Development of technologies to support the diagnosis of infectious diseases and cancer to support the primary health care

54/2017). Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s).Purpose: Primary Health Care (PHC) is the coordinator of health care in Brazil and needs to be strengthened in the diagnostic field to increase health care quality. Aiming to improve the diagnostic tools currently available in PHC, this work describes the process of development and validation of two point-of-care biomedical devices for screening patients with syphilis or different kinds of cancer. Methods: The development of these devices followed nine stages of action based on the requirements established by the Ministry of Health. During development, both systems followed the stages of circuit planning, software simulation to verify the components used, cost assessment for the acquisition of features, simulation in contact matrix, development of the embedded system, and planning of the printed circuit board and storage box. Results: Both devices underwent preliminary functionality tests to assess their quality. The performance tests applied on the device to diagnose syphilis performed 8,733,194 requests, with a flow of 2426 requests/second, reaching the desired parameters of robustness, integrity, durability, and stability. In addition, functioning tests on the cancer-screening device indicated the ability to detect standard fluorescence in a minimal (150 uL) sample volume. Conclusions: Together, the methodology used for developing the devices resulted in promising equipment to improve the diagnosis and meet the requirements for executing technologies for testing and triaging patients in PHC.publishersversionpublishe

Protective Effect of Galectin-1 during Histoplasma capsulatum Infection Is Associated with Prostaglandin E2 and Nitric Oxide Modulation

Histoplasma capsulatum is a dimorphic fungus that develops a yeast-like morphology in host's tissue, responsible for the pulmonary disease histoplasmosis. The recent increase in the incidence of histoplasmosis in immunocompromised patients highlights the need of understanding immunological controls of fungal infections. Here, we describe our discovery of the role of endogenous galectin-1 (Gal-1) in the immune pathophysiology of experimental histoplasmosis. All infected wild-type (WT) mice survived while only 1/3 of Lgals1−/− mice genetically deficient in Gal-1 survived 30 days after infection. Although infected Lgals1−/− mice had increased proinflammatory cytokines, nitric oxide (NO), and elevations in neutrophil pulmonary infiltration, they presented higher fungal load in lungs and spleen. Infected lung and infected macrophages from Lgals1−/− mice exhibited elevated levels of prostaglandin E2 (PGE2, a prostanoid regulator of macrophage activation) and prostaglandin E synthase 2 (Ptgs2) mRNA. Gal-1 did not bind to cell surface of yeast phase of H. capsulatum, in vitro, suggesting that Gal-1 contributed to phagocytes response to infection rather than directly killing the yeast. The data provides the first demonstration of endogenous Gal-1 in the protective immune response against H. capsulatum associated with NO and PGE2 as an important lipid mediator in the pathogenesis of histoplasmosis

The Text Mining Technique Applied to the Analysis of Health Interventions to Combat Congenital Syphilis in Brazil: The Case of the "Syphilis No!" Project

Congenital syphilis (CS) remains a threat to public health worldwide, especially in developing countries. To mitigate the impacts of the CS epidemic, the Brazilian government has developed a national intervention project called "Syphilis No." Thus, among its range of actions is the production of thousands of writings featuring the experiences of research and intervention supporters (RIS) of the project, called field researchers. In addition, this large volume of base data was subjected to analysis through data mining, which may contribute to better strategies for combating syphilis. Natural language processing is a form of knowledge extraction. First, the database extracted from the "LUES Platform" with 4,874 documents between 2018 and 2020 was employed. This was followed by text preprocessing, selecting texts referring to the field researchers' reports for analysis. Finally, for analyzing the documents, N-grams extraction (N = 2,3,4) was performed. The combination of the TF-IDF metric with the BoW algorithm was applied to assess terms' importance and frequency and text clustering. In total, 1019 field activity reports were mined. Word extraction from the text mining method set out the following guiding axioms from the bigrams: "confronting syphilis in primary health care;" "investigation committee for congenital syphilis in the territory;" "municipal plan for monitoring and investigating syphilis cases through health surveillance;" "women's healthcare networks for syphilis in pregnant;" "diagnosis and treatment with a focus on rapid testing." Text mining may serve public health research subjects when used in parallel with the conventional content analysis method. The computational method extracted intervention activities from field researchers, also providing inferences on how the strategies of the "Syphilis No" Project influenced the decrease in congenital syphilis cases in the territory

Latin Americans show wide-spread Converso ancestry and imprint of local Native ancestry on physical appearance

Historical records and genetic analyses indicate that Latin Americans trace their ancestry mainly to the intermixing (admixture) of Native Americans, Europeans and Sub-Saharan Africans. Using novel haplotype-based methods, here we infer sub-continental ancestry in over 6,500 Latin Americans and evaluate the impact of regional ancestry variation on physical appearance. We find that Native American ancestry components in Latin Americans correspond geographically to the present-day genetic structure of Native groups, and that sources of non-Native ancestry, and admixture timings, match documented migratory flows. We also detect South/East Mediterranean ancestry across Latin America, probably stemming mostly from the clandestine colonial migration of Christian converts of non-European origin (Conversos). Furthermore, we find that ancestry related to highland (Central Andean) versus lowland (Mapuche) Natives is associated with variation in facial features, particularly nose morphology, and detect significant differences in allele frequencies between these groups at loci previously associated with nose morphology in this sample.Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Celula

Latin Americans show wide-spread Converso ancestry and imprint of local Native ancestry on physical appearance

Historical records and genetic analyses indicate that Latin Americans trace their ancestry mainly to the intermixing (admixture) of Native Americans, Europeans and Sub-Saharan Africans. Using novel haplotype-based methods, here we infer sub-continental ancestry in over 6,500 Latin Americans and evaluate the impact of regional ancestry variation on physical appearance. We find that Native American ancestry components in Latin Americans correspond geographically to the present-day genetic structure of Native groups, and that sources of non-Native ancestry, and admixture timings, match documented migratory flows. We also detect South/East Mediterranean ancestry across Latin America, probably stemming mostly from the clandestine colonial migration of Christian converts of non-European origin (Conversos). Furthermore, we find that ancestry related to highland (Central Andean) versus lowland (Mapuche) Natives is associated with variation in facial features, particularly nose morphology, and detect significant differences in allele frequencies between these groups at loci previously associated with nose morphology in this sample.Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Celula