Distribuzione e abbondanza della stigofauna nell\'habitat ipogeo di natura fratturato,nella zona di Nardò (Puglia)

ItLa falda sotterranea nei pressi di Nardò (LE)è stata costantemente monitorata dal CNR-IRSA di Bari a partire dal 1997 e,dal 2001 sono state effettuate le ricerche dei parametri microbiologici di contaminazione fecale.Il Laboratorio Ipogeo Salentino di Biospeleologia “Sandro Ruffo ”ha campionato la fauna sotterranea nelle stesse aree esaminando tre categorie ecologiche:stigosseni,stigo fili e stigobionti. Gli autori hanno voluto veri ficare la sensibilità della stigofauna alle variazioni delle qualità ambientali dell’habitat ipogeo quali cambi di temperatura dell’acqua,di salinità,pH o composizione chimica,tenuto conto che questi organismi partecipano attivamente ai processi degradativi.Dalla ricerca emerge che il misidaceo Spelaeomysis bottazzii non può essere utilizzato come indicatore biologico in quanto è stato ritrovato sia in siti contaminati che in zone non contaminate.EnThe ground water quality at the Nardò (LE)site has been continuously monitored by CNR-IRSA since 1997,and after 2001 also by considering pathogenic indicators due to fecal ground water pollution.In the same area,the Laboratorio Ipogeo Salentino di Biospeleologia “Sandro Ruffo ” sampled the underground fauna and three ecological categories were examined:stygoxenes,stygophiles and stygobi- onts.The authors aimed to check the stygofauna sensitivity to hypogeous habitat changes due to environmental stresses such as water temperature,water salinity, pH or chemical constituents,though they are active organisms which contribute to the biodegradation.Here the possible relationship between sampled aquatic organ- isms and ground water pollution has been focused.The results showed that Spe- laeomysis bottazzii cannot be useful as biological indicator,because the species lives in both contaminated and non-contaminated ground waters

Identification of Drug Interaction Adverse Events in Patients With COVID-19: A Systematic Review

IMPORTANCE During the COVID-19 pandemic, urgent clinical management of patients has mainly included drugs currently administered for other diseases, referred to as repositioned drugs. As a result, some of these drugs have proved to be not only ineffective but also harmful because of adverse events associated with drug-drug interactions (DDIs).OBJECTIVE To identify DDIs that led to adverse clinical outcomes and/or adverse drug reactions in patients with COVID-19 by systematically reviewing the literature and assessing the value of drug interaction checkers in identifying such events.EVIDENCE REVIEW After identification of the drugs used during the COVID-19 pandemic, the drug interaction checkers Drugs.com, COVID-19 Drug Interactions, LexiComp, Medscape, and WebMD were consulted to analyze theoretical DDI-associated adverse events in patients with COVID-19 from March 1, 2020, through February 28, 2022. A systematic literature review was performed by searching the databases PubMed, Scopus, and Cochrane for articles published from March 1, 2020, through February 28, 2022, to retrieve articles describing actual adverse events associated with DDIs. The drug interaction checkers were consulted again to evaluate their potential to assess such events.FINDINGS The DDIs identified in the reviewed articles involved 46 different drugs. In total, 575 DDIs for 58 drug pairs (305 associated with at least 1 adverse drug reaction) were reported. The drugs most involved in DDIs were lopinavir and ritonavir. Of the 6917 identified studies, 20 met the inclusion criteria. These studies, which enrolled 1297 patients overall, reported 115 DDI-related adverse events: 15 (26%) were identifiable by all tools analyzed, 29 (50%) were identifiable by at least 1 of them, and 14 (24%) remained nonidentifiable.CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE The main finding of this systematic review is that the use of drug interaction checkers could have identified several DDI-associated adverse drug reactions, including severe and life-threatening events. Both the interactions between the drugs used to treat COVID-19 and between the COVID-19 drugs and those already used by the patients should be evaluated

Years of life that could be saved from prevention of hepatocellular carcinoma

BACKGROUND: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) causes premature death and loss of life expectancy worldwide. Its primary and secondary prevention can result in a significant number of years of life saved. AIM: To assess how many years of life are lost after HCC diagnosis. METHODS: Data from 5346 patients with first HCC diagnosis were used to estimate lifespan and number of years of life lost after tumour onset, using a semi-parametric extrapolation having as reference an age-, sex- and year-of-onset-matched population derived from national life tables. RESULTS: Between 1986 and 2014, HCC lead to an average of 11.5 years-of-life lost for each patient. The youngest age-quartile group (18-61 years) had the highest number of years-of-life lost, representing approximately 41% of the overall benefit obtainable from prevention. Advancements in HCC management have progressively reduced the number of years-of-life lost from 12.6 years in 1986-1999, to 10.7 in 2000-2006 and 7.4 years in 2007-2014. Currently, an HCC diagnosis when a single tumour <2 cm results in 3.7 years-of-life lost while the diagnosis when a single tumour 65 2 cm or 2/3 nodules still within the Milan criteria, results in 5.0 years-of-life lost, representing the loss of only approximately 5.5% and 7.2%, respectively, of the entire lifespan from birth. CONCLUSIONS: Hepatocellular carcinoma occurrence results in the loss of a considerable number of years-of-life, especially for younger patients. In recent years, the increased possibility of effectively treating this tumour has improved life expectancy, thus reducing years-of-life lost

Prognostic value of copeptin and mid-regional proadrenomedullin in COVID-19-hospitalized patients.

BackgroundBiomarkers are used for diagnosis, risk stratification and medical decisions. Copeptin and mid-regional proadrenomedullin (MR-proADM) are markers of stress and endothelial function, respectively, which have been studied in pneumonia, sepsis and septic shock. This study aimed to assess whether copeptin and MR-proADM could predict coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in-hospital outcomes, that is multi-system complications, length of stay and mortality.MethodsCopeptin and MR-proADM were assessed at admission in 116 patients hospitalized with COVID-19. Data were retrospectively extracted from an online database. The primary endpoint was in-hospital mortality. The secondary endpoints were in-hospital complications, the composite outcome 'death, or admission to intensive care unit, or in-hospital complications', and length of stay. The predictive power was expressed as area under the receiver operator characteristic curve (AUROC).ResultsCopeptin was increased in non-survivors (median 29.7 [interquartile range 13.0-106.2] pmol/L) compared to survivors (10.9 [5.9-25.3] pmol/L, p  25.3 pmol/L. MR-proADM differentiated survivors (0.8 [0.6-1.1] nmol/L) from non-survivors (1.5 [1.1-2.8] nmol/L, p  1.0 nmol/L. Copeptin and MR-proADM predicted sepsis (AUROC 0.95 and 0.96 respectively), acute kidney injury (0.87 and 0.90), the composite outcome (0.69 and 0.75) and length of stay (r = 0.42, p ConclusionsAdmission MR-proADM and copeptin may be implemented for early risk stratification in COVID-19-hospitalized patients to help identify those eligible for closer monitoring and care intensification

Genome-wide Analyses Identify KIF5A as a Novel ALS Gene

To identify novel genes associated with ALS, we undertook two lines of investigation. We carried out a genome-wide association study comparing 20,806 ALS cases and 59,804 controls. Independently, we performed a rare variant burden analysis comparing 1,138 index familial ALS cases and 19,494 controls. Through both approaches, we identified kinesin family member 5A (KIF5A) as a novel gene associated with ALS. Interestingly, mutations predominantly in the N-terminal motor domain of KIF5A are causative for two neurodegenerative diseases: hereditary spastic paraplegia (SPG10) and Charcot-Marie-Tooth type 2 (CMT2). In contrast, ALS-associated mutations are primarily located at the C-terminal cargo-binding tail domain and patients harboring loss-of-function mutations displayed an extended survival relative to typical ALS cases. Taken together, these results broaden the phenotype spectrum resulting from mutations in KIF5A and strengthen the role of cytoskeletal defects in the pathogenesis of ALS.Peer reviewe

Environmental-Economic Accounts and Financial Resource Mobilisation for Implementation the Convention on Biological Diversity

At the Rio “Earth Summit” the Convention on Biological Diversity introduced a global commitment to conservation of biological diversity and sustainable use of its components. An implementation process is going on, based on a strategic plan, biodiversity targets and a strategy for mobilizing financial resources. According to target “2”, by 2020 national accounts should include monetary aggregates related to biodiversity. Environmental accounts can play an important role – together with other information – in monitoring processes connected with target “20”: contribute to identifying activities needed to preserve biodiversity, calculating the associated costs and eventually assessing funding needs. In particular, EPEA and ReMEA are valuable accounting tools for providing data on biodiversity expenditure. The high quality of the information provided by these accounts makes them good candidates for being adopted world-wide within the Convention’s monitoring processes. Enhanced interaction between statisticians and officials from ministries of environment would be crucial to reach significant advancement towards standardization of the information used in support of the Convention

Scavenging properties of neutrophil 4-hydroxyphenylpyruvate dioxygenase are based on a hypothesis that does not stand up to scrutiny

It was previously reported by D’Eufemia et al. that neutrophil preparations from a patient with tyrosinemia type III, i.e. with inherited deficiency of 4-hydroxyphenylpyruvate dioxygenase (HPPD), exhibited a far higher NO release than controls, when NO was estimated in terms of nitrite content in the suspending media. It was hypothesized that HPPD might participate to NO sequestration in neutrophils and that excessive NO release might reflect the lack of the scavenging action in defective cells. In recent control experiments, we found that HPPD activity in neutrophils preparations from healthy subjects is below the detection limit of the enzymatic assay (less than 3 nmol product/h per mg protein). This indicates that HPPD concentration in neutrophils is very low, if any, confirming what was already suggested in literature, and rules out the possibility of a prominent role of HPPD as NO scavenger in these cells. Moreover, we found that 500 microM L-tyrosine increases nitrite release and accumulation in suspending media of U-937 cells, a human monoblast-like lymphoma cell line which displays many characteristics of macrophages, including the expression of inducible and endothelial nitric oxide synthases. We hypothesize that the increase of nitrite release by patient’s neutrophils might be related to the presence of high L-tyrosine concentrations in the blood samples (426 micromol/L instead of 52.1 +/- 10.9 micromol/L as healthy subjects), rather than to HPPD deficiency of in these cells

Environmental Protection by the Opto-acoustic and Neutron Emission Seismic Precursors

The acoustic (AE) and electromagnetic (EM) emission signals detected during the failure of brittle materials are analogous to the anomalous mechanical and geoelectromagnetic waves observed before major earthquakes. These phenomena reinforce the idea that opto-acoustic emissions can be applied as a forerunning tool for seismic events. The elastic energy released by micro-cracking eventually yields to form macroscopic fractures, whose mechanical vibrations are converted into electromagnetic oscillations over a wide range of frequencies, from Hz to THz. This excited state of the matter could be the cause of resonance phenomena at the nuclear level producing neutron bursts, in particular during stress-drops or sudden catastrophic failures. The authors present the results they are obtaining at a gypsum mine located in Northern Italy. The observations revealed a strong correlation between AE/NE events and the closest and most intense earthquakes. Thanks to the position of the monitoring station (100 m under the ground level), the acoustic and electromagnetic noise from human activities is greatly reduced, as well as the neutron background. An integration of AE/EME/NE data with CO2 and Radon variations, that are considered as additional seismic precursors, is planne

The Dark Side of Energy Drinks: A Comprehensive Review of Their Impact on the Human Body

In recent years, the consumption of energy drinks by young adults and athletes has risen significantly, but concerns have been raised about the potential health risks associated with excessive consumption. These concerns include cardiovascular problems, nervous system disorders, and the potential for addiction. This review aims to examine the reported effects of acute or chronic abuse of energy drinks on human health. The analysis shows a significant prevalence of adverse effects, particularly on the cardiovascular and neurovegetative systems. In particular, the analysis identified nine cases of cardiac arrest, three of which were fatal. The aetiology of these adverse effects is attributed to the inherent neurostimulant properties of these beverages, of which caffeine is the predominant component. A comparison of documented effects in humans with experimental studies in animal models showed an overlap in results. This review highlights the need for greater rigour in the assessment of sudden cardiac death, particularly in young people, as legal substances such as energy drinks may be involved. We propose stricter limits on the consumption of these beverages than for caffeine, based on the evidence found and the data in the literature. This review also calls for the establishment of regulations governing the consumption of these products in view of their potential impact on human health