Impact of Socioeconomic Environment on Home Social Care Service Demand and Dependant Users

An aging population and rising life expectancy lead to an increased demand for social services to care for dependent users, among other factors. In Barcelona, home social care (HSC) services are a key agent in meeting this demand. However, demand is not evenly distributed among neighborhoods, and we hypothesized that this can be explained by the user's social environment. In this work, we describe the user's environment at a macroscopic level by the socioeconomic features of the neighborhood. This research aimed to gain a deeper understanding of the dependent user's socioeconomic environment and service needs. We applied descriptive analytics techniques to explore possible patterns linking HSC demand and other features. These methods include principal components analysis (PCA) and hierarchical clustering. The main analysis was made from the obtained boxplots, after these techniques were applied. We found that economic and disability factors, through users' mean net rent and degree of disability features, are related to the demand for home social care services. This relation is even clearer for the home-based social care services. These findings can be useful to distribute the services among areas by considering more features than the volume of users/population. Moreover, it can become helpful in future steps to develop a management tool to optimize HSC scheduling and staff assignment to improve the cost and quality of service. For future research, we believe that additional and more precise characteristics could provide deeper insights into HSC service demand

Gram-negative enterobacteria induce tolerogenic maturation in dexamethasone conditioned dendritic cells

Dendritic cells have been investigated in clinical trials, predominantly with the aim of stimulating immune responses against tumours or infectious diseases. Thus far, however, no clinical studies have taken advantage of their specific immunosuppressive potential. Tolerogenic DCs may represent a new therapeutic strategy for human immune-based diseases, such as Crohn's disease, where the perturbations of the finely tuned balance between the immune system and the microflora result in disease. In the present report, we describe the generation of tolerogenic DCs from healthy donors and Crohn's disease patients using clinical-grade reagents in combination with dexamethasone as immunosuppressive agent and characterize their response to maturation stimuli. Interestingly, we found out that dexamethasone-conditioned DCs keep their tolerogenic properties to Gram-negative bacteria. Other findings included in this study demonstrate that the combination of dexamethasone with a specific cytokine cocktail yielded clinical-grade DCs with the following characteristics: a semi-mature phenotype, a pronounced shift towards anti-inflammatory versus inflammatory cytokine production and low T-cell stimulatory properties. Importantly, in regard to their clinical application, the tolerogenic phenotype of DCs remained stable after the elimination of dexamethasone and after a second stimulation with LPS or bacteria. All these properties make this cell product suitable to be tested in clinical trials of inflammatory conditions including Crohn's disease

Off/On Fluorescent Nanoparticles for Tunable High-Temperature Threshold Sensing

Herein, a versatile threshold temperature sensor based on the glass transition temperature-triggered fluorescence activation of a dye/developer duo, encapsulated in polymeric nanoparticles is reported. The emission enhancement, detectable even by unaided eye is completed within a narrow temperature range and activates at adjustable threshold temperatures up to 200 °C. Fluorescence is chosen as sensing probe due to its high detection sensitivity together with an advanced spatial and temporal resolution. The strategy is based on nanoparticles prepared from standard thermoplastic polymers, a fluorescence developer, and the commercially available Rhodamine B base dye, a well-known and widely used fluorescent molecule. By making nanoparticles of different thermoplastic polymers, fast, abrupt, and irreversible disaggregation induced fluorescence enhancement, with tunable threshold temperature depending on the nanoparticles polymer glass transition is achieved. As a proof-of-concept for the versatility of this novel family of NPs, their use for sensing the thermal history of environments and surfaces exposed to the threshold temperature is showed

A conspect of chromosome numbers in tribe Delphinieae (Ranunculaceae)

A literature survey of chromosome number counts was made for the tribe Delphinieae, which includes the genera Aconitum, Delphinium, Consolida, and Aconitella. 1097 reports are presented corresponding to 327 species, representing about 40 % of the total species number of the tribe. The basic number is universally x = 8 and ploidy levels found are 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, 6x, and 8x. Some disploidy cases have been described, although this phenomenon is very rare within the tribe. Poliploidy is more frequent in perennial taxa (Aconitum and Delphinium) whereas in annuals disploidy takes more importance. In 13 species more than one different chromosome number has been reported and 54 species showed different ploidy levels. Our objective was to provide a complete information on chromosome numbers of Delphinieae species and to point out gaps that need to be addressed.PB91-268 and AMB97-375 from DGICYT (Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, Spain

Revealing the topological nature of the bond order wave in a strongly correlated quantum system

8openJulià-Farré, Sergi; González-Cuadra, Daniel; Patscheider, Alexander; Mark, Manfred J.; Ferlaino, Francesca; Lewenstein, Maciej; Barbiero, Luca; Dauphin, AlexandreJulià-Farré, Sergi; González-Cuadra, Daniel; Patscheider, Alexander; Mark, Manfred J.; Ferlaino, Francesca; Lewenstein, Maciej; Barbiero, Luca; Dauphin, Alexandr

Preserved Error-Monitoring in Borderline Personality Disorder Patients with and without Non-Suicidal Self-Injury Behaviors

Background: The presence of non-suicidal self-injury acts in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is very prevalent. These behaviors are a public health concern and have become a poorly understood phenomenon in the community. It has been proposed that the commission of non-suicidal self-injury might be related to a failure in the brain network regulating executive functions. Previous studies have shown that BPD patients present an impairment in their capacity to monitor actions and conflicts associated with the performance of certain actions, which suppose an important aspect of cognitive control. Method: We used Event Related Potentials to examine the behavioral and electrophysiological indexes associated with the error monitoring in two BPD outpatients groups (17 patients each) differentiated according to the presence or absence of non-suicidal self-injury behaviors. We also examined 17 age- and intelligence- matched healthy control participants. Results: The three groups did not show significant differences in event-related potentials associated with errors (Error-Related Negativity and Pe) nor in theta power increase following errors. Conclusions: This is the first study investigating the behavioral and electrophysiological error monitoring indexes in BPD patients characterized by their history of non-suicidal self-injury behaviors. Our results show that error monitoring is preserved in BPD patients and suggest that non-suicidal self-injury acts are not related to a dysfunction in the cognitive control mechanisms