Fumo, caffè e rischio di Sclerosi Multipla: uno studio caso-controllo

A lot of studies support hypothesis that Multiple Sclerosis (MS) rises from interaction between genetic predisposition and environmental factors, not yet identified. As regards environmental factors, we investigated association between disease and exposure to smoking and coffee, wether in incidence or in progression of disease. We led a study by a case-control scheme 1:1, where comparison was between a MS patient and an healthy subject. MS patients (cases) were recognized among people attended in MS Ambulatory at the Neurosciences Department of University Hospital of Palermo. Healthy subjects (controls) were recognized by an epidemiological survey leaded on territory. Cases and controls were given a structured questionnaire to get up informations about cigarette smoking and coffee consumption. We included in our study 100 cases and 100 controls, matched to cases by sex. Our analyses show that MS patients were more exposed to smoking and to high coffee consumption before disease onset than general population, with a dose-dependent relationship (coffee: OR = 1.91, IC al 95% = 1,08-3,34; smoking: OR 3,27, IC al 95% = 1,82 - 5,89). That is true wether we consider separately these risk factors or we analyse them like associated events (OR = 3,65, IC al 95% 1,87 - 7,11). Instead of we did not found relationships between smoking, coffee and different clinical onset of disease. Using MSSS (Multiple Sclerosis Severity Score), we evaluated MS progression regarding smoking and/or coffee exposure during disease course and we did not notice a significant correlation between a possible worse disease progression and these two environmental factors (coffee: OR = 0,63, CI = 0,27 - 1,47; smoking: OR = 1,17, CI = 0,54 - 2,57). These results support hypothesis that cigarette smoking and high coffee consumption can be associated to an increased MS risk, slightly more if they are at the same time. On the contrary, these two environmental factors are not able to modify neither clinical onset type or disease progression in unfavourable way

Activity and toxicity of oxaliplatin plus raltitrexed in 5-fluorouracil refractory metastatic colorectal adeno-carcinoma

Background: This study evaluated the antitumor efficacy and safety of a novel oxaliplatin/raltitrexed combination in pretreated advanced colorectal cancer patients. Patients and Methods: Forty-five patients with 5-fluorouracil-refractory metastatic colorectal cancer received raltitrexed 3.0 mg/m2 as a 15-minute intravenous (i.v.) infusion, followed 45 min later by l-OHP 130mg/m2 iv as 2-h venous infusion on 1 day every 3 weeks. All patients had histologically proven metastatic colorectal cancer, age 18-75, measurable disease and normal baseline biological values. Most patients (60%) had >2 disease sites. All patients were assessed for safety and also for response according to an intent-to-treat fashion. Results: The overall response rate was 29% (95% CL 16%-44%) including one CR (2%) and 12 PR (27%). Six patients (16%) showed a stabilization of disease for a tumor growth control rate of 45%. The median time to progression was 4 months (range 1-12+) and median overall survival was 9 months (range 1-29+). Conclusion: These data confirm that this oxaliplatin/raltitrexed combination is effective against metastatic colorectal carcinoma, well tolerated with low grade toxicity and easy to administrer. Further evaluation of this regimen seems warranted as an alternative to fluoropyrimidine-based combinations

Bio-logger Ethogram Benchmark: A benchmark for computational analysis of animal behavior, using animal-borne tags

This repository contains the datasets presented in our forthcoming work: B. Hoffman, M. Cusimano, V. Baglione, D. Canestrari, D. Chevallier, D. DeSantis, L. Jeantet, M. Ladds, T. Maekawa, V. Mata-Silva, V. Moreno-González, A. Pagano, E. Trapote, O. Vainio, A. Vehkaoja, K. Yoda, K. Zacarian, A. Friedlaender, and C. Rutz, "A benchmark for computational analysis of animal behavior, using animal-borne tags," 2023. It also contains the experiment results which are reported in the paper. Standardized code to implement, train, and evaluate models can be found at https://github.com/earthspecies/BEBE/. Please note the licenses in each dataset folder. Zip folders beginning with "formatted": These are the datasets we used to run the experiments reported in the benchmark paper. Zip folders beginning with "raw": These are the unprocessed datasets used in BEBE. Code to process these raw datasets into the formatted ones used by BEBE can be found at https://github.com/earthspecies/BEBE-datasets/. Zip folders beginning with "experiments": Results of the cross-validation experiments reported in the paper, as well as hyperparameter optimization. Confusion matrices for all experiments can also be found here