Reminiscência enquanto ferramenta de trabalho com idosos : vantagens e limitações

O objectivo deste artigo é analisar a importância da reminiscência enquanto estratégia terapêutica junto de idosos. Explora-se o conceito de reminiscência tal como decorre no quotidiano e analisa-se o seu surgimento como estratégia de trabalho com idosos, considerando os seus principais âmbitos de intervenção, desde moldes preventivos, como a adaptação à institucionalização, até níveis remediativos, como a estimulação do funcionamento cognitivo em quadros demenciais. Por fim, listam-se aquelas que se consideram ser as principais limitações inerentes à Terapia de Reminiscência no trabalho com idosos, nomeadamente a ausência de modelos estruturados de intervenção e as lacunas referentes a estratégias intencionais de avaliação de eficácia dos mesmos. Apresentam- se algumas estratégias promotoras da eficácia da Terapia de Reminiscência.The main objective of this paper is the analysis of reminiscence, naming is advantages and limitations as an intervention tool towards older adults. We first consider reminiscence as a daily happening, constrained by the social and historical background of the participant. We then describe the adaptation of this strategy to the work with older adults, in prevention or remediation, such as adaptation to institutions or cognitive stimulation in dementias. Finally, we list the main limitations in reminiscence therapy, namely the absence of structured intervention models and the shortfall of strategies to assess their efficiency. We consider some of the possible strategies to promote the accuracy of reminiscence therapy.Universidade do Minho. Centro de Investigação em Psicologia d(CIPsi

Estimulação e promoção de memórias autobiográficas específicas como metodologia de diminuição de sintomatologia depressiva em pessoas idosas

Dissertação de Mestrado em Psicologia - Área de Especialização em Psicologia ClínicaAs alterações demográficas registadas nas últimas décadas, despoletadas pela redução da taxa de natalidade e pelo aumento da esperança média de vida, estão actualmente patentes na inversão da pirâmide populacional portuguesa, onde o número de idosos ultrapassou pela primeira vez o número de jovens (INE, 2002). Conquanto se registem melhorias consideráveis na qualidade de vida da população idosa portuguesa, mensurável através de indicadores físicos objectivos e medidas de satisfação de vida subjectivas, as taxas de prevalência de psicopatologia, nomeadamente de depressão, são preponderantes. Os dados aumentam de forma exponencial se considerarmos a percentagem de subdiagnóstico estimada. Pretendemos com este trabalho implementar uma modalidade de intervenção breve junto de idosos com diagnóstico de episódio depressivo, através da estimulação das suas memórias autobiográficas. Num primeiro momento, expomos o estado da arte em torno desta temática. Apresentamos o conceito de memória autobiográfica, relacionando-a com a iniciação e manutenção da sintomatologia depressiva, destacando nesta relação o conceito de obregeneralização, enquanto incapacidade para recuperar memórias relativas a acontecimentos de vida específicos (Capítulo I). Consideramos quais as características do quadro depressivo em idosos e quais as modalidades de intervenção mais utilizadas (Capítulo II). Analisamos a história da reminiscência, enquanto estratégia de intervenção junto de idosos (Capítulo III). Na segunda parte, referimos quais os procedimentos realizados, com o intuito de implementar uma intervenção breve, ao longo de 4 sessões, junto de idosos com sintomatologia depressiva (Geriatric Depression Scale, Barreto et al., 2003) e sem défice cognitivo (Mini Mental State Examen, Guerreiro et al., 1993), através da terapia da reminiscência (Capítulo IV). A par com a diminuição da sintomatologia depressiva, consideramos que a implementação do protocolo de intervenção iria reflectir-se no aumento da satisfação de vida (Life Satisfaction Index, Martín, 2002) e da especificidade e positividade das memórias autobiográficas (Autobiographical Memory Test, Williams & Broadbent, 1986). A amostra foi constituída por 22 pessoas idosas ( x =80.7 anos, DP=4.5), em situação de internamento a tempo inteiro ou parcial, aleatoriamente distribuídas entre ambas as condições, de tratamento ou sem tratamento. Os resultados traduzem uma melhoria estatisticamente significativa por parte dos participantes inseridos no grupo experimental, observável através (i) da diminuição da sintomatologia depressiva (t(20)= 3.58, p<.05), (ii) do aumento da satisfação de vida (t(20)= –3.83, p<.05), e (iii) da recuperação de mais memórias autobiográficas específicas (t(20)= –3.46, p<.05) e positivas (t(20)= –4.23, p<.05). Concluímos assim que (i) a sobregeneralização que acompanha a memória autobiográfica em quadros depressivos é reversível mediante a utilização de estratégias direccionadas para a promoção da sua especificidade; e (ii) a terapia de reminiscência parece ser uma estratégia eficaz para o trabalho terapêutico junto de pessoas idosas com sintomatologia do foro depressivo. De entre as principais vantagens desta estratégia, destacamos a ausência necessidade de aquisição de novas competências por parte dos idosos (Capítulo V).strong increase in the life expectancy, which translates into severe demographical changes. This results on a noteworthy shift of the Portuguese demographical structure, since there are currently more elders than young people (INE, 2002). Although there are considerable improvements in the Portuguese elders’ quality of life, which can be measured through objective physical measures and subjective satisfaction indicators, the prevalence for psychopathology is still very high, especially in the case of depression. The estimated data for under diagnosis indicates an even worse case scenario. The aim of this work is to implement a short intervention directed to depressed elderly, stimulating their autobiographical memories. We first present the concept of autobiographical memory, exploring the link between overgeneralized autobiographical memory, defined as the incapacity to retrieve memories of specific life events, and the onset and persistence of depression (Chapter I). We then consider the main characteristics of geriatric depression, as well as the most important strategies applied (Chapter II). On the last part of the state of the art, we review reminiscence’s history, as a usual technique to intervene with the elderly (Chapter III). On the second part, we report the adopted procedure, which consists in a four session intervention, aimed to reduce depressive symptoms (Geriatric Depression Scale, Barreto et al., 2003) on institutionalized elders without cognitive impairment (Mini Mental State Examen, Guerreiro et al., 1993) through reminiscence therapy. Beside the reduction of depressive symptoms, we hypothesized that after the intervention protocol was applied the participants from the experimental group would show an improvement in life satisfaction (Life Satisfaction Index, Martín, 2002), and autobiographical memories would be more specific and positive (Autobiographical Memory Test, Williams & Broadbent, 1986). Our sample was composed by 22 elders ( x =80.7 years, SD=4.5), in partially or fully institutionalised, randomly assigned to the two conditions, treatment or no treatment. The results show a statistically significant improvement of the elders submitted to intervention, showing (i) less depressive symptoms (t(20)= 3.58, p<.05), (ii) improvement in life satisfaction (t(20)= –3.83, p<.05) and (iii) higher retrieval of specific (t(20)= –3.46, p<.05) and positive autobiographical memories (t(20)= –4.23, p<.05). The findings suggest that (i) the overgeneralization of autobiographical memory, characteristic of depressive pathology, is reversible through techniques aimed to promote the specificity; and (ii) reminiscence therapy seems to be a worthy strategy for therapeutic work with depressive elders. Its main advantage seems to be the fact that it doesn’t impose new competences on the elderly (Chapter V)

Release of fragrances from cotton functionalized with carbohydrate-binding module proteins

Perspiration as a response to daily activity and physical exercise results in unpleasant odors that cause social unrest and embarrassment. To tackle it, functional textiles incorporating fragrances could be an effective clothing deodorizing product. This work presents two strategies for the release of -citronellol from functionalized cotton with carbohydrate-binding module (CBM)-based complexes (OBP::GQ20::CBM/-citronellolapproach 1 and CBM::GQ20::SP-DS3-liposome/-citronellolapproach 2). CBM from Cellulomonas fimi was fused with the odorant-binding protein (OBP::GQ20::CBM) and with an anchor peptide with affinity to the liposome membrane (CBM::GQ20::SP-DS3). In approach 1, OBP fusion protein served as a fragrance container, whereas in approach 2, the fragrance was loaded into liposomes with a higher cargo capacity. The two strategies showed a differentiated -citronellol release profile triggered by an acidic sweat solution. OBP::GQ20::CBM complex revealed a fast release (31.9% and 25.8% of the initial amount, after 1.5 and 24 h of exposure with acidic sweat solution, respectively), while the CBM::GQ20::SP-DS3-liposome complex demonstrated a slower and controlled release (5.9% and 10.5% of the initial amount, after 1.5 and 24 h of exposure with acidic sweat solution, respectively). Both strategies revealed high potential for textile functionalization aimed at controlled release of fragrances. The OBP::GQ20::CBM/-citronellol complex is ideal for applications requiring fast release of a high amount of fragrance, whereas the CBM::GQ20::SP-DS3-liposome/-citronellol complex is more suitable for prolonged and controlled release of a lower amount of -citronellol.This study was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the scope of the strategic funding of UID/BIO/04469/2019 unit and BioTecNorte operation (NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000004) funded by European Regional Development Fund under the scope of Norte2020 - Programa Operacional Regional do Norte. F.G. and C.S. thanks FCT for their funding (SFRH/BD/114684/2016; SFRH/IF/00186/2015).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Reminiscência enquanto ferramenta de trabalho com idosos: Vantagens e limitações

O objectivo deste artigo é analisar a importância da reminiscência enquanto estratégia terapêutica junto de idosos. Explora-se o conceito de reminiscência tal como decorre no quotidiano e analisa-se o seu surgimento como estratégia de trabalho com idosos, considerando os seus principais âmbitos de intervenção, desde moldes preventivos, como a adaptação à institucionalização, até níveis remediativos, como a estimulação do funcionamento cognitivo em quadros demenciais. Por fim, listam-se aquelas que se consideram ser as principais limitações inerentes à Terapia de Reminiscência no trabalho com idosos, nomeadamente a ausência de modelos estruturados de intervenção e as lacunas referentes a estratégias intencionais de avaliação de eficácia dos mesmos. Apresentam-se algumas estratégias promotoras da eficácia da Terapia de Reminiscência

Dietary intake of young portuguese handball players

The aim of this study was to analyse dietary intake (macronutrients and micronutrients) in young female and male handball athletes. A transversal study was performed with young handball players from sub 16 and 18 Portuguese Handball Federation, who volunteered to participate in this study. Anthropometric (weight and height measure), nutritional intake (using food frequency questionnaire) and position in the game were evaluated. The final sample comprised 64 athletes (48.4% female and 51.6% male). The mean age was 16± 1 years, average body mass index was higher in females (24.1± 3.5kg/m2) than males (23.8± 3.0 kg/m2). Mean energy intake per day was significantly lower in females than males 2167.4± 1185.0 and 2952.9± 1315.8 kcal/day (p= 0.015, 95CI), respectively. According to the recommendations from food, most of the young handball athletes reported a generally higher dietary intake (protein intake was near to the upper recommendation limit; the carbohydrate intake was below and the fat intake higher) and a lower for some micronutrients. A process to identify the athletes that need nutritional support should be considered by handball coaches to optimise their performance and safeguard their healthTo all athletes and their coaches who contributed to the study and to the Portuguese Handball Federationinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Conjugated Linoleic Acid: good or bad nutrient

Conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) is a class of 28 positional and geometric isomers of linoleic acid octadecadienoic.Currently, it has been described many benefits related to the supplementation of CLA in animals and humans, as in the treatment of cancer, oxidative stress, in atherosclerosis, in bone formation and composition in obesity, in diabetes and the immune system. However, our results show that, CLA appears to be not a good supplement in patients with cachexia

Development of 3D MRI-Based Anatomically Realistic Models of Breast Tissues and Tumours for Microwave Imaging Diagnosis

Breast cancer diagnosis using radar-based medical MicroWave Imaging (MWI) has been studied in recent years. Realistic numerical and physical models of the breast are needed for simulation and experimental testing of MWI prototypes. We aim to provide the scientific community with an online repository of multiple accurate realistic breast tissue models derived from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), including benign and malignant tumours. Such models are suitable for 3D printing, leveraging experimental MWI testing. We propose a pre-processing pipeline, which includes image registration, bias field correction, data normalisation, background subtraction, and median filtering. We segmented the fat tissue with the region growing algorithm in fat-weighted Dixon images. Skin, fibroglandular tissue, and the chest wall boundary were segmented from water-weighted Dixon images. Then, we applied a 3D region growing and Hoshen-Kopelman algorithms for tumour segmentation. The developed semi-automatic segmentation procedure is suitable to segment tissues with a varying level of heterogeneity regarding voxel intensity. Two accurate breast models with benign and malignant tumours, with dielectric properties at 3, 6, and 9 GHz frequencies have been made available to the research community. These are suitable for microwave diagnosis, i.e., imaging and classification, and can be easily adapted to other imaging modalities.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Automatic strategy for extraction of anthropometric measurements for the diagnostic and evaluation of deformational plagiocephaly from infant’s head models

Deformational Plagiocephaly (DP) refers to an asymmetrical distortion of an infant's skull resulting from external forces applied over time. The diagnosis of this condition is performed using asymmetry indexes that are estimated from specific anatomical landmarks, whose are manually defined on head models acquired using laser scans. However, this manual identification is susceptible to intra-/inter-observer variability, being also time-consuming. Therefore, automatic strategies for the identification of the landmarks and, consequently, extraction of asymmetry indexes, are claimed. A novel pipeline to automatically identify these landmarks on 3D head models and to estimate the relevant cranial asymmetry indexes is proposed. Thus, a template database is created and then aligned with the unlabelled patient through an iterative closest point (ICP) strategy. Here, an initial rigid alignment followed by an affine one are applied to remove global misalignments between each template and the patient. Next, a non-rigid alignment is used to deform the template information to the patient-specific shape. The final position of each landmark is computed as a local weight average of all candidate results. From the identified landmarks, a head's coordinate system is automatically estimated and later used to estimate cranial asymmetry indexes. The proposed framework was evaluated in 15 synthetic infant head's model. Overall, the results demonstrated the accuracy of the identification strategy, with a mean average distance of 2.8 +/- 0.6 mm between the identified landmarks and the ground-truth. Moreover, for the estimation of cranial asymmetry indexes, a performance comparable to the inter-observer variability was achieved.The present submission corresponds to original research work of the authors and has never been submitted elsewhere. Moreover, this work was funded by the project NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-024300, supported by Northern Portugal Regional Operational Programme (Norte2020), under the Portugal 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER). Moreover, this work has been also supported by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2019. Furthermore, the authors acknowledge FCT, Portugal, and the European Social Found, European Union, for funding support through the "Programa Operacional Capital Humano" (POCH) in the scope of the PhD grants SFRH/BD/136721/2018 (Bruno Oliveira), SFRH/BD/136670/2018 (Helena R. Torres), and SFRH/BD/131545/2017 (Fernando Veloso)

A hybrid bi-objective optimization approach for joint determination of safety stock and safety time buffers in multi-item single-stage industrial supply chains

In material requirements planning (MRP) systems, safety stock and safety time are two well-known inventory buffering strategies to protect against supply and demand uncertainties. While the role of safety stocks in coping with uncertainty is well studied, safety time has received only scarce attention in the supply chain management literature. Particularly, most previous operations research models have typically considered the use of such inventory buffers in a separate fashion, but not together. Here, we propose a decision support system (DSS) to address the problem of integrating optimal safety stock and safety time decisions at the component level, in multi-supplier multi-item single-stage industrial supply chains under dynamic demands and stochastic lead times. The DSS is based on a hybrid bi-objective optimization approach that simultaneously optimizes upstream inventory holding costs and β-service levels, suggesting multiple non-dominated Pareto-optimal solutions to decision-makers. We further explore a weighted closed-form analytical expression to select a single Pareto-optimal point from a set of non-dominated solutions, thereby enhancing the practical application of the proposed DSS. We describe the implementation of our approach in a major automotive electronics company operating under a myriad of components with dynamic demand, uncertain supply and requirements plans with different degrees of sparsity. We show the potential of our approach to improve β-service levels while minimizing inventory-related costs. The results suggest that, in certain cases, it appears to be more cost-effective to combine safety stock with safety time compared to considering each inventory buffer independently.This work has been supported by the European Structural and Investment Funds in the FEDER component, through the Operational Competitiveness and Internationalization Pro-gram (COMPETE 2020) [Project No. 39479, Funding reference: POCI-01–0247-FEDER-39479]

Bacterioplankton Community Shifts during a Spring Bloom of Aphanizomenon gracile and Sphaerospermopsis aphanizomenoides at a Temperate Shallow Lake

Climate change is enhancing the frequency of cyanobacterial blooms not only during summer but also in spring and autumn, leading to increased ecological impacts. The bacterioplankton community composition (BCC), in particular, is deeply affected by these blooms, although at the same time BCC can also play important roles in blooms’ dynamics. However, more information is still needed regarding BCC during species-specific cyanobacterial blooms. The goal of this study was to assess BCC succession in a hypereutrophic shallow lake (Vela Lake, Portugal) during a warm spring using a metagenomic approach to provide a glimpse of the changes these communities experience during the dominance of Aphanizomenon-like bloom-forming species. BCC shifts were studied using 16S rRNA gene metabarcoding and multivariate analyses. A total of 875 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were retrieved from samples. In early spring, the dominant taxa belonged to Proteobacteria (mainly Alphaproteobacteria—Rickettsiales) and Bacteroidetes (Saprospirales, Flavobacteriales and Sphingobacteriales). However, at the end of May, a bloom co-dominated by cyanobacterial populations of Aphanizomenon gracile, Sphaerospermopsis aphanizomenoides and Synechococcus sp. developed and persisted until the end of spring. This led to a major BCC shift favouring the prevalence of Alphaproteobacteria (Rickettsiales and also Rhizobiales, Caulobacteriales and Rhodospirillales) and Bacteroidetes (Saprospirales, followed by Flavobacteriales and Sphingobacteriales). These results contribute to the knowledge of BCC dynamics during species-specific cyanobacterial blooms, showing that BCC is strongly affected (directly or indirectly) by Aphanizomenon-Sphaerospermopsis blooms.publishe