Use of fixed-dose combinations in hypertension and cardiovascular disease prevention

This book provides a critical and comprehensive review of the methodologies available for measuring drug adherence in clinical practice, including those relying on emerging technologies. The authors discuss the risk factors of non-adherence and shed light on how to identify patients at risk of poor adherence. Drug therapies in chronic diseases rely heavily on the patient's adherence, since drugs that are not taken are ineffective and leave the patient at high risk of developing clinical complications. Given the absence of new drugs for the treatment of hypertension, drug adherence is particularly important in these patients to improve blood pressure control. The book further investigates a new aspect, namely the importance of drug adherence in clinical trials and studies and draws attention to the limits of developing drugs without significant information on drug adherence. Several chapters are dedicated to the importance of adherence in specific forms of hypertension, such as resistant hypertension, dyslipidemia and hypertension associated with cardiovascular risk. As experts confronted with drug adherence in their daily practice, the authors analyse the real effectiveness of several interventions aimed at improving drug adherence and put particular emphasis on the importance of an interdisciplinary approach involving nurses and pharmacists. The volume also includes a careful analysis of the health and economic impact of poor adherence. The book is aimed at physicians, pharmacists, students and all health professionals dealing not only with hypertension or dyslipidemia, but also with chronic asymptomatic diseases such as diabetes, HIV or chronic respiratory diseases

Epigenetic Dysfunction in Turner Syndrome Immune Cells

Turner syndrome (TS) is a chromosomal condition associated with partial or complete absence of the X chromosome that involves characteristic findings in multiple organ systems. In addition to well-known clinical characteristics such as short stature and gonadal failure, TS is also associated with T cell immune alterations and chronic otitis media, suggestive of a possible immune deficiency. Recently, ubiquitously transcribed tetratricopeptide repeat on the X chromosome (UTX), a histone H3 lysine 27 (H3K27) demethylase, has been identified as a downregulated gene in TS immune cells. Importantly, UTX is an X-linked gene that escapes X-chromosome inactivation and thus is haploinsufficient in TS. Mice with T cell-specific UTX deficiency have impaired clearance of chronic viral infection due to decreased frequencies of T follicular helper (Tfh) cells, which are critical for B cell antibody generation. In parallel, TS patients have decreased Tfh frequencies in peripheral blood. Together, these findings suggest that haploinsufficiency of the X-linked UTX gene in TS T cells underlies an immune deficit, which may manifest as increased predisposition to chronic otitis media

Text-mining solutions for biomedical research: enabling integrative biology

In response to the unbridled growth of information in literature and biomedical databases, researchers require efficient means of handling and extracting information. As well as providing background information for research, scientific publications can be processed to transform textual information into database content or complex networks and can be integrated with existing knowledge resources to suggest novel hypotheses. Information extraction and text data analysis can be particularly relevant and helpful in genetics and biomedical research, in which up-to-date information about complex processes involving genes, proteins and phenotypes is crucial. Here we explore the latest advancements in automated literature analysis and its contribution to innovative research approaches