Position paper: The potential role of optical biopsy in the study and diagnosis of environmental enteric dysfunction

Environmental enteric dysfunction (EED) is a disease of the small intestine affecting children and adults in low and middle income countries. Arising as a consequence of repeated infections, gut inflammation results in impaired intestinal absorptive and barrier function, leading to poor nutrient uptake and ultimately to stunting and other developmental limitations. Progress towards new biomarkers and interventions for EED is hampered by the practical and ethical difficulties of cross-validation with the gold standard of biopsy and histology. Optical biopsy techniques — which can provide minimally invasive or noninvasive alternatives to biopsy — could offer other routes to validation and could potentially be used as point-of-care tests among the general population. This Consensus Statement identifies and reviews the most promising candidate optical biopsy technologies for applications in EED, critically assesses them against criteria identified for successful deployment in developing world settings, and proposes further lines of enquiry. Importantly, many of the techniques discussed could also be adapted to monitor the impaired intestinal barrier in other settings such as IBD, autoimmune enteropathies, coeliac disease, graft-versus-host disease, small intestinal transplantation or critical care

Water Depollution by Advanced Oxidation Technologies

This chapter deals with water treatments by advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) based on chemical and photochemical reactions. The most used processes are described, and for each of them, the main reaction mechanisms, principles, advantages, drawbacks, performances and formation of by-products, coupled with technologies and their applications to waters and wastewater depollution, have been analysed, supporting the main results of studies published in the pertinent literature

Understanding Pathophysiological Concepts Leading to Obstructive Apnea.

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) results from a combination of several factors leading to the obstruction of the upper respiratory tract (URT). OSA represents a systemic pathophysiological entity and leads to many comorbidities such as hypertension, coronary ischemia, and stroke. Patients with this pathophysiological entity experience also an increased risk of postoperative complications. Obesity is certainly the main cause of developing OSA. However, many other predisposing factors influence the genesis of obstructive apnea. It is important to understand the complexity of the interactions between predisposing factors to understand the relationship between weight loss following obesity surgery and the improvement in the severity of OSA. In this narrative review, we expose the seven major categories of predisposing factors that interact to generate obstructive apneas in patients, namely the anatomic abnormalities of the URT, the mechanical and the metabolic responses of the upper airway musculature, the loop gain, the arousal threshold, and the hormonal abnormalities. The genesis of apnea is the result of a complex dynamic interaction between the anatomical risk factors and the compensatory neuromuscular reflexes. All of these points are integrally part of the perioperative care of the obese patients. Finally, we will discuss different options for weight reduction