Language laterality, handedness and empathy in a sample of parents of children with autism spectrum disorder

Lateralidad del lenguaje, preferencia manual y empatía en una muestra de padres de niños con trastorno de espectro autista. Antecedentes: algunos familiares de primer orden de personas con trastornos del espectro autista (TEA) exhiben un patrón de funcionamiento cognitivo que forma parte del llamado fenotipo ampliado de autismo (FAA). Método: el objetivo de este estudio consiste en evaluar si algunos aspectos neuropsicológicos relacionados con un FAA están presentes en progenitores de niños y niñas con TEA. Para ello, se realizó una prueba de escucha dicótica libre, se detectó la preferencia manual y se obtuvo el Cociente de Empatía (CE-60). Resultados: los resultados sitúan a la muestra total dentro de parámetros similares a los de la población general, aunque algunos datos de la escucha dicótica revelaron diferencias según el género. Contrariamente a lo esperado, en el subgrupo de padres los datos de ambos oídos no correlacionaron signifi cativamente, lo que revelaría falta de interdependencia hemisférica. Conclusiones: nuestros resultados apoyan la posible existencia de cierta vulnerabilidad genética a un patrón anómalo de lateralización hemisférica del lenguaje. Por tanto, factores epigenéticos por determinar podrían estar incidiendo sobre un genotipo vulnerable en las personas con TEA. No obstante, la presente investigación ha de considerarse un estudio piloto debido al tamaño de la muestra

Spatiotemporal Characteristics of the Largest HIV-1 CRF02_AG Outbreak in Spain: Evidence for Onward Transmissions

Background and Aim: The circulating recombinant form 02_AG (CRF02_AG) is the predominant clade among the human immunodeficiency virus type-1 (HIV-1) non-Bs with a prevalence of 5.97% (95% Confidence Interval-CI: 5.41–6.57%) across Spain. Our aim was to estimate the levels of regional clustering for CRF02_AG and the spatiotemporal characteristics of the largest CRF02_AG subepidemic in Spain.Methods: We studied 396 CRF02_AG sequences obtained from HIV-1 diagnosed patients during 2000–2014 from 10 autonomous communities of Spain. Phylogenetic analysis was performed on the 391 CRF02_AG sequences along with all globally sampled CRF02_AG sequences (N = 3,302) as references. Phylodynamic and phylogeographic analysis was performed to the largest CRF02_AG monophyletic cluster by a Bayesian method in BEAST v1.8.0 and by reconstructing ancestral states using the criterion of parsimony in Mesquite v3.4, respectively.Results: The HIV-1 CRF02_AG prevalence differed across Spanish autonomous communities we sampled from (p < 0.001). Phylogenetic analysis revealed that 52.7% of the CRF02_AG sequences formed 56 monophyletic clusters, with a range of 2–79 sequences. The CRF02_AG regional dispersal differed across Spain (p = 0.003), as suggested by monophyletic clustering. For the largest monophyletic cluster (subepidemic) (N = 79), 49.4% of the clustered sequences originated from Madrid, while most sequences (51.9%) had been obtained from men having sex with men (MSM). Molecular clock analysis suggested that the origin (tMRCA) of the CRF02_AG subepidemic was in 2002 (median estimate; 95% Highest Posterior Density-HPD interval: 1999–2004). Additionally, we found significant clustering within the CRF02_AG subepidemic according to the ethnic origin.Conclusion: CRF02_AG has been introduced as a result of multiple introductions in Spain, following regional dispersal in several cases. We showed that CRF02_AG transmissions were mostly due to regional dispersal in Spain. The hot-spot for the largest CRF02_AG regional subepidemic in Spain was in Madrid associated with MSM transmission risk group. The existence of subepidemics suggest that several spillovers occurred from Madrid to other areas. CRF02_AG sequences from Hispanics were clustered in a separate subclade suggesting no linkage between the local and Hispanic subepidemics

Language laterality, handedness and empathy in a sample of parents of children with autism spectrum disorder

Lateralidad del lenguaje, preferencia manual y empatía en una muestra de padres de niños con trastorno de espectro autista. Antecedentes: algunos familiares de primer orden de personas con trastornos del espectro autista (TEA) exhiben un patrón de funcionamiento cognitivo que forma parte del llamado fenotipo ampliado de autismo (FAA). Método: el objetivo de este estudio consiste en evaluar si algunos aspectos neuropsicológicos relacionados con un FAA están presentes en progenitores de niños y niñas con TEA. Para ello, se realizó una prueba de escucha dicótica libre, se detectó la preferencia manual y se obtuvo el Cociente de Empatía (CE-60). Resultados: los resultados sitúan a la muestra total dentro de parámetros similares a los de la población general, aunque algunos datos de la escucha dicótica revelaron diferencias según el género. Contrariamente a lo esperado, en el subgrupo de padres los datos de ambos oídos no correlacionaron signifi cativamente, lo que revelaría falta de interdependencia hemisférica. Conclusiones: nuestros resultados apoyan la posible existencia de cierta vulnerabilidad genética a un patrón anómalo de lateralización hemisférica del lenguaje. Por tanto, factores epigenéticos por determinar podrían estar incidiendo sobre un genotipo vulnerable en las personas con TEA. No obstante, la presente investigación ha de considerarse un estudio piloto debido al tamaño de la muestra

Discovering HIV related information by means of association rules and machine learning

Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is still one of the main health problems worldwide. It is therefore essential to keep making progress in improving the prognosis and quality of life of affected patients. One way to advance along this pathway is to uncover connections between other disorders associated with HIV/AIDS-so that they can be anticipated and possibly mitigated. We propose to achieve this by using Association Rules (ARs). They allow us to represent the dependencies between a number of diseases and other specific diseases. However, classical techniques systematically generate every AR meeting some minimal conditions on data frequency, hence generating a vast amount of uninteresting ARs, which need to be filtered out. The lack of manually annotated ARs has favored unsupervised filtering, even though they produce limited results. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised system, able to identify relevant ARs among HIV-related diseases with a minimal amount of annotated training data. Our system has been able to extract a good number of relationships between HIV-related diseases that have been previously detected in the literature but are scattered and are often little known. Furthermore, a number of plausible new relationships have shown up which deserve further investigation by qualified medical experts

COVID-19 in hospitalized HIV-positive and HIV-negative patients : A matched study

CatedresObjectives: We compared the characteristics and clinical outcomes of hospitalized individuals with COVID-19 with [people with HIV (PWH)] and without (non-PWH) HIV co-infection in Spain during the first wave of the pandemic. Methods: This was a retrospective matched cohort study. People with HIV were identified by reviewing clinical records and laboratory registries of 10 922 patients in active-follow-up within the Spanish HIV Research Network (CoRIS) up to 30 June 2020. Each hospitalized PWH was matched with five non-PWH of the same age and sex randomly selected from COVID-19@Spain, a multicentre cohort of 4035 patients hospitalized with confirmed COVID-19. The main outcome was all-cause in-hospital mortality. Results: Forty-five PWH with PCR-confirmed COVID-19 were identified in CoRIS, 21 of whom were hospitalized. A total of 105 age/sex-matched controls were selected from the COVID-19@Spain cohort. The median age in both groups was 53 (Q1-Q3, 46-56) years, and 90.5% were men. In PWH, 19.1% were injecting drug users, 95.2% were on antiretroviral therapy, 94.4% had HIV-RNA < 50 copies/mL, and the median (Q1-Q3) CD4 count was 595 (349-798) cells/μL. No statistically significant differences were found between PWH and non-PWH in number of comorbidities, presenting signs and symptoms, laboratory parameters, radiology findings and severity scores on admission. Corticosteroids were administered to 33.3% and 27.4% of PWH and non-PWH, respectively (P = 0.580). Deaths during admission were documented in two (9.5%) PWH and 12 (11.4%) non-PWH (P = 0.800). Conclusions: Our findings suggest that well-controlled HIV infection does not modify the clinical presentation or worsen clinical outcomes of COVID-19 hospitalization