POS1464-HPR ASSESSMENT OF EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING IN RHEUMATIC PATIENTS DURING COVID-19 LOCKDOWN THROUGH A WEB-BASED SURVEY APPROACH

Background:The severe measures of lockdown imposed in Italy to limit the SARS coronavirus 2 disease (COVID-19) spread caused an increase of reported anxiety, depression and suicidal rate among general population. Patients affected by rheumatic disorders feature an increased risk of mood disorders for the chronic course of the disease itself and for the related disability.Objectives:Aim of this study was to investigate the impact of COVID-19 lockdown on emotional well-being of a large cohort of rheumatic patients through a telemedicine approach.Methods:Patients in follow-up in rheumatologic out-patient clinics of our hospital were invited to participate to an online survey. They were asked also to invite their best friend, matched for age and sex, to participate the survey, as control group. The online survey included demographic questions and validated, psychometric scales for stress vulnerability (Stress Vulnerability Scale-SVS), resilience (Resilience Scale-RS), depression (Zung's depression questionnaire-Zung-D) and anxiety (Zung's anxiety questionnaire-Zung-A) evaluation.Results:The cohort was composed by 484 subjects (84,1% F, 15,9% M). The number of subjects and the frequency of various diagnosis are shown in Table 1. According to the psychometric scales, 55,5% and 43,3% of subject showed respectively an increased stress vulnerability and a reduced resiliency. Moreover, 64% and 40,5% of the enrolled subjects reported respectively anxiety and depressive symptoms worthy of psychiatric attention. There was a significant different distribution of scores for SVS (p<0,0001), Zung-A (p<0,0001) and Zung-D (p<0,0001) among the various diagnosis. In comparison with controls, higher scores of SVS were present in connective tissue diseases (CTD) (p=0,007), Sjogren's Syndrome (SSJ) (p=0,0029) and fibromyalgia (FM) (p<0,0001) patients, higher scores of Zung-A were present in SSJ (p=0,006) and FM (p<0,0001) patients and higher scores of Zung-D were present in FM (p<0,0001) patients (Figure 1). Ordinal regression analysis showed that higher classes of anxiety were independently predicted by the Tension (β=0,32;CI=0,13-0,52;p=0,003) and Demoralization (β=0,22;CI=0,04-0,44;p=0,046) components of SVS and by the Zung-D score (β=0,09;CI=0,05-0,1;p<0,001), while higher classes of depression were independently predicted by SVS total (β=0,17;CI=0,03-0,30;p=0,012), by its subcomponent Demoralization (β=0,22;CI=0,01-0,43;p=0,038), by a lower absolute RS score (β=-0,083;CI=-0,1--0,06;p<0,001) and by the Zung-A score (β=0,11;CI=0,06-0,15;p<0,001). In both cases, a specific diagnosis was not associated to a higher risk of advanced anxiety and depression classes.Conclusion:Rheumatic patients developed a high frequency of anxiety and depressive symptoms following COVID-19 lockdown, of which a large part should be referred for specialist attention according to their severity. There was a large variability of the symptoms reported among the various diagnosis. CTD, SSJ and FM patients were the most susceptible to the development of anxiety, depression and stress vulnerability. The application of psycometric scales through a telemedicine approach represents a useful tool to identify patients with higher levels of anxiety and depression.Table 1.DIAGNOSISFrequencyPercentControls459,3RA8216,9PSA214,3UA40,8SPA71,4CTD7014,5FM7916,3Myositis81,7Behcet's112,3Vasculitis163,3APS61,2Other AID132,7SSJ12225,2Total484100RA: Rheumatoid Arthritis, PSA: Psoriatic Arthritis; UA: Undifferentiated Arthritis; SPA: Spondyloarthritis; CTD: Connective tissues diseases (including Systemic Lupus Erythematosus, Scleroderma, Undifferentiated Connettivitis, Mixed Connettivitis); FM: Fibromyalgia; APS: Anti-phospholipid syndrome; Other AID: Other autoimmune/inflammatory disorders (including Adult-onset Still disease, IgG4 related disease); SSJ: Sjogren SyndromeFigure 1.Disclosure of Interests:None declare

Gellan hydrogel as a powerful tool in paper cleaning process: a detailed study

Hypothesis: Wet cleaning of ancient papers is one of the most critical steps during a conservation treatment. It is used to improve the optical qualities of a graphic work and remove dust and by-products resulting from cellulose degradation. Nevertheless, washing treatment usually involves a substantial impact on the original morphological structure of paper and can sometimes be dangerous for water sensitive inks and pigments. Experiments: The use of rigid hydrogel of Gellan gum as an alternative paper cleaning treatment is developed. The application of a rigid hydrogel minimizes damages caused by the use of water, and therefore is much more respectful for the original integrity of ancient paper. Findings: Gellan hydrogel has been used to clean paper samples belonging to different centuries (from XVI to XIX) and therefore, characterized by a different story in terms of degradation condition and paper composition. Several techniques, such as high-performance liquid chromatography, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy and pH measurements, has been employed to assess the effectiveness and safety of the proposed cleaning method

A pig multi-tissue normalised cDNA library: large-scale sequencing, cluster analysis and 9K micro-array resource generation

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Domestic animal breeding and product quality improvement require the control of reproduction, nutrition, health and welfare in these animals. It is thus necessary to improve our knowledge of the major physiological functions and their interactions. This would be greatly enhanced by the availability of expressed gene sequences in the databases and by cDNA arrays allowing the transcriptome analysis of any function.</p> <p>The objective within the AGENAE French program was to initiate a high-throughput cDNA sequencing program of a 38-tissue normalised library and generate a diverse microarray for transcriptome analysis in pig species.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We constructed a multi-tissue cDNA library, which was normalised and subtracted to reduce the redundancy of the clones. Expressed Sequence Tags were produced and 24449 high-quality sequences were released in EMBL database. The assembly of all the public ESTs (available through SIGENAE website) resulted in 40786 contigs and 54653 singletons. At least one Agenae sequence is present in 11969 contigs (12.5%) and in 9291 of the deeper-than-one-contigs (22.8%). Sequence analysis showed that both normalisation and subtraction processes were successful and that the initial tissue complexity was maintained in the final libraries. A 9K nylon cDNA microarray was produced and is available through CRB-GADIE. It will allow high sensitivity transcriptome analyses in pigs.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>In the present work, a pig multi-tissue cDNA library was constructed and a 9K cDNA microarray designed. It contributes to the Expressed Sequence Tags pig data, and offers a valuable tool for transcriptome analysis.</p

MINT, the molecular interaction database: 2012 update

The Molecular INTeraction Database (MINT, http://mint.bio.uniroma2.it/mint/) is a public repository for protein-protein interactions (PPI) reported in peer-reviewed journals. The database grows steadily over the years and at September 2011 contains approximately 235,000 binary interactions captured from over 4750 publications. The web interface allows the users to search, visualize and download interactions data. MINT is one of the members of the International Molecular Exchange consortium (IMEx) and adopts the Molecular Interaction Ontology of the Proteomics Standard Initiative (PSI-MI) standards for curation and data exchange. MINT data are freely accessible and downloadable at http://mint.bio.uniroma2.it/mint/download.do. We report here the growth of the database, the major changes in curation policy and a new algorithm to assign a confidence to each interaction

Preliminary identification of key clinical domains for outcome evaluation in fibromyalgia using the Delphi method : the Italian experience

Objective: Fibromyalgia (FM) is a complex syndrome that, in Italy, affects at least 2% of the adult population. It is characterized by chronic widespread musculoskeletal pain often accompanied by multiple other symptoms. The aim of this study was to identify a set of clinical domains for FM considered relevant by both clinicians and patients using a consensus process. Methods: Consensus was achieved using the Delphi method based on questionnaires and systematic, controlled opinion feedback. The Delphi exercise involved a panel of 252 rheumatologists and 86 patients with FM as defined by the American College of Rheumatology criteria. All of the patients and clinicians were asked to rank the relative different domains of FM in order of priority. The content validity index (CVI) was used to establish the percentage agreement. The importance of each item was ranked on a 0-3 Likert scale. The frequency, mean relevance scores, and frequency importance product were also calculated. Results: The Delphi exercise showed that the domains ranked highest by patients were similar to those of the clinicians, with the exception of tender point intensity (considered relevant by the clinicians but not by the patients) and environmental sensitivity (considered important by the patients but not by the clinicians). A final 8-item model was developed which was considered to demonstrate adequate validity. Conclusions: The Delphi exercises identified and ranked relevant key clinical domains that need to be assessed in FM research. On the basis of these results, a new patient-reported composite outcome index can be developed and used in clinical trials

Systematic review with meta-analysis: cytokines in fibromyalgia syndrome

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>To perform a systematic review and meta-analysis on cytokine levels in patients with fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS).</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Through December 2010 we systematically reviewed the databases PubMed, MEDLINE, and PsycINFO and screened the reference lists of 22 review articles for suitable original articles. Original articles investigating cytokines in patients with FMS were included. Data were extracted by two independent authors. Differences of the cytokine levels of FMS patients and controls were summarized by standardized mean differences (SMD) using a random effects model. Study quality was assessed applying methodological scores: modified Center of Evidence Based Medicine, Newcastle-Ottawa-Scale, and Würzburg Methodological Quality Score.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Twenty-five articles were included investigating 1255 FMS patients and 800 healthy controls. Data of 13/25 studies entered meta-analysis. The overall methodological quality of studies was low. The results of the majority of studies were not comparable because methods, investigated material, and investigated target cytokines differed. Systematic review of the selected 25 articles revealed that FMS patients had higher serum levels of interleukin (IL)-1 receptor antagonist, IL-6, and IL-8, and higher plasma levels of IL-8. Meta-analysis of eligible studies showed that FMS patients had higher plasma IL-6 levels compared to controls (SMD = -0.34 [-0.64, -0.03] 95% CI; p = 0.03). The majority of investigated cytokines were not different between patients and controls.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The pathophysiological role of cytokines in FMS is still unclear. Studies of higher quality and with higher numbers of subjects are needed.</p

Capturing variation impact on molecular interactions in the IMEx Consortium mutations data set

The current wealth of genomic variation data identified at nucleotide level presents the challenge of understanding by which mechanisms amino acid variation affects cellular processes. These effects may manifest as distinct phenotypic differences between individuals or result in the development of disease. Physical interactions between molecules are the linking steps underlying most, if not all, cellular processes. Understanding the effects that sequence variation has on a molecule's interactions is a key step towards connecting mechanistic characterization of nonsynonymous variation to phenotype. We present an open access resource created over 14 years by IMEx database curators, featuring 28,000 annotations describing the effect of small sequence changes on physical protein interactions. We describe how this resource was built, the formats in which the data is provided and offer a descriptive analysis of the data set. The data set is publicly available through the IntAct website and is enhanced with every monthly release

Effect of Cryogrinding on Chemical Stability of the Sparingly Water-Soluble Drug Furosemide

Purpose To investigate the effect of cryogrinding on chemical stability of the diuretic agent furosemide and its mixtures with selected excipients. Methods Furosemide was ground at liquid nitrogen temperature for 30, 60, 120 and 180 min. Mixtures of furosemide-PVP and furosemide-inulin (1:1) were milled under cryogenic conditions. Materials were analyzed by XRD, UPLC, MS and NMR. Results Upon increasing the milling time, a significant build-up of an unidentified impurity 1, probably the main degradation product, was noticed. Cogrinding of furosemide with PVP and inulin worsened chemical stabilization of the pharmaceutical. The main degradation product formed upon cryomilling was subsequently identified as 4-chloro-5-sulfamoylanthranilic acid (CSA). Based on some theoretical considerations involving specific milling conditions, the milling intensity and an expected specific milling dose have been calculated. Results indicate that cryogenic grinding is capable to initiate mechanically induced decomposition of furosemide.Conclusions Cryogenic grinding can activate and accelerate not only structural changes (solid state amorphization) but also chemical decomposition of pharmaceuticals. A cryogenic milling device should be considered as a chemical reactor, where under favourable conditions chemical reactions could be mechanically initiated

The Protein-Protein Interaction tasks of BioCreative III: classification/ranking of articles and linking bio-ontology concepts to full text

BACKGROUND: Determining usefulness of biomedical text mining systems requires realistic task definition and data selection criteria without artificial constraints, measuring performance aspects that go beyond traditional metrics. The BioCreative III Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) tasks were motivated by such considerations, trying to address aspects including how the end user would oversee the generated output, for instance by providing ranked results, textual evidence for human interpretation or measuring time savings by using automated systems. Detecting articles describing complex biological events like PPIs was addressed in the Article Classification Task (ACT), where participants were asked to implement tools for detecting PPI-describing abstracts. Therefore the BCIII-ACT corpus was provided, which includes a training, development and test set of over 12,000 PPI relevant and non-relevant PubMed abstracts labeled manually by domain experts and recording also the human classification times. The Interaction Method Task (IMT) went beyond abstracts and required mining for associations between more than 3,500 full text articles and interaction detection method ontology concepts that had been applied to detect the PPIs reported in them.RESULTS:A total of 11 teams participated in at least one of the two PPI tasks (10 in ACT and 8 in the IMT) and a total of 62 persons were involved either as participants or in preparing data sets/evaluating these tasks. Per task, each team was allowed to submit five runs offline and another five online via the BioCreative Meta-Server. From the 52 runs submitted for the ACT, the highest Matthew's Correlation Coefficient (MCC) score measured was 0.55 at an accuracy of 89 and the best AUC iP/R was 68. Most ACT teams explored machine learning methods, some of them also used lexical resources like MeSH terms, PSI-MI concepts or particular lists of verbs and nouns, some integrated NER approaches. For the IMT, a total of 42 runs were evaluated by comparing systems against manually generated annotations done by curators from the BioGRID and MINT databases. The highest AUC iP/R achieved by any run was 53, the best MCC score 0.55. In case of competitive systems with an acceptable recall (above 35) the macro-averaged precision ranged between 50 and 80, with a maximum F-Score of 55. CONCLUSIONS: The results of the ACT task of BioCreative III indicate that classification of large unbalanced article collections reflecting the real class imbalance is still challenging. Nevertheless, text-mining tools that report ranked lists of relevant articles for manual selection can potentially reduce the time needed to identify half of the relevant articles to less than 1/4 of the time when compared to unranked results. Detecting associations between full text articles and interaction detection method PSI-MI terms (IMT) is more difficult than might be anticipated. This is due to the variability of method term mentions, errors resulting from pre-processing of articles provided as PDF files, and the heterogeneity and different granularity of method term concepts encountered in the ontology. However, combining the sophisticated techniques developed by the participants with supporting evidence strings derived from the articles for human interpretation could result in practical modules for biological annotation workflows