New expectations in the treatment of anemia in chronic kidney disease

AbstractThe new drugs developed for the treatment of anemia in chronic kidney disease patients, together with their mechanisms of action are reviewed. At present, many of them are already in advanced stages of clinical trials and is expected to be incorporated into the therapeutic arsenal in the coming years. The potential benefits and possible limitations are also described

Silent Speech Interfaces for Speech Restoration: A Review

This work was supported in part by the Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (AEI) under Grant PID2019-108040RB-C22/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. The work of Jose A. Gonzalez-Lopez was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under Juan de la Cierva-Incorporation Fellowship (IJCI-2017-32926).This review summarises the status of silent speech interface (SSI) research. SSIs rely on non-acoustic biosignals generated by the human body during speech production to enable communication whenever normal verbal communication is not possible or not desirable. In this review, we focus on the first case and present latest SSI research aimed at providing new alternative and augmentative communication methods for persons with severe speech disorders. SSIs can employ a variety of biosignals to enable silent communication, such as electrophysiological recordings of neural activity, electromyographic (EMG) recordings of vocal tract movements or the direct tracking of articulator movements using imaging techniques. Depending on the disorder, some sensing techniques may be better suited than others to capture speech-related information. For instance, EMG and imaging techniques are well suited for laryngectomised patients, whose vocal tract remains almost intact but are unable to speak after the removal of the vocal folds, but fail for severely paralysed individuals. From the biosignals, SSIs decode the intended message, using automatic speech recognition or speech synthesis algorithms. Despite considerable advances in recent years, most present-day SSIs have only been validated in laboratory settings for healthy users. Thus, as discussed in this paper, a number of challenges remain to be addressed in future research before SSIs can be promoted to real-world applications. If these issues can be addressed successfully, future SSIs will improve the lives of persons with severe speech impairments by restoring their communication capabilities.Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (AEI) PID2019-108040RB-C22/AEI/10.13039/501100011033Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under Juan de la Cierva-Incorporation Fellowship IJCI-2017-3292

Integration of proteomics with transcriptomics and metallomics for the study of environmental issues

Comunicaciones a congreso

Sevoflurano como coadyuvante en la sedación durante ventilación mecánica en pacientes médicos de unidad de cuidados intensivos: resultados preliminares en una serie de casos

ResumenObjetivoExplicar nuestra experiencia preliminar en la utilización de sedación inhalatoria de manera estandarizada con sevoflurano mediante el dispositivo Anaesthetic Conserving Device en pacientes críticos intubados en nuestra unidad de cuidados intensivos (UCI).PacientesSe ha utilizado en 9 casos, en pacientes adultos (6 hombres y 3 mujeres), durante un periodo de 24meses.ResultadosSe ha conseguido una adecuada implantación del protocolo por parte de médicos y personal de enfermería, logrando los objetivos de sedación fijados en un primer momento (RASS 0, −2) y sin obtener resultados adversos ni efectos secundarios a nivel hepático y/o renal.ConclusionesEn nuestra limitada experiencia, la sedación inhalatoria con sevoflurano coadyuvante en UCI es una técnica segura y complementaria al uso de fármacos intravenosos, como propofol, remifentanilo y midazolam, utilizados habitualmente para lograr una sedación guiada por objetivos.AbstractObjectiveTo disclose our preliminary experience in inhalation sedation with sevoflorane in a standardized manner using the Anaesthetic Conserving Device in intubated, critically ill patients in our ICU.PatientsIt has been used in 9 cases of adult patients (6 men and 3 women) over 24 months.ResultsA proper implementation of the protocol by physicians and the nursing staff has been achieved, meeting the goals established for sedation (RASS 0, −2) free of hepatic or renal adverse outcomes or side effects.ConclusionsIn our limited experience, adjuvant inhalation sedation with sevoflorane in the ICU is safe and complementary to the use of intravenous drugs such as propofol, remifentanil and midazolam, which are currently commonly used to achieve goal-directed sedation

IAA : Información y actualidad astronómica (24)

Sumario : Máseres en el espacio.-- Venus Express.-- El complejo cinturón de asteroides.-- DECONSTRUCCIÓN Y otros ENSAYOS : Rotación diferencial y oscilaciones estelares.-- ACTUALIDAD.-- ENTRE BASTIDORES .-- HISTORIAS DE ASTRONOMÍA: El astrónomo de vista prodigiosa.-- CIENCIA: PILARES E INCERTIDUMBRES : Ondas gravitatorias.-- ACTIVIDADES IAA.Esta revista se publica con la ayuda FCT-08-0130 del Programa Nacional de Fomento de la Cultura Científica y Tecnológica 2008.N

High p27 protein levels in chronic lymphocytic leukemia are associated to low Myc and Skp2 expression, confer resistance to apoptosis and antagonize Myc effects on cell cycle

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.-- et al.Myc (c-Myc) counteracts p27 effects, and low p27 usually correlates with high Myc expression in human cancer. However there is no information on the co-expression of both genes in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). We found a lack of correlation between RNA and protein levels of p27 and Myc in CLL cells, so we determined the protein levels by immunoblot in 107 cases of CLL. We observed a high p27 protein expression in CLL compared to normal B cells. Ectopic p27 expression in a CLL-derived cell line resulted in cell death resistance. Surprisingly, Myc expression was very low or undetectable in most CLL cases analyzed, with a clear correlation between high p27 and low Myc protein levels. This was associated with low Skp2 expression, which is consistent with the Skp2 role in p27 degradation and with SKP2 being a Myc target gene. High Myc expression did not correlate with leukemia progression, despite that cell cycle-related Myc target genes were upregulated. However, biochemical analysis showed that the high p27 levels inhibited cyclin-Cdk complexes even in Myc expressing CLL cells. Our data suggest that the combination of high p27 and low Myc is a marker of CLL cells which is mediated by Skp2.The work has been funded by grants SAF11-23796 from MINECO and RD12/0036/0033 (to JL), and RD12/0036/0004 (to DC) and RD12/0036/0060 (to MAP) from Instituto Carlos III. These funding was co-sponsored by the European Union FEDER program. JC was recipient of a Fellowship from Fundación Marqués de Valdecilla and from the University of Cantabria.Peer Reviewe

Dual-Channel Speech Enhancement Based on Extended Kalman Filter Relative Transfer Function Estimation

This paper deals with speech enhancement in dual-microphone smartphones using beamforming along with postfiltering techniques. The performance of these algorithms relies on a good estimation of the acoustic channel and speech and noise statistics. In this work we present a speech enhancement system that combines the estimation of the relative transfer function (RTF) between microphones using an extended Kalman filter framework with a novel speech presence probability estimator intended to track the noise statistics’ variability. The available dual-channel information is exploited to obtain more reliable estimates of clean speech statistics. Noise reduction is further improved by means of postfiltering techniques that take advantage of the speech presence estimation. Our proposal is evaluated in different reverberant and noisy environments when the smartphone is used in both close-talk and far-talk positions. The experimental results show that our system achieves improvements in terms of noise reduction, low speech distortion and better speech intelligibility compared to other state-of-the-art approaches.Spanish MINECO/FEDER Project TEC2016-80141-PSpanish Ministry of Education through the National Program FPU under Grant FPU15/0416

Gingival hyperplasia as an early manifestation of acute myeloid leukemia. A retrospective review

We study the prevalence of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) among patients with severe gingival enlargement. We retrospective reviewed the clinical records of patients with severe gingival enlargement, between 2011 and 2018. The Saxer and Mühlemann index were used to measure inflammation and gingival bleeding. The degree of dental mobility was measured by the Nyman and Lindhe technique. A correlation analysis was carried out to test whether there were any associations among the different variables. In the sample of 117 patients the mean gingival bleeding index was ?3 and the degree of dental mobility ?2.3. 1.7% of patients, with severe gingival hyperplasia were diagnosed with AML. We found a significant association between gingival bleeding and aging (p<0.001) and a trend (0.54) between bleeding and suffering from AML. Severe gingival enlargement, abundant gingival bleeding, and dental mobility could be early manifestations of a blood dyscrasia

Deciphering the Role and Signaling Pathways of PKCα in Luminal A Breast Cancer Cells.

Protein kinase C (PKC) comprises a family of highly related serine/threonine protein kinases involved in multiple signaling pathways, which control cell proliferation, survival, and differentiation. The role of PKCα in cancer has been studied for many years. However, it has been impossible to establish whether PKCα acts as an oncogene or a tumor suppressor. Here, we analyzed the importance of PKCα in cellular processes such as proliferation, migration, or apoptosis by inhibiting its gene expression in a luminal A breast cancer cell line (MCF-7). Differential expression analysis and phospho-kinase arrays of PKCα-KD vs. PKCα-WT MCF-7 cells identified an essential set of proteins and oncogenic kinases of the JAK/STAT and PI3K/AKT pathways that were down-regulated, whereas IGF1R, ERK1/2, and p53 were up-regulated. In addition, unexpected genes related to the interferon pathway appeared down-regulated, while PLC, ERBB4, or PDGFA displayed up-regulated. The integration of this information clearly showed us the usefulness of inhibiting a multifunctional kinase-like PKCα in the first step to control the tumor phenotype. Then allowing us to design a possible selection of specific inhibitors for the unexpected up-regulated pathways to further provide a second step of treatment to inhibit the proliferation and migration of MCF-7 cells. The results of this study suggest that PKCα plays an oncogenic role in this type of breast cancer model. In addition, it reveals the signaling mode of PKCα at both gene expression and kinase activation. In this way, a wide range of proteins can implement a new strategy to fine-tune the control of crucial functions in these cells and pave the way for designing targeted cancer therapies.Work in Murcia was supported by grants BFU2017-87222-P (MICINN, Spain-FEDER) to S.C.-G. and J.C.G.-F. and Fundación Séneca Region de Murcia 20885/PI/18 to S.C.-G.S