Pensamiento crítico en estudiantes del Grado de Educación Social

El presente artículo se centra en una investigación cualitativa sobre las creencias acerca del pensamiento crítico que poseen 72 estudiantes de tercer curso del Grado de Educación Social de la Universidad de Huelva (España). Los resultados, en consonancia con otras investigaciones, muestran que el alumnado tiene un conocimiento poco detallado aunque certero de lo que significa dicha competencia, ofreciendo explicaciones generales que van en acuerdo con las ideas que tienen acerca de la Universidad, la Sociedad y la finalidad de la Educación Social. La buena disposición que muestra la mayoría del alumnado investigado choca con escasos hábitos para el pensamiento crítico, achacándolo a una formación reproductiva, a la influencia perniciosa de determinados poderes sociales y a un no-saber-hacer-y-actuar de los futuros educadores sociales.This article focuses on qualitative research on the beliefs about critical thinking held by 72 third year students of the Social Education Degree of the University of Huelva (Spain). The results show that the students have a little detailed but accurate knowledge of what this competence means, offering general explanations that are in line with the ideas they have about the University, Society and the purpose of Social Education. The willingness shown by the majority of the students researched clashes with scarce habits for critical thinking, blaming it on reproductive training, the pernicious influence of certain social powers and the non-know-how-to-act of future social educators

Detection of arousal and valence from facial expressions and physiological responses evoked by different types of stressors

Automatically detecting mental state such as stress from video images of the face could support evaluating stress responses in applicants for high risk jobs or contribute to timely stress detection in challenging operational settings (e.g., aircrew, command center operators). Challenges in automatically estimating mental state include the generalization of models across contexts and across participants. We here aim to create robust models by training them using data from different contexts and including physiological features. Fifty-one participants were exposed to different types of stressors (cognitive, social evaluative and startle) and baseline variants of the stressors. Video, electrocardiogram (ECG), electrodermal activity (EDA) and self-reports (arousal and valence) were recorded. Logistic regression models aimed to classify between high and low arousal and valence across participants, where “high” and “low” were defined relative to the center of the rating scale. Accuracy scores of different models were evaluated: models trained and tested within a specific context (either a baseline or stressor variant of a task), intermediate context (baseline and stressor variant of a task), or general context (all conditions together). Furthermore, for these different model variants, only the video data was included, only the physiological data, or both video and physiological data. We found that all (video, physiological and video-physio) models could successfully distinguish between high- and low-rated arousal and valence, though performance tended to be better for (1) arousal than valence, (2) specific context than intermediate and general contexts, (3) video-physio data than video or physiological data alone. Automatic feature selection resulted in inclusion of 3–20 features, where the models based on video-physio data usually included features from video, ECG and EDA. Still, performance of video-only models approached the performance of video-physio models. Arousal and valence ratings by three experienced human observers scores based on part of the video data did not match with self-reports. In sum, we showed that it is possible to automatically monitor arousal and valence even in relatively general contexts and better than humans can (in the given circumstances), and that non-contact video images of faces capture an important part of the information, which has practical advantages

Validation of disease-specific biomarkers for the early detection of bronchopulmonary dysplasia

Objective: To demonstrate and validate the improvement of current risk stratification for bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) early after birth by plasma protein markers (sialic acid-binding Ig-like lectin 14 (SIGLEC-14), basal cell adhesion molecule (BCAM), angiopoietin-like 3 protein (ANGPTL-3)) in extremely premature infants. Methods and results: Proteome screening in first-week-of-life plasma samples of n = 52 preterm infants <32 weeks gestational age (GA) on two proteomic platforms (SomaLogic®, Olink-Proteomics®) confirmed three biomarkers with significant predictive power: BCAM, SIGLEC-14, and ANGPTL-3. We demonstrate high sensitivity (0.92) and specificity (0.86) under consideration of GA, show the proteins’ critical contribution to the predictive power of known clinical risk factors, e.g., birth weight and GA, and predicted the duration of mechanical ventilation, oxygen supplementation, as well as neonatal intensive care stay. We confirmed significant predictive power for BPD cases when switching to a clinically applicable method (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) in an independent sample set (n = 25, p < 0.001) and demonstrated disease specificity in different cohorts of neonatal and adult lung disease. Conclusion: While successfully addressing typical challenges of clinical biomarker studies, we demonstrated the potential of BCAM, SIGLEC-14, and ANGPTL-3 to inform future clinical decision making in the preterm infant at risk for BPD. Trial registration: Deutsches Register Klinische Studien (DRKS) No. 00004600; https://www.drks.de. Impact: The urgent need for biomarkers that enable early decision making and personalized monitoring strategies in preterm infants with BPD is challenged by targeted marker analyses, cohort size, and disease heterogeneity.We demonstrate the potential of the plasma proteins BCAM, SIGLEC-14, and ANGPTL-3 to identify infants with BPD early after birth while improving the predictive power of clinical variables, confirming the robustness toward proteome assays and proving disease specificity.Our comprehensive analysis enables a phase-III clinical trial that allows full implementation of the biomarkers into clinical routine to enable early risk stratification in preterms with BPD

European Respiratory Society guideline on long-term management of children with bronchopulmonary dysplasia.

This document provides recommendations for monitoring and treatment of children in whom bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) has been established and who have been discharged from the hospital, or who were >36 weeks of postmenstrual age. The guideline was based on predefined Population, Intervention, Comparison and Outcomes (PICO) questions relevant for clinical care, a systematic review of the literature and assessment of the evidence using the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) approach. After considering the balance of desirable (benefits) and undesirable (burden, adverse effects) consequences of the intervention, the certainty of the evidence, and values, the task force made conditional recommendations for monitoring and treatment of BPD based on very low to low quality of evidence. We suggest monitoring with lung imaging using ionising radiation in a subgroup only, for example severe BPD or recurrent hospitalisations, and monitoring with lung function in all children. We suggest to give individual advice to parents regarding daycare attendance. With regards to treatment, we suggest the use of bronchodilators in a subgroup only, for example asthma-like symptoms, or reversibility in lung function; no treatment with inhaled or systemic corticosteroids; natural weaning of diuretics by the relative decrease in dose with increasing weight gain if diuretics are started in the neonatal period; and treatment with supplemental oxygen with a saturation target range of 90-95%. A multidisciplinary approach for children with established severe BPD after the neonatal period into adulthood is preferable. These recommendations should be considered until new and urgently needed evidence becomes available

U-BIOPRED clinical adult asthma clusters linked to a subset of sputum omics

Background: Asthma is a heterogeneous disease in which there is a differential response to asthma treatments. This heterogeneity needs to be evaluated so that a personalized management approach can be provided. Objectives: We stratified patients with moderate-to-severe asthma based on clinicophysiologic parameters and performed an omics analysis of sputum. Methods: Partition-around-medoids clustering was applied to a training set of 266 asthmatic participants from the European Unbiased Biomarkers for the Prediction of Respiratory Diseases Outcomes (U-BIOPRED) adult cohort using 8 prespecified clinic-physiologic variables. This was repeated in a separate validation set of 152 asthmatic patients. The clusters were compared based on sputum proteomics and transcriptomics data. Results: Four reproducible and stable clusters of asthmatic patients were identified. The training set cluster T1 consists of patients with well-controlled moderate-to-severe asthma, whereas cluster T2 is a group of patients with late-onset severe asthma with a history of smoking and chronic airflow obstruction. Cluster T3 is similar to cluster T2 in terms of chronic airflow obstruction but is composed of nonsmokers. Cluster T4 is predominantly composed of obese female patients with uncontrolled severe asthma with increased exacerbations but with normal lung function. The validation set exhibited similar clusters, demonstrating reproducibility of the classification. There were significant differences in sputum proteomics and transcriptomics between the clusters. The severe asthma clusters (T2, T3, and T4) had higher sputum eosinophilia than cluster T1, with no differences in sputum neutrophil counts and exhaled nitric oxide and serum IgE levels. Conclusion: Clustering based on clinicophysiologic parameters yielded 4 stable and reproducible clusters that associate with different pathobiological pathways