Efficacy and Tolerability of 6-Month Treatment with Tamsulosin Plus the Hexanic Extract of Serenoa repens versus Tamsulosin Plus 5-Alpha-Reductase Inhibitors for Moderate-to-Severe LUTS-BPH Patients: Results of a Paired Matched Clinical Study

The objective of this subset analysis was to evaluate and compare the efficacy and tolerability of two combination treatments for men with moderate-to-severe lower urinary tract symptoms associated with benign prostatic hyperplasia (LUTS/BPH). Data were from a real-world, open-label, prospective, and multicenter study performed in outpatient urology clinics. Men with moderate-to-severe LUTS/BPH received 6-month treatment with tamsulosin (TAM) in combination with either the hexanic extract of S. repens (HESr) or a 5-alpha-reductase inhibitor (5ARI). Changes in urinary symptoms and quality of life were measured using the IPSS and BII questionnaires, respectively. Treatment tolerability was assessed by recording adverse effects (AEs). Patients in the two study groups were matched using iterative and propensity score matching approaches. After iterative matching, data were available from 136 patients (n = 68 treated with TAM + 5ARI, n = 68 with TAM + HESr). After 6 months of treatment, mean (SD) IPSS total score improved by 7.7 (6.3) and 6.7 (5.0) points in the TAM + 5ARI and TAM + HESr groups, respectively (p = 0.272); mean BII total scores improved by 3.1 (2.9) and 2.9 (2.4) points (p = 0.751), respectively. AEs were reported by 26.5% and 10.3% of patients in the same groups, mostly affecting sexual function (p < 0.027). When used in a real-world setting to treat patients with moderate-severe LUTS/BPH, 6-month treatment with TAM + HESr was as effective as TAM + 5ARI, but with better tolerability. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Clinical intervals and diagnostic characteristics in a cohort of prostate cancer patients in Spain: a multicentre observational study

Background: Little is known about the healthcare process for patients with prostate cancer, mainly because hospital-based data are not routinely published. The main objective of this study was to determine the clinical characteristics of prostate cancer patients, the diagnostic process and the factors that might influence intervals from consultation to diagnosis and from diagnosis to treatment. Methods: We conducted a multicentre, cohort study in seven hospitals in Spain. Patients' characteristics and diagnostic and therapeutic variables were obtained from hospital records and patients' structured interviews from October 2010 to September 2011. We used a multilevel logistic regression model to examine the association between patient care intervals and various variables influencing these intervals (age, BMI, educational level, ECOG, first specialist consultation, tumour stage, PSA, Gleason score, and presence of symptoms) and calculated the odds ratio (OR) and the interquartile range (IQR). To estimate the random inter-hospital variability, we used the median odds ratio (MOR). Results: 470 patients with prostate cancer were included. Mean age was 67.8 (SD: 7.6) years and 75.4 % were physically active. Tumour size was classified as T1 in 41.0 % and as T2 in 40 % of patients, their median Gleason score was 6.0 (IQR:1.0), and 36.1 % had low risk cancer according to the D'Amico classification. The median interval between first consultation and diagnosis was 89 days (IQR:123.5) with no statistically significant variability between centres. Presence of symptoms was associated with a significantly longer interval between first consultation and diagnosis than no symptoms (OR:1.93, 95%CI 1.29-2.89). The median time between diagnosis and first treatment (therapeutic interval) was 75.0 days (IQR:78.0) and significant variability between centres was found (MOR:2.16, 95%CI 1.45-4.87). This interval was shorter in patients with a high PSA value (p = 0.012) and a high Gleason score (p = 0.026). Conclusions: Most incident prostate cancer patients in Spain are diagnosed at an early stage of an adenocarcinoma. The period to complete the diagnostic process is approximately three months whereas the therapeutic intervals vary among centres and are shorter for patients with a worse prognosis. The presence of prostatic symptoms, PSA level, and Gleason score influence all the clinical intervals differently

On Distant Speech Recognition for Home Automation

The official version of this draft is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16226-3_7International audienceIn the framework of Ambient Assisted Living, home automation may be a solution for helping elderly people living alone at home. This study is part of the Sweet-Home project which aims at developing a new home automation system based on voice command to improve support and well-being of people in loss of autonomy. The goal of the study is vocal order recognition with a focus on two aspects: distance speech recognition and sentence spotting. Several ASR techniques were evaluated on a realistic corpus acquired in a 4-room flat equipped with microphones set in the ceiling. This distant speech French corpus was recorded with 21 speakers who acted scenarios of activities of daily living. Techniques acting at the decoding stage, such as our novel approach called Driven Decoding Algorithm (DDA), gave better speech recognition results than the baseline and other approaches. This solution which uses the two best SNR channels and a priori knowledge (voice commands and distress sentences) has demonstrated an increase in recognition rate without introducing false alarms

Research misconduct in the fields of ethics and philosophy: researchers’ perceptions in Spain

This is the Author’s Original Manuscript (AOM) (also called a “preprint”) sent to review to Science and Engineering Ethics on 11/10/2020. The final version of the article was published online at SEE on 21/01/2021. The online version is available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-021-00278-wEmpirical studies have revealed a disturbing prevalence of research misconduct in a wide variety of disciplines, although not, to date, in the areas of ethics and philosophy. This study aims to provide empirical evidence on perceptions of how serious a problem research misconduct is in these two disciplines in Spain, particularly regarding the effects that the model used to evaluate academics’ research performance may have on their ethical behaviour. The methodological triangulation applied in the study combines a questionnaire, a debate at the annual meeting of scientific association, and in-depth interviews. Of the 541 questionnaires sent out, 201 responses were obtained (37.1% of the total sample), with a significant difference in the participation of researchers in philosophy (30.5%) and in ethics (52.8%); 26 researchers took part in the debate and 14 interviews were conducted. The questionnaire results reveal that 91.5% of the respondents considered research misconduct to be on the rise; 63.2% considered at least three of the fraudulent practices referred to in the study to be commonplace, and 84.1% identified two or more such practices. The researchers perceived a high prevalence of duplicate publication (66.5%) and self-plagiarism (59.0%), use of personal influence (57.5%) and citation manipulation (44.0%), in contrast to a low perceived incidence of data falsification or fabrication (10.0%). The debate and the interviews corroborated these data. Researchers associated the spread of these misconducts with the research evaluation model applied in Spain

Ubiquitous healthy diatoms in the deep sea confirm deep carbon injection by the biological pump

The role of the ocean as a sink for CO2 is partially dependent on the downward transport of phytoplankton cells packaged within fast-sinking particles. However, whether such fast-sinking mechanisms deliver fresh organic carbon down to the deep bathypelagic sea and whether this mechanism is prevalent across the ocean requires confirmation. Here we report the ubiquitous presence of healthy photosynthetic cells, dominated by diatoms, down to 4,000 m in the deep dark ocean. Decay experiments with surface phytoplankton suggested that the large proportion (18%) of healthy photosynthetic cells observed, on average, in the dark ocean, requires transport times from a few days to a few weeks, corresponding to sinking rates (124–732 m d−1) comparable to those of fast-sinking aggregates and faecal pellets. These results confirm the expectation that fast-sinking mechanisms inject fresh organic carbon into the deep sea and that this is a prevalent process operating across the global oligotrophic ocean

A comprehensive overview of radioguided surgery using gamma detection probe technology

The concept of radioguided surgery, which was first developed some 60 years ago, involves the use of a radiation detection probe system for the intraoperative detection of radionuclides. The use of gamma detection probe technology in radioguided surgery has tremendously expanded and has evolved into what is now considered an established discipline within the practice of surgery, revolutionizing the surgical management of many malignancies, including breast cancer, melanoma, and colorectal cancer, as well as the surgical management of parathyroid disease. The impact of radioguided surgery on the surgical management of cancer patients includes providing vital and real-time information to the surgeon regarding the location and extent of disease, as well as regarding the assessment of surgical resection margins. Additionally, it has allowed the surgeon to minimize the surgical invasiveness of many diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, while still maintaining maximum benefit to the cancer patient. In the current review, we have attempted to comprehensively evaluate the history, technical aspects, and clinical applications of radioguided surgery using gamma detection probe technology

The European Solar Telescope

The European Solar Telescope (EST) is a project aimed at studying the magnetic connectivity of the solar atmosphere, from the deep photosphere to the upper chromosphere. Its design combines the knowledge and expertise gathered by the European solar physics community during the construction and operation of state-of-the-art solar telescopes operating in visible and near-infrared wavelengths: the Swedish 1m Solar Telescope, the German Vacuum Tower Telescope and GREGOR, the French Télescope Héliographique pour l’Étude du Magnétisme et des Instabilités Solaires, and the Dutch Open Telescope. With its 4.2 m primary mirror and an open configuration, EST will become the most powerful European ground-based facility to study the Sun in the coming decades in the visible and near-infrared bands. EST uses the most innovative technological advances: the first adaptive secondary mirror ever used in a solar telescope, a complex multi-conjugate adaptive optics with deformable mirrors that form part of the optical design in a natural way, a polarimetrically compensated telescope design that eliminates the complex temporal variation and wavelength dependence of the telescope Mueller matrix, and an instrument suite containing several (etalon-based) tunable imaging spectropolarimeters and several integral field unit spectropolarimeters. This publication summarises some fundamental science questions that can be addressed with the telescope, together with a complete description of its major subsystems