Hypertension's daily living: changes, restrictions and reactions.

Objetivou-se descrever o cotidiano da vida de hipertensos após o conhecimento do diagnóstico da hipertensão arterial (HA); e, identificar possíveis mudanças na dinâmica da vida de hipertensos após o início do tratamento da HA. Utilizou-se o método descritivo com abordagem qualitativa e a análise de discurso dos depoimentos de seis hipertensos. Evidenciaram-se diferentes comportamentos/reações dos doentes em relação aos seus cotidianos após a descoberta da HA, nem sempre coincidentes no tempo, com o início do tratamento anti-hipertensivo. Essas diferenças parecem estar associadas à compreensão dos doentes sobre o significado da HA e ao impacto desta nas suas vidas. Em síntese, conviver com a cronicidade da HA significa, ao longo do tempo, fazer/sofrer mudanças no cotidiano da vida.Aiming to describe daily living of hypertensive people after Arterial Hypertension (AH) diagnoses and to identify changes in their lives. The method of inquiry used was descritive and qualitative using discursive method to figure out theme factors. The results showed different behaviors/reactions of being sick according to their daily living after discovering AH, that not always happened at the same time that the antihypertensive treatment began. Those differences seems to be associated with individual understanding of sickness itself and of impact in their lives. So, getting along with hypertension is to learn about the sickness and symptoms and also make the necessaries changes

Dynamical Boson Stars

The idea of stable, localized bundles of energy has strong appeal as a model for particles. In the 1950s John Wheeler envisioned such bundles as smooth configurations of electromagnetic energy that he called {\em geons}, but none were found. Instead, particle-like solutions were found in the late 1960s with the addition of a scalar field, and these were given the name {\em boson stars}. Since then, boson stars find use in a wide variety of models as sources of dark matter, as black hole mimickers, in simple models of binary systems, and as a tool in finding black holes in higher dimensions with only a single killing vector. We discuss important varieties of boson stars, their dynamic properties, and some of their uses, concentrating on recent efforts.Comment: 79 pages, 25 figures, invited review for Living Reviews in Relativity; major revision in 201

Stationary Black Holes: Uniqueness and Beyond

The spectrum of known black-hole solutions to the stationary Einstein equations has been steadily increasing, sometimes in unexpected ways. In particular, it has turned out that not all black-hole-equilibrium configurations are characterized by their mass, angular momentum and global charges. Moreover, the high degree of symmetry displayed by vacuum and electro-vacuum black-hole spacetimes ceases to exist in self-gravitating non-linear field theories. This text aims to review some developments in the subject and to discuss them in light of the uniqueness theorem for the Einstein-Maxwell system.Comment: Major update of the original version by Markus Heusler from 1998. Piotr T. Chru\'sciel and Jo\~ao Lopes Costa succeeded to this review's authorship. Significantly restructured and updated all sections; changes are too numerous to be usefully described here. The number of references increased from 186 to 32

Mechanism of IL-12 mediated alterations in tumour blood vessel morphology: analysis using whole-tissue mounts

Angiogenesis is a multistep process that is limited and carefully regulated in normal adult tissue, but in tumours this regulation is disrupted and the process remains ‘switched on’ (Hanahan and Folkman, 1996). Ample experimental data support the fact that tumour growth requires access to blood vessels and subsequent expansion of host vessels to provide nutrients for the growing tumour mass (Folkman, 1995a). Furthermore, many studies in a variety of tumour types have reported a correlation between the extent of tumour vasculature and poor prognosis or increased metastases (Weidner et al, 1991; Folkman, 1995b; Weidner and Folkman, 1996). Thus, accurate assessment of the vasculature of tumours could provide valuable information regarding treatment outcomes and the likelihood of metastatic spread to other sites. Angiogenesis can be regulated by a variety of factors. Several cytokines produced by immune cells also have been shown to affect the process of angiogenesis. One of the most noteworthy is interleukin (IL)-12, which is produced by antigen presenting cells (APC), such as macrophages and dendritic cells (DC) in response to bacterial stimuli or other inflammatory cytokines. Thus, IL-12 plays an important role in both the innate and adaptive immune responses (Trinchieri, 1998). Owing to its central role in stimulating immunity, it has been examined for possible therapeutic effects in the treatment of tumours. In addition to its effects on the immune system, IL-12 has also been shown to inhibit angiogenesis (Voest et al, 1995; Sgadari et al, 1996). Despite studies in both experimental models and in patients (reviewed in Trinchieri and Scott, 1999), and clear demonstrations of therapeutic efficacy, relatively little is known about how it alters vessel formation within tumours. In part, this is due to the difficulty in assessing the three-dimensional structure of vessels and other cellular components within the tumour. Assessment of tumour vessels is generally based on immunohistochemistry of tumour sections. Although use of this technique has led to a great deal of important information, these procedures are extremely time consuming and provide only a limited two-dimensional view of the vessels. This makes it very difficult to visualise the structure of the microvasculature and identify differences among different tumour types or changes following treatment regimens. To more easily and accurately visualise vessels within tumours, we developed a whole-tissue mount technique that provides a three-dimensional view of the tumour vasculature relative to other components of the tumour tissue. This technique was first validated by studying vessels from transgenic mice that express green fluorescent protein (GFP) (Wu et al, 2000), and then used to investigate the mechanism by which IL-12 influences the vessel architecture within B16 tumours

Mapping enzyme-substrate interactions: its potential to study the mechanism of enzymes

With the increase of the need to use more sustainable processes for the industry in our society, the modeling of enzymes has become crucial to fully comprehend their mechanism of action and use this knowledge to enhance and design their properties. A lot of methods to study enzymes computationally exist and they have been classified on sequence-based, structure-based, and the more new artificial intelligence-based ones. Albeit the abundance of methods to help predict the function of an enzyme, molecular modeling is crucial when trying to understand the enzyme mechanism, as they aim to correlate atomistic information with experimental data. Among them, methods that simulate the system dynamics at a molecular mechanics level of theory (classical force fields) have shown to offer a comprehensive study. In this book chapter, we will analyze these techniques, emphasizing the importance of precise modeling of enzyme-substrate interactions. In the end, a brief explanation of the transference of the information from research studies to the industry is given accompanied with two examples of family enzymes where their modeling has helped their exploitation.Peer ReviewedObjectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::9 - Indústria, Innovació i InfraestructuraPostprint (author's final draft

Exploring new physics frontiers through numerical relativity

The demand to obtain answers to highly complex problems within strong-field gravity has been met with significant progress in the numerical solution of Einstein's equations - along with some spectacular results - in various setups. We review techniques for solving Einstein's equations in generic spacetimes, focusing on fully nonlinear evolutions but also on how to benchmark those results with perturbative approaches. The results address problems in high-energy physics, holography, mathematical physics, fundamental physics, astrophysics and cosmology