Developing BIOTEL: A Semi-Automated Spreadsheet for Estimating Telomere Length and Biological Age

Introduction: Telomere length (TL) is causally related to aging and several age-related diseases. Specifically, the abundance of short telomeres and the rate of telomere shortening are strong determinants of cell homeostasis. Thus, tools for analyzing and manipulating TL data can vastly improve research focused on aging. Aim: In this study, we developed a semi-automated worksheet, BIOTEL, to generate individual and group TL statistics and provide a crude estimation of biological age.Results: Data from the Telomere Length Database Project (TLDP) were implemented to the spreadsheet to produce TL statistics. 150 participants were included, and their age was from 21 to 82 years, and the sex distribution ratio was 52.3%: 47.7% (male: female). Initially, we analyzed the fluorescence intensities of telomeres that were measured on metaphase spread leukocytes using three-dimensional (3D) quantitative-fluorescent in situ hybridization (Q-FISH) procedures (3D DNA FISH) with a (C3TA2)3 peptide nucleic acid (PNA) probe. Raw data of fluorescence intensities, demographic data and medical records from the participants were imported into the worksheet. Basic statistical analyses of TL data were provided through BIOTEL, including TL percentiles, specialized charts for TL distribution including the percentage of critically short telomeres (< 3,000 kilobases), individual telomere profiles, and graphs of biological age vs. chronological age.Conclusion: BIOTEL ver. 2.4 is a functional semi-automated worksheet that calculates a wide range of TL statistics, thus a useful tool with applications in research of telomeres and biological age estimation

Association of Mediterranean Diet Adherence with Disease Progression Characteristics, Lifestyle Factors and Overall Survival in Gastric Cancer Patients

© 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/BACKGROUND: The Mediterranean diet (MD) exerts a protective effect against cancer development and progression; however, the evaluation of its impact on gastric cancer still remains quite scarce. The present study aims to evaluate the association of MD adherence during the lifespan with disease progression characteristics, lifestyle factors and overall survival in gastric carcinoma patients. METHODS: This is an observational, cross-sectional study conducted on 186 gastric cancer patients followed up for a median time interval of 57 months or until death due to cancer disease. Tumor histopathological characteristics were retrieved from patients' medical records, while validated questionnaires assessing, immediately after the time of diagnosis, health-related quality of life, physical activity levels, sleep quality, depression, anxiety and MD adherence during the lifespan were used. RESULTS: Higher MD adherence during the lifespan was significantly associated with younger patients (p = 0.0106), regular smoking (p < 0.0001), abnormal BMI status (p < 0.0001), intestinal-type gastric carcinoma (p = 0.0111), high tumor histopathological grade (p < 0.0001) and earlier disease stage (p < 0.0001). Moreover, patients with elevated MD adherence during their lifespan showed significantly better health-related quality of life (p < 0.0001), higher physical activity levels (p < 0.0001), more adequate sleep quality (p < 0.0001) and lower prevalence of depression (p = 0.0003) and anxiety (p = 0.0006) compared to those with reduced MD adherence. In multiple regression analysis, elevated MD compliance during the lifespan was independently correlated with longer overall patient survival after adjustment for several confounders (Cox regression analysis, p = 0.0001). CONCLUSIONS: Higher MD adherence during the lifespan was associated with less advanced tumor histopathology characteristics and favorable mental and physical lifestyle factors. Moreover, higher MD adherence during the lifespan was also independently correlated with longer overall survival in gastric carcinoma patients. Thus, adopting a healthy dietary pattern like the MD during the lifespan may act as a preventive agent in combination with a healthy lifestyle against gastric cancer development and progression.Peer reviewe

The international face of Thessaloniki: the “Greek crisis,” the entrepreneurial mayor, and mainstream media discourses

Thessaloniki and its mayor have been portrayed quite favourably in international mainstream media compared to the Greek state after the 2008 economic crisis. The dominant (media) discourses on Greece interpret the crisis as the result of the failure of the Greek state to reform due to the prevalence of a traditional political culture over a modern one and the moral failures of the population. In the international media representations of Thessaloniki, the local government has been described as “exceptional” in its crisis management compared to the state and other local governments, and the city's mayor, Yiannis Boutaris, has been portrayed as a reform hero, due to the implemented entrepreneurial development strategy and the revamp of the city's image through place branding. Analysing the key role of international media in the production and reproduction of a place-branding campaign of Thessaloniki in international media by employing critical discourse analysis, the paper questions the favourable representations of the city compared to the Greek state during the same period. I argue that the serial repetition of positive images contributed to Thessaloniki being perceived as an example to be followed by other Greek local governments and the central state, acting as a best practice example for transformations envisioned on wider scales. The paper contributes to place-branding debates by illustrating the important role of international media in the dissemination of place brands, and by analysing how media representations of place may serve the legitimation of processes of neoliberalisation on scales wider than the concrete urban setting where they occur

Strange homelands: encountering the migrant on the contemporary Greek stage

This article examines three examples from recent Greek theatre which stage experiences of migrants and refugees against the backdrop of Greece’s growing internationalism and multiculturalism. In allowing migrants to author their own narratives of border-crossing and encountering their new “homeland”, those theatrical endeavours, I argue, attempt to break the monologism of Greek theatre and monolithic understandings of national identity thus opening up spaces for encountering diverse voices. In acknowledging the risks and tensions underpinning the migrant’s presence on stage, the article also applies pressure to questions of encounter, authenticity, representation and self-expression of migratory subjects and interrogates some ways in which they navigate their precarious space of belonging and author themselves in the context of contemporary Greek theatre

Geometrothermodynamics in Horava-Lifshitz gravity

We investigate the thermodynamic geometries of the most general static, spherically symmetric, topological black holes of the Ho\v{r}ava--Lifshitz gravity. In particular, we show that a Legendre invariant metric derived in the context of geometrothermodynamics for the equilibrium manifold reproduces correctly the phase transition structure of these black holes. Moreover, the limiting cases in which the mass, the entropy or the Hawking temperature vanish are also accompanied by curvature singularities which indicate the limit of applicability of the thermodynamics and the geometrothermodynamics of black holes. The Einstein limit and the case of a black hole with flat horizon are also investigated.Comment: Preliminary draf

Koinonia: verifiable e-voting with long-term privacy

Despite years of research, many existing e-voting systems do not adequately protect voting privacy. In most cases, such systems only achieve "immediate privacy", that is, they only protect voting privacy against today's adversaries, but not against a future adversary, who may possess better attack technologies like new cryptanalysis algorithms and/or quantum computers. Previous attempts at providing long-term voting privacy (dubbed "everlasting privacy" in the literature) often require additional trusts in parties that do not need to be trusted for immediate privacy. In this paper, we present a framework of adversary models regarding e-voting systems, and analyze possible threats to voting privacy under each model. Based on our analysis, we argue that secret-sharing based voting protocols offer a more natural and elegant privacy-preserving solution than their encryption-based counterparts. We thus design and implement Koinonia, a voting system that provides long-term privacy against powerful adversaries and enables anyone to verify that each ballot is well-formed and the tallying is done correctly. Our experiments show that Koinonia protects voting privacy with a reasonable performance