Gastroesophageal reflux episodes in asthmatic patients and their temporal relation with sleep architecture

Gastroesophageal reflux (GER) is common in asthma patients and can contribute to sleep disruption. The aim of the present study was to determine the time-related distribution of GER events together with their impact on sleep in asthmatic subjects with GER disease symptoms. The inclusion criteria were: 18-65 years, controlled moderate to severe asthma and GER-compatible clinical evidence. The exclusion criteria were: chronic obstructive lung disease, smoking, infections of the upper airways, use of oral corticosteroids, other co-morbidities, pregnancy, sleep-related disorders, night-time shift work, and the use of substances with impact on sleep. Asthmatic patients with nocturnal symptoms were excluded. All-night polysomnography and esophageal pH monitoring were recorded simultaneously. Of the 147 subjects selected, 31 patients and 31 controls were included. Seventeen patients were classified as DeMeester positive and 14 as DeMeester negative. Both groups displayed similar outcomes when general variables were considered. Sleep stage modification one minute prior to GER was observed in the DeMeester-positive group. Awakening was the most frequent occurrence at GER onset and during the 1-min period preceding 38% of the nocturnal GER. Sleep stage 2 was also prevalent and preceded 36% of GER events. In the DeMeester-negative group, awakening was the most frequent response before and during GER. Modifications in sleep stages, arousals or awakenings were associated with 75% of the total GER events analyzed during the period of one minute before and after the fall of esophageal pH below 4 in the DeMeester-positive group. These data provide evidence that sleep modifications precede the GER events in asthmatic patients

Avaliação das atividades antibacteriana, tripanocida e citotóxica do extrato hidroalcóolico das raízes de Tradescantia sillamontana Matuda (Veludo Branco) (Commelinaceae)

RESUMO O objetivo deste estudo foi avaliar o efeito antibacteriano e tripanocida in vitro do extrato hidroalcóolico das raízes de Tradescantia sillamontana Matuda (Commelinaceae), conhecida popularmente como veludo branco. Foi avaliada a atividade antibacteriana in vitro frente às bactérias Streptococcus mitis (CIM = 100 µg/mL; CMB = 150 µg/mL), Streptococcus mutans (CIM = 200 µg/mL; CMB = 220 µg/mL), Streptococcus sanguinis (CIM = 400 µg/mL; CMB = 425 µg/mL), Streptococcus sobrinus (CIM = 400 µg/mL; CMB = 420 µg/mL) e Bacteroides fragilis (CIM = 400 µg/mL; CMB = 430 µg/mL) pelo método de diluição em caldo. Os protozoários da família tripanossomatídeo causam doenças tropicais que costumam ser negligenciadas que costumam ser como a tripanossomíase, para a qual estão disponíveis poucos medicamentos. Neste contexto, o extrato hidroalcóolico das raízes de T. sillamontana também foi avaliado frente às formas tripomastigotas da cepa Y de Trypanosoma cruzi, com promissora atividade frente a este protozoário (IC50 = 2,4 µg/mL). Quando avaliada a atividade citotóxica frente a fibroblastos da linhagem LLCMK2, o extrato apresentou moderada citotoxicidade (CC50 = 480,37 µg/mL). Os resultados ora apresentados para o extrato hidroalcóolico das raízes de Tradescantia sillamontana Matuda demonstraram promissoras atividades antibacteriana e tripanocida, sendo uma fonte alternativa de produtos naturais com atividades contra T. cruzi e algumas bactérias do gênero Streptococcus e Bacteroides

Determinantes da demanda brasileira por importação de arroz do Mercosul

Desde meados da década de 1990, o arroz é um dos principais produtos agrícolas importados pelo Brasil, principalmente do Uruguai e da Argentina, o que frequentemente gera questionamentos dos orizicultores brasileiros. O objetivo deste artigo é analisar os determinantes das importações brasileiras deste cereal, e para tanto, apresenta-se um modelo econômico visando analisar esta relação comercial no Mercosul, assumindo que as importações brasileiras de arroz são resultantes de um excesso de demanda doméstica pelo cereal. Utiliza-se um Modelo Autorregressivo Vetorial - VAR estrutural. Os resultados mostram uma forte relação do volume importado com o preço doméstico do arroz e com a taxa de câmbio. Verifica-se uma significativa participação do preço de importação na explicação do preço doméstico. A quantidade importada de arroz responde positivamente a um choque positivo no preço doméstico e negativamente a choques positivos no preço de importação e na taxa de câmbio. Verifica-se uma relação de bicausalidade entre o preço doméstico e o preço de importação de arroz. Uma das principais conclusões é que a demanda por importação reage imediatamente a choques no preço doméstico e taxa de câmbio, e posteriormente, a choques no preço de importação, sugerindo dificuldades em substituir imediatamente o volume importado no mercado doméstico.<br>Since the middle of the 90's, rice has been one of the main agricultural products imported by Brazil, particularly from Uruguay and Argentina, which very often raises concerns to Brazilian rice producers. This paper aims to analyze the factors that determine the Brazilian rice imports, and therefore proposes an economic model to examine these trade flows in Mercosur, assuming that the Brazilian rice imports results from a domestic demand surplus. An econometric model Vector Auto-regressive (structural VAR) is applied. Results show a strong relationship among rice imports and domestic rice prices, as well as the exchange rate. A significant effect of import prices over domestic prices has been verified. The quantity of rice imports relates positively to an increase of domestic prices and negatively to an increase of import prices, as well as increases in the exchange rate. A bicausality relationship is verified between domestic and import prices for rice. One of the major conclusions is that Brazilian rice imports answer immediately to changes in domestic prices and exchange rate and react one quarter later to changes in import prices suggesting a delay over rice importers to substitute imports by the domestic rice

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press