐14.14)。结论正念训练可减轻护士的情绪负担,从而降低其职业倦怠程度。然而,还需开展进一步的随机临床试验进行验证。
Objective
To determine the prevalence of high levels of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization and low personal accomplishment in nursing professionals in oncology services.
Methods
A ...meta‐analytical study was performed. The search was carried out in March 2017 in Pubmed, CINAHL, Scopus, Scielo, Proquest, CUIDEN, and LILACS databases. Studies using Maslach Burnout Inventory for the assessment of burnout were included.
Results
The total sample of oncology nurses was n = 9959. The total number of included studies was n = 17, with n = 21 samples for the meta‐analysis of emotional exhaustion and n = 18 for depersonalization and low personal accomplishment. The prevalence of emotional exhaustion and of depersonalization was 30% (95% CI = 26%–33%) and 15% (95% CI = 9%–23%), respectively, and that of low personal performance was 35% (95% CI = 27%–43%).
Conclusions
The are many oncology nurses with emotional exhaustion and low levels of personal accomplishment. The presence and the risk of burnout among these staff members are considerable.
Microalgae have been used for centuries to provide nourishment to humans and animals, only very recently they have become much more widely cultured and harvested at large industrial scale. This paper ...reviews the potential health benefits and nutrition provided by microalgae whose benefits are contributing to expand their market. We also point out several key challenges that remain to be addressed in this field.
Aims
Data on the impact of COVID‐19 in chronic heart failure (CHF) patients and its potential to trigger acute heart failure (AHF) are lacking. The aim of this work was to study characteristics, ...cardiovascular outcomes and mortality in patients with confirmed COVID‐19 infection and a prior diagnosis of heart failure (HF). Further aims included the identification of predictors and prognostic implications for AHF decompensation during hospital admission and the determination of a potential correlation between the withdrawal of HF guideline‐directed medical therapy (GDMT) and worse outcomes during hospitalization.
Methods and results
Data for a total of 3080 consecutive patients with confirmed COVID‐19 infection and follow‐up of at least 30 days were analysed. Patients with a previous history of CHF (n = 152, 4.9%) were more prone to the development of AHF (11.2% vs. 2.1%; P < 0.001) and had higher levels of N‐terminal pro brain natriuretic peptide. In addition, patients with previous CHF had higher mortality rates (48.7% vs. 19.0%; P < 0.001). In contrast, 77 patients (2.5%) were diagnosed with AHF, which in the vast majority of cases (77.9%) developed in patients without a history of HF. Arrhythmias during hospital admission and CHF were the main predictors of AHF. Patients developing AHF had significantly higher mortality (46.8% vs. 19.7%; P < 0.001). Finally, the withdrawal of beta‐blockers, mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists and angiotensin‐converting enzyme inhibitors or angiotensin receptor blockers was associated with a significant increase in in‐hospital mortality.
Conclusions
Patients with COVID‐19 have a significant incidence of AHF, which is associated with very high mortality rates. Moreover, patients with a history of CHF are prone to developing acute decompensation after a COVID‐19 diagnosis. The withdrawal of GDMT was associated with higher mortality.
Heart failure in COVID‐19 patients: prevalence, incidence and prognostic implications.
New Insights on Steroid Biotechnology Fernández-Cabezón, Lorena; Galán, Beatriz; García, José L
Frontiers in microbiology,
05/2018, Letnik:
9
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Nowadays steroid manufacturing occupies a prominent place in the pharmaceutical industry with an annual global market over $10 billion. The synthesis of steroidal active pharmaceutical ingredients ...(APIs) such as sex hormones (estrogens, androgens, and progestogens) and corticosteroids is currently performed by a combination of microbiological and chemical processes. Several mycobacterial strains capable of naturally metabolizing sterols (e.g., cholesterol, phytosterols) are used as biocatalysts to transform phytosterols into steroidal intermediates (synthons), which are subsequently used as key precursors to produce steroidal APIs in chemical processes. These synthons can also be modified by other microbial strains capable of introducing regio- and/or stereospecific modifications (functionalization) into steroidal molecules. Most of the industrial microbial strains currently available have been improved through traditional technologies based on physicochemical mutagenesis and selection processes. Surprisingly, Synthetic Biology and Systems Biology approaches have hardly been applied for this purpose. This review attempts to highlight the most relevant research on Steroid Biotechnology carried out in last decades, focusing specially on those works based on recombinant DNA technologies, as well as outlining trends and future perspectives. In addition, the need to construct new microbial cell factories (MCF) to design more robust and bio-sustainable bioprocesses with the ultimate aim of producing steroids à
is discussed.
Severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), the most severe form of T-cell immunodeficiency, can be screened at birth by quantifying T-cell receptor excision circles (TRECs) in dried blood spot (DBS) ...samples. Early detection of this condition speeds up the establishment of appropriate treatment and increases the patient's life expectancy. Newborn screening for SCID started in January 2017 in Catalonia, the first Spanish and European region to universally include this testing. The results obtained in the first 2 years of experience are evaluated here. All babies born between January 2017 and December 2018 were screened. TREC quantification in DBS (1.5 mm diameter) was performed with the Enlite Neonatal TREC kit from PerkinElmer (Turku, Finland). In 2018, the retest cutoff in the detection algorithm was updated based on the experience gained in the first year, and changed from 34 to 24 copies/μL. This decreased the retest rate from 3.34 to 1.4% (global retest rate, 2.4%), with a requested second sample rate of 0.23% and a positive detection rate of 0.02%. Lymphocyte phenotype (T, B, NK populations), expression of CD45RA/RO isoforms, percentage and intensity of TCR αβ and TCR γδ, presence of HLA-DR+ T lymphocytes, and
lymphocyte proliferation were studied in all patients by flow cytometry. Of 130,903 newborns screened, 30 tested positive, 15 of which were male. During the study period, one patient was diagnosed with SCID: incidence, 1 in 130,903 births in Catalonia. Thirteen patients had clinically significant T-cell lymphopenia (non-SCID) with an incidence of 1 in 10,069 newborns (43% of positive detections). Nine patients were considered false-positive cases because of an initially normal lymphocyte count with normalization of TRECs between 3 and 6 months of life, four infants had transient lymphopenia due to an initially low lymphocyte count with recovery in the following months, and three patients are still under study. The results obtained provide further evidence of the benefits of including this disease in newborn screening programs. Longer follow-up is needed to define the exact incidence of SCID in Catalonia.
Background Small-cell lung cancer (SCLC) is an aggressive disease with high metastatic potential and poor prognosis. Due to its low prevalence, epidemiological and clinical information of SCLC ...patients retrieved from lung cancer registries is scarce. Patients and methods This was an observational multicenter study that enrolled patients with lung cancer and thoracic tumors, recruited from August 2016 to January 2020 at 50 Spanish hospitals. Demographic and clinical data, treatment patterns and survival of SCLC patients included in the Thoracic Tumor Registry (TTR) were analyzed. Results With a total of 956 cases, the age of 64.7 ± 9.1 years, 78.6% were men, 60.6% smokers, and ECOG PS 0, 1 or greater than or equal to 2 in 23.1%, 53.0% and 23.8% of cases, respectively. Twenty percent of patients had brain metastases at the diagnosis. First-line chemotherapy (CT), mainly carboplatin or cisplatin plus etoposide was administered to >90% of patients. In total, 36.0% and 13.8% of patients received a second and third line of CT, respectively. Median overall survival was 9.5 months (95% CI 8.8-10.2 months), with an estimated rate of 70.3% (95% CI 67.2-73.4%), 38.9% (95% CI 35.4-42.4%), and 14.8% (95% CI 11.8-17.8%) at 6, 12 and 24 months respectively. Median progression-free survival was 6.3 months. Higher mortality and progression rates were significantly associated with male sex, older age, smoking habit, and ECOG PS 1-2. Long-term survival (> 2 years) was confirmed in 6.6% of patients, showing a positive correlation with better ECOG PS, poor smoking and absence of certain metastases at diagnosis. Conclusion This study provides an updated overview of the clinical situation and treatment landscape of ES-SCLC in Spain. Our results might assist oncologists to improve current clinical practice towards a better prognosis for these patients.
Real-time gun detection in CCTV: An open problem Salazar González, Jose L.; Zaccaro, Carlos; Álvarez-García, Juan A. ...
Neural networks,
December 2020, 2020-Dec, 2020-12-00, 20201201, Letnik:
132
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Object detectors have improved in recent years, obtaining better results and faster inference time. However, small object detection is still a problem that has not yet a definitive solution. The ...autonomous weapons detection on Closed-circuit television (CCTV) has been studied recently, being extremely useful in the field of security, counter-terrorism, and risk mitigation. This article presents a new dataset obtained from a real CCTV installed in a university and the generation of synthetic images, to which Faster R-CNN was applied using Feature Pyramid Network with ResNet-50 resulting in a weapon detection model able to be used in quasi real-time CCTV (90 ms of inference time with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX-1080Ti card) improving the state of the art on weapon detection in a two stages training. In this work, an exhaustive experimental study of the detector with these datasets was performed, showing the impact of synthetic datasets on the training of weapons detection systems, as well as the main limitations that these systems present nowadays. The generated synthetic dataset and the real CCTV dataset are available to the whole research community.
Alterations of balance are a growing public health problem as they affect one in three adults over the age of 65, and one in two over the age of 80. Identifying the factors that affect postural ...stability is essential in designing specific interventions to maintain the independence and mobility of older people. The aim of this review was to understand the use of accelerometers in order to assess the balance in older people. Analyzing the most appropriate evaluation methodology and protocolizing it will optimize the processes of early identification of balance alterations. However, quantitative assessment methods of balance are usually limited to a laboratory environment, a factor that can be overcome by accelerometers. A systematic search was carried out across eight databases where accelerometers were employed to assess balance in older people. Articles were excluded if they focused on sensor design and did not measure balance or apply the technology on targeted participants. A total of 19 articles were included for full-text analysis, where participants took part in the balance evaluation monitored by accelerometers. The analysis of spatio-temporal parameters and the magnitude of the accelerations recorded by the devices were the most common study variables. Accelerometer usage has potential to positively influence interventions based on physical exercise to improve balance and prevent falls in older people.
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