Governing multisectoral action for health in low- and middle-income countries

Kumanan Rasanathan and colleagues argue that the potential of multisectoral collaboration for improving health remains untapped in many low- and middle-income countries

Tissue sparing surgery in knee reconstruction: unicompartmental (UKA), patellofemoral (PFA), UKA + PFA, bi-unicompartmental (Bi-UKA) arthroplasties

Recently mini-invasive joint replacement has become one of the hottest topics in the orthopaedic world. However, these terms have been improperly misunderstood as a “key-hole” surgery where traditional components are implanted with shorter surgical approaches, with few benefits and several possible dangers. Small implants as unicompartmental knee prostheses, patellofemoral prostheses and bi-unicompartmental knee prostheses might represent real less invasive procedures: Tissue sparing surgery, the Italian way to minimally invasive surgery (MIS). According to their experience the authors go through this real tissue sparing surgery not limited only to a small incision, but where the surgeons can respect the physiological joint biomechanics

Mechanisms and in vivo functions of contact inhibition of locomotion

Contact inhibition of locomotion (CIL) is a process whereby a cell ceases motility or changes its trajectory upon collision with another cell. CIL was initially characterized more than half a century ago and became a widely studied model system to understand how cells migrate and dynamically interact. Although CIL fell from interest for several decades, the scientific community has recently rediscovered this process. We are now beginning to understand the precise steps of this complex behaviour and to elucidate its regulatory components, including receptors, polarity proteins and cytoskeletal elements. Furthermore, this process is no longer just in vitro phenomenology; we now know from several different in vivo models that CIL is essential for embryogenesis and in governing behaviours such as cell dispersion, boundary formation and collective cell migration. In addition, changes in CIL responses have been associated with other physiological processes, such as cancer cell dissemination during metastasis

Outcomes from elective colorectal cancer surgery during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic

This study aimed to describe the change in surgical practice and the impact of SARS-CoV-2 on mortality after surgical resection of colorectal cancer during the initial phases of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic

The database of the PREDICTS (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems) project

The PREDICTS project-Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)-has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used this evidence base to develop global and regional statistical models of how local biodiversity responds to these measures. We describe and make freely available this 2016 release of the database, containing more than 3.2 million records sampled at over 26,000 locations and representing over 47,000 species. We outline how the database can help in answering a range of questions in ecology and conservation biology. To our knowledge, this is the largest and most geographically and taxonomically representative database of spatial comparisons of biodiversity that has been collated to date; it will be useful to researchers and international efforts wishing to model and understand the global status of biodiversity

Community placements for people with severe and profound learning disabilities and serious challenging behaviour: individual illustrations of issues and problems

Three individual cases of adults with severe or profound learning disabilities who moved from institutional care to individually-designed placements in small group homes are used in order to illustrate implications for good practice, management and policy-making. One case was of a successful placement which showed improved results over time; the second was a placement closed down to save money and the third was a placement which broke down in crisis with readmission to institutional care, but which was eventually recreated successfully. The cases show the need to work at three levels: the relationship between the individual and their immediate environment, the relationship between how this environment is delivered and how the placement is organised; and the relationship between the placement and the service system of which it is part

Dimensionality reduction methods for contingency tables with ordinal variables

Several extensions of correspondence analysis have been introduced in literature coping with the possible ordinal structure of the variables. They usually obtain a graphical representation of the interdependence between the rows and columns of a contingency table, by using several tools for the dimensionality reduction of the involved spaces. These tools are able to enrich the interpretation of the graphical planes, providing also additional information, with respect to the usual singular value decomposition. The main aim of this paper is to suggest an unified theoretical framework of several methods of correspondence analysis coping with ordinal variables