Papel de los polifenoles en la EII: nuevas propuestas relacionadas con el microbioma y con el succinato

La Enfermedad Inflamatoria Intestinal (EII) se caracteriza por ser un trastorno crónico inflamatorio que afecta al tracto gastrointestinal. Se clasifica a su vez en dos tipos: enfermedad de Crohn y colitis ulcerosa. Actualmente es una enfermedad cuya preva lencia e incidencia está en aumento, por lo que surge la necesidad de investigar y evaluar nuevas dianas terapéuticas como alternativa al tratamiento convencional. Por ello, este estudio se centra en tres elementos diferentes, polifenoles, succinato y micr obioma, con el objetivo de comprender sus posibles mecanismos de acción y las ventajas que pueden aportar a la terapéutica de la enfermedad. Los polifenoles intervienen en múltiples rutas de señalización relacionadas con la inflamación, además de poseer pr opiedades antioxidantes, por lo que sería de interés profundizar en el uso de estos compuestos naturales durante la enfermedad.Universidad de Sevilla. Grado en Farmaci

El desarrollo histórico del conocimiento sobre las disoluciones y su relación con la Teoría Cinético-Molecular. Implicaciones didácticas

El conocimiento sobre la naturaleza de la materia y sus propiedades tiene un papel importante en la educación científica. Los currículos en nuestro país incorporan la enseñanza de la teoría cinético-molecular (TCM), asumiendo que aspectos básicos de esta teoría pueden ser comprendidos, asimilados y aplicados por el alumnado de la Educación Secundaria Obligatoria. Al mismo tiempo, se han ido acumulando evidencias que muestran que el aprendizaje de la naturaleza de la materia presenta grandes dificultades, y se reconoce que una proporción alta de estudiantes no consigue una comprensión adecuada de aspectos básicos de ella.En este artículo se intenta arrojar luz sobre esta cuestión recurriendo al análisis histórico. En primer lugar, se hace un recorrido a través de hitos importantes que han conducido a la construcción de la TCM. En segundo lugar, se analizan las teorías y modelos más utilizados a lo largo de la historia para explicar los fenómenos de disolución, relacionándolos con la TCM. Finalmente, se plantean algunas implicaciones didácticas.Knowledge about the nature of matter and its properties has got an important role in science education. The curricula in our country include the teaching of the kinetic-molecular theory (KMT), assuming that basic aspects of this theory can be understood, assimilated and used by pupils of compulsory secondary education. At the same time, evidences showing that the learning of the nature of matter presents great difficulties have been accumulated, and the fact that a high proportion of students do not get a proper understanding of basic aspects of nature of matter has been recognised. In this article, we attempt to shed light on this issue by resorting to historical analysis. First, a tour through important milestones that have led to the construction of the KMT is made. Second, theories and models used throughout history to explain the phenomena of dissolution are discussed in relation to the KMT. Finally, some educational implications are formulated

I want to believe: Prior beliefs influence judgments about the effectiveness of both alternative and scientific medicine

Previous research suggests that people may develop stronger causal illusions when the existence of a causal relationship is consistent with their prior beliefs. In the present study, we hypothesized that prior pseudoscientific beliefs will influence judgments about the effectiveness of both alternative medicine and scientific medicine. Participants (N = 98) were exposed to an adaptation of the standard causal illusion task in which they had to judge whether two fictitious treatments, one described as conventional medicine and the other as alternative medicine, could heal the crises caused by two different syndromes. Since both treatments were completely ineffective, those believing that any of the two medicines worked were exhibiting a causal illusion. Participants also responded to the Pseudoscience Endorsement Scale (PES) and some questions about trust in alternative therapies that were taken from the Survey on the Social Perception of Science and Technology conducted by FECYT. The results replicated the causal illusion effect and extended them by revealing an interaction between the prior pseudoscientific beliefs and the scientific/pseudoscientific status of the fictitious treatment. Individuals reporting stronger pseudoscientific beliefs were more vulnerable to the illusion in both scenarios, whereas participants with low adherence to pseudoscientific beliefs seemed to be more resistant to the illusion in the alternative medicine scenario. Alternative medicine refers to a wide range of health practices not included in the healthcare system and not considered conventional or scientific medicine (World Health Organization, 2022). A common feature of alternative therapies is the lack of scientific evidence on their effectiveness, with some popular examples being homeopathy (Hawke et al., 2018; Peckham et al., 2019) and reiki (Zimpel et al., 2020). Therefore, they often can be considered pseudoscientific (i.e., practices or beliefs that are presented as scientific but are unsupported by scientific evidence; Fasce and Picó, 2019). Understanding why some people rely on alternative medicine despite this lack of evidence is relevant, since its usage can pose a threat to a person’s health (Freckelton, 2012; Hellmuth et al., 2019; Lilienfeld, 2007), either by replacing evidence-based treatments (Chang et al., 2006; Johnson et al., 2018a, 2018b; Mujar et al., 2017) or by reducing their effectiveness (Awortwe et al., 2018). In this research, we will assume that people assess the effectiveness of a given treatment (whether scientific or alternative) by estimating the causal link between the treatment (potential cause) and symptom relief (outcome). To achieve this, people can resort to various information sources, but they could certainly use their own experience of covariation between the treatment and the symptoms. However, biases can occur in this process. In particular, the causal illusion is the systematic error of perceiving a causal link between unrelated events that happen to occur in time proximity (Matute et al., 2015). This cognitive bias could explain why people sometimes judge that completely ineffective treatments cause health benefits (Matute et al., 2011), particularly when both the administration of the treatment (i.e., the cause) and the relief of the symptoms (i.e., the outcome) occur with high frequency (Allan et al., 2005; Hannah and Beneteau, 2009; Musca et al., 2010; Perales et al., 2005; Vadillo et al., 2010). Although the causal illusion is subject to variations in the probability with which the potential cause and the outcome occur, and hence most theoretical analyses of the phenomenon have focused on how people acquire contingency information (e.g., Matute et al., 2019), the participant’s prior beliefs could also play a role, and this will be the focus of the current paper. In fact, influence of prior beliefs seems common in other cognitive biases that enable humans to protect their worldviews. A good example is the classical phenomenon of belief bias (Evans et al., 1983; Klauer et al., 2000; Markovits and Nantel, 1989). This consists of people’s tendency to accept the conclusion of a deductive inference based on their prior knowledge and beliefs rather than on the logical validity of the arguments. For example, the syllogism ‘All birds can fly. Eagles can fly. Therefore, eagles are birds’ is invalid because the conclusion does not follow from the premises, but people would often judge it as valid just because the conclusion seems in line with their previous knowledge. There is a specific form of belief bias known as ‘motivated reasoning’ (Trippas et al., 2015), in which people exhibit a strong preference or motivation to arrive at a particular conclusion when they are making an inference (Kunda, 1990). Thus, individuals draw the conclusion they want to believe from the available evidence. To do this, people tend to dismiss information that is incongruent with prior beliefs and focus excessively on evidence that supports prior conceptions, which resembles the popular confirmation bias (Oswald and Grosjean, 2004). Additionally, some evidence points out that motivated reasoning can specifically affect causal inferences (Kahan et al., 2017), particularly when people learn about cause–effect relationships from their own experience (Caddick and Rottman, 2021). Thus, if these cognitive biases show the effect of prior beliefs, it should not be surprising that causal illusions operate in a similar way. In fact, some experimental evidence suggests that this is the case. For example, Blanco et al. (2018) found that political ideology could modulate causal illusion so that the resulting inference fits previous beliefs. In particular, the results from their experiments suggest that participants developed a causal illusion selectively to favor the conclusions that they were more inclined to believe from the beginning. Thus, we predict that prior beliefs about science and pseudoscience could also bias causal inferences about treatments and their health outcomes. More specifically, we suggest that, when people attempt to assess the effectiveness of a pseudoscientific or scientific medical treatment, their causal inferences may be biased to suit their prior beliefs and attitudes about both types of treatments. In line with this idea, a recent study by Torres et al. (2020) explicitly examined the relationship between causal illusion in the laboratory and belief in pseudoscience. These authors designed a causal illusion task with a pseudoscience-framed scenario: participants had to decide whether an infusion made up of an Amazonian plant (i.e., a fictitious natural remedy that mimicked the characteristics of alternative medicine) was effective at alleviating headache. They found that participants who held stronger pseudoscientific beliefs (assessed by means of a questionnaire) showed a greater degree of causal illusion in their experiment, overestimating the ability of the herbal tea to alleviate the headache. Importantly, note that this experiment only contained one cover story, framed in a pseudoscientific scenario. We argue that the results observed by Torres et al. (2020) have two possible interpretations: the first is that people who believed in pseudoscience were more prone to causal illusion in general, regardless of the cover story of the task; the second, based on the effect observed by Blanco et al. (2018) in the context of political ideology, is that the illusion is produced to confirm previous beliefs, that is, those participants who had a positive attitude toward alternative medicine were more inclined to believe that the infusion was working to heal the headache, and causal illusion developed to favor this conclusion. Given that only one pseudoscientific scenario was used in Torres et al.’s experiment, it is impossible to distinguish between the two interpretations. Thus, further research is necessary to analyze how individual differences in pseudoscientific beliefs modulate the intensity of causal illusion, and whether this modulation interacts with the scenario so that prior beliefs are reinforced. To sum up, the present research aims to fill this gap by assessing the participants’ attitude toward pseudoscience, and then presenting an experimental task in which participants are asked to judge the effectiveness of two fictitious medical treatments: one presented as conventional/scientific, and the other one as alternative/pseudoscientific. None of these treatments were causally related to recovery. Our main hypothesis is that the intensity of the observed causal illusion will depend on the interaction between previous beliefs about pseudoscience and the current type of medicine presented. Specifically, we expect that: • Participants with less positive previous beliefs about pseudoscience will develop weaker illusions in the pseudoscientific scenario than in the scientific scenario. For those participants, the conclusion that an alternative medicine is working is not very credible according to their prior beliefs. • Participants with more positive beliefs about pseudoscience could either show the opposite pattern (so that they find more believable the conclusion that the pseudoscientific medicine works than the conclusion that the scientific medicine works), which would be consistent with the studies by Blanco et al. (2018) on political ideology, or, alternatively, they could show similar levels of (strong) causal illusion for both treatments, which would suggest that pseudoscientific beliefs are associated with stronger causal illusions in general, as has been previously suggested (Torres et al., 2020)Grant PID2021-126320NB-I00 from the Agencia Estatal de Investigación of the Spanish GovernmentGrant IT1696-22 from the Basque Governmen

Neuropsychological approach to subjective cognitive complaints in cognitively unimpaired older people: a systematic review

Objective: a systemized approach to subjective cognitive complaints (SCCs) in elderly people is needed owing to the high prevalence of such complaints and their impact on the psychosocial well-being of those affected. The aim of this study was to carry out a systematic review of the characteristics and effectiveness of intervention programmes that use a neuropsychological approach to target SCCs in cognitively unimpaired older people and that are tested in randomized controlled trials.Methods: the search included a time-unlimited query of Scopus, PsycInfo and Medline, yielding 215 articles, of which only 7 met the inclusion/exclusion criteria. Results: the number of intervention programmes was very limited (11 interventions), but diverse, with cognitive stimulation, physical exercise, psychoeducation and cognitive restructuring all used to address SCCs. Conclusions: interventions including only cognitive stimulation were not effective in reducing SCCs, but interventions including cognitive stimulation and psychoeducation, physical exercise, and group sessions and discussions reinforced by the therapist were effectiveS

English collocations and intercultural communication

In this paper we emphasize the importance of learning a lexico-grammatical type of unit known as collocation when learning English as a second language, as the teaching of these units has been traditionally neglected in favour of more idiomatic units such as phrasal verbs and idioms. However, their mastery proves essential for natural sounding English. Although they should be learned at every language level of the learner they gain additional importance when the learner has advanced level of English or uses this lingua franca for intercultural communication, e.g. English for specific purposes. We present a multimedia self learning tool tailored to the needs of the advanced learner of English as a second languageEn este artículo defendemos la importancia del aprendizaje de un tipo de unidad lingüística conocida como colocación en la adquisición de inglés como segunda lengua, ya que la enseñanza de este tipo de unidad ha sido relegado a un segundo plano a favor de la enseñanza de unidades fraseológicas con mayor grado de idiomaticidad, como los verbos frasales y las expresiones idiomáticas. Sin embargo, su dominio es fundamental para hablar inglés con propiedad. Aunque deben ser aprendidas en todos los niveles de adquisición, cobran especial importancia en los niveles avanzados de aprendizaje o cuando el aprendiz usa esta lengua franca para la comunicación intercultural, como por ejemplo, en el uso del inglés para el terreno profesional. Como contribución práctica, presentamos una herramienta multimedia para el aprendizaje de las colocaciones diseñada para aprendices de nivel avanzado de inglés como segunda lengu

Alteraciones bucodentales en niños y niñas con Parálisis Cerebral Infantil que asistieron al Instituto Médico Pedagógico los Pipitos, en el período de Junio a Septiembre 2014

La Parálisis Cerebral Infantil (PCI) es un grupo de síndromes no progresivos, con alteraciones de la postura y el movimiento, secundarios a lesiones o malformaciones del cerebro, producidas durante su desarrollo (Koman y Cols. 2004). Como consecuencia, su etiología es heterogénea, el tipo y la gravedad de la alteración motriz son variables, así como la posibilidad de afectación cognitiva y de otros trastornos asociados. Puede ser causada por factores prenatales, perinatales y posnatales (Fejerman & Fernández Álvarez, 2007). Las personas afectadas con PCI pueden presentar múltiples disfunciones orofaciales, anomalías y patologías bucales que aunque no sean exclusivas constituirían un problema de salud, entre las cuales se podría mencionar: hipoplasia del esmalte, enfermedad periodontal, bruxismo, malas oclusiones, patologías asociadas a las disfunciones anatómicas y funcionales como el babeo, entre otras (Martínez Martínez & Matamoros Botello, 2003). Las dificultades que experimentan para comer, especialmente para masticar y para la higiene dental, podrían hacer que sus dientes sean extremadamente susceptibles a caries y que sus encías tengan tendencia a inflamarse. Con la ayuda de los padres o tutores aplicando medidas de higiene oral como un buen cepillado de dientes y de la lengua ayudará a mantener una mejor salud oral en los niños y evitar o disminuir la aparición de estas alteraciones (Martínez Martínez & Matamoros Botello, 200

Entre basaltos y lagunas : las estructuras de piedra de la meseta de Somuncurá. Apuntes para la reflexión de los patrones de movilidad de los cazadores-recolectores

Fil: Miotti, Laura Lucía. División Arqueología. Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo. Universidad Nacional de La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Terranova, Enrique. División Arqueología. Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo. Universidad Nacional de La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Blanco, Rocío Vanesa. División Arqueología. Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo. Universidad Nacional de La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Marchionni, Laura. División Arqueología. Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo. Universidad Nacional de La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Hermo, Darío. División Arqueología. Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo. Universidad Nacional de La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Magnin, Lucía. División Arqueología. Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo. Universidad Nacional de La Plata; Argentin

La cooperación internacional y la ayuda oficial al desarrollo de España: caso práctico Perú = Spanish international cooperation and official development assistance: Peru case study

El presente Trabajo Fin de Grado desarrolla de manera práctica y concisa la cooperación internacional al desarrollo, y en particular la Ayuda Oficial al Desarrollo, previa conceptualización de los elementos que posteriormente serán analizados. Tal desarrollo sigue una estructura lineal, que se ve reflejada en los tres ámbitos de estudio, estos son, el internacional, el Comunitario y el español, sirviendo los dos primeros a modo de contextualización del último. Dicha estructura consta de tres partes: el estudio de la naturaleza y evolución de la cooperación oficial, seguido de los instrumentos y estrategias empleadas, finalizando con el análisis cuantitativo y cualitativo de la AOD. No obstante, el estudio de la AOD española se realiza de manera más detallada incluyendo también una descripción clara de la estructura institucional de la cooperación oficial. Para concluir, se lleva a cabo el caso práctico de la cooperación oficial española en Perú. A través de este estudio descriptivo, se han analizado los motivos de tal implicación, las diferentes alianzas construidas entre ambas partes y su impacto. Asimismo, se ha realizado el análisis de la AOD española destinada a dicho país, centrándose en el 2016, último año del que existen datos disponibles. Palabra

Conducta autolesiva no suicida en adolescentes. Factores relacionados con el seguimiento en salud mental y aplicación de la evaluación ecológica momentánea

Tesis doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Facultad de Psicología, Departamento de Psicología Biológica y de la Salud. Fecha de lectura: 28-05-202