Integrating cross-discipline workshops for basic and clinical content treatment

Educative spaces of social interaction result in excellent environments for explaining contents meaningfully, which generates true consciousness of its utility. The present article is aimed at offering assessments on the role of cross discipline integrating workshops for basic and clinical content treatment. The offered appraisals are based on three key elements: the importance of these workshops for constructing cross discipline knowledge, the value of socio-constructivist postulate for the subject who learns in these spaces and the authors’ practical experience. It may be stated that from the conception assumed for their development, this type of workshop allows an adequate basic bio-medical and clinical content treatment in the Medicine career, since it is possible to achieve integrating specific objectives in learning new contents to be linked. In addition, they demand the use of teaching tasks for achieving these objectives and facilitate the use of didactic procedures for content treatment

5to. Congreso Internacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación para la Sociedad. Memoria académica

El V Congreso Internacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación para la Sociedad, CITIS 2019, realizado del 6 al 8 de febrero de 2019 y organizado por la Universidad Politécnica Salesiana, ofreció a la comunidad académica nacional e internacional una plataforma de comunicación unificada, dirigida a cubrir los problemas teóricos y prácticos de mayor impacto en la sociedad moderna desde la ingeniería. En esta edición, dedicada a los 25 años de vida de la UPS, los ejes temáticos estuvieron relacionados con la aplicación de la ciencia, el desarrollo tecnológico y la innovación en cinco pilares fundamentales de nuestra sociedad: la industria, la movilidad, la sostenibilidad ambiental, la información y las telecomunicaciones. El comité científico estuvo conformado formado por 48 investigadores procedentes de diez países: España, Reino Unido, Italia, Bélgica, México, Venezuela, Colombia, Brasil, Estados Unidos y Ecuador. Fueron recibidas un centenar de contribuciones, de las cuales 39 fueron aprobadas en forma de ponencias y 15 en formato poster. Estas contribuciones fueron presentadas de forma oral ante toda la comunidad académica que se dio cita en el Congreso, quienes desde el aula magna, el auditorio y la sala de usos múltiples de la Universidad Politécnica Salesiana, cumplieron respetuosamente la responsabilidad de representar a toda la sociedad en la revisión, aceptación y validación del conocimiento nuevo que fue presentado en cada exposición por los investigadores. Paralelo a las sesiones técnicas, el Congreso contó con espacios de presentación de posters científicos y cinco workshops en temáticas de vanguardia que cautivaron la atención de nuestros docentes y estudiantes. También en el marco del evento se impartieron un total de ocho conferencias magistrales en temas tan actuales como la gestión del conocimiento en la universidad-ecosistema, los retos y oportunidades de la industria 4.0, los avances de la investigación básica y aplicada en mecatrónica para el estudio de robots de nueva generación, la optimización en ingeniería con técnicas multi-objetivo, el desarrollo de las redes avanzadas en Latinoamérica y los mundos, la contaminación del aire debido al tránsito vehicular, el radón y los riesgos que representa este gas radiactivo para la salud humana, entre otros

Integrating cross-discipline workshops for basic and clinical content treatment

Educative spaces of social interaction result in excellent environments for explaining contents meaningfully, which generates true consciousness of its utility. The present article is aimed at offering assessments on the role of cross discipline integrating workshops for basic and clinical content treatment. The offered appraisals are based on three key elements: the importance of these workshops for constructing cross discipline knowledge, the value of socio-constructivist postulate for the subject who learns in these spaces and the authors’ practical experience. It may be stated that from the conception assumed for their development, this type of workshop allows an adequate basic bio-medical and clinical content treatment in the Medicine career, since it is possible to achieve integrating specific objectives in learning new contents to be linked. In addition, they demand the use of teaching tasks for achieving these objectives and facilitate the use of didactic procedures for content treatment

How do women living with HIV experience menopause? Menopausal symptoms, anxiety and depression according to reproductive age in a multicenter cohort

CatedresBackground: To estimate the prevalence and severity of menopausal symptoms and anxiety/depression and to assess the differences according to menopausal status among women living with HIV aged 45-60 years from the cohort of Spanish HIV/AIDS Research Network (CoRIS). Methods: Women were interviewed by phone between September 2017 and December 2018 to determine whether they had experienced menopausal symptoms and anxiety/depression. The Menopause Rating Scale was used to evaluate the prevalence and severity of symptoms related to menopause in three subscales: somatic, psychologic and urogenital; and the 4-item Patient Health Questionnaire was used for anxiety/depression. Logistic regression models were used to estimate odds ratios (ORs) of association between menopausal status, and other potential risk factors, the presence and severity of somatic, psychological and urogenital symptoms and of anxiety/depression. Results: Of 251 women included, 137 (54.6%) were post-, 70 (27.9%) peri- and 44 (17.5%) pre-menopausal, respectively. Median age of onset menopause was 48 years (IQR 45-50). The proportions of pre-, peri- and post-menopausal women who had experienced any menopausal symptoms were 45.5%, 60.0% and 66.4%, respectively. Both peri- and post-menopause were associated with a higher likelihood of having somatic symptoms (aOR 3.01; 95% CI 1.38-6.55 and 2.63; 1.44-4.81, respectively), while post-menopause increased the likelihood of having psychological (2.16; 1.13-4.14) and urogenital symptoms (2.54; 1.42-4.85). By other hand, post-menopausal women had a statistically significant five-fold increase in the likelihood of presenting severe urogenital symptoms than pre-menopausal women (4.90; 1.74-13.84). No significant differences by menopausal status were found for anxiety/depression. Joint/muscle problems, exhaustion and sleeping disorders were the most commonly reported symptoms among all women. Differences in the prevalences of vaginal dryness (p = 0.002), joint/muscle complaints (p = 0.032), and sweating/flush (p = 0.032) were found among the three groups. Conclusions: Women living with HIV experienced a wide variety of menopausal symptoms, some of them initiated before women had any menstrual irregularity. We found a higher likelihood of somatic symptoms in peri- and post-menopausal women, while a higher likelihood of psychological and urogenital symptoms was found in post-menopausal women. Most somatic symptoms were of low or moderate severity, probably due to the good clinical and immunological situation of these women

Discovering HIV related information by means of association rules and machine learning

Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is still one of the main health problems worldwide. It is therefore essential to keep making progress in improving the prognosis and quality of life of affected patients. One way to advance along this pathway is to uncover connections between other disorders associated with HIV/AIDS-so that they can be anticipated and possibly mitigated. We propose to achieve this by using Association Rules (ARs). They allow us to represent the dependencies between a number of diseases and other specific diseases. However, classical techniques systematically generate every AR meeting some minimal conditions on data frequency, hence generating a vast amount of uninteresting ARs, which need to be filtered out. The lack of manually annotated ARs has favored unsupervised filtering, even though they produce limited results. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised system, able to identify relevant ARs among HIV-related diseases with a minimal amount of annotated training data. Our system has been able to extract a good number of relationships between HIV-related diseases that have been previously detected in the literature but are scattered and are often little known. Furthermore, a number of plausible new relationships have shown up which deserve further investigation by qualified medical experts

COVID-19 in hospitalized HIV-positive and HIV-negative patients : A matched study

CatedresObjectives: We compared the characteristics and clinical outcomes of hospitalized individuals with COVID-19 with [people with HIV (PWH)] and without (non-PWH) HIV co-infection in Spain during the first wave of the pandemic. Methods: This was a retrospective matched cohort study. People with HIV were identified by reviewing clinical records and laboratory registries of 10 922 patients in active-follow-up within the Spanish HIV Research Network (CoRIS) up to 30 June 2020. Each hospitalized PWH was matched with five non-PWH of the same age and sex randomly selected from COVID-19@Spain, a multicentre cohort of 4035 patients hospitalized with confirmed COVID-19. The main outcome was all-cause in-hospital mortality. Results: Forty-five PWH with PCR-confirmed COVID-19 were identified in CoRIS, 21 of whom were hospitalized. A total of 105 age/sex-matched controls were selected from the COVID-19@Spain cohort. The median age in both groups was 53 (Q1-Q3, 46-56) years, and 90.5% were men. In PWH, 19.1% were injecting drug users, 95.2% were on antiretroviral therapy, 94.4% had HIV-RNA < 50 copies/mL, and the median (Q1-Q3) CD4 count was 595 (349-798) cells/μL. No statistically significant differences were found between PWH and non-PWH in number of comorbidities, presenting signs and symptoms, laboratory parameters, radiology findings and severity scores on admission. Corticosteroids were administered to 33.3% and 27.4% of PWH and non-PWH, respectively (P = 0.580). Deaths during admission were documented in two (9.5%) PWH and 12 (11.4%) non-PWH (P = 0.800). Conclusions: Our findings suggest that well-controlled HIV infection does not modify the clinical presentation or worsen clinical outcomes of COVID-19 hospitalization

Primer congreso científico UNACHI 2015.

La Universidad Autónoma de Chiriquí (UNACHI), a través de la Vicerrectoría de Investigación y Postgrado (VIP), en cumplimiento de su misión, visión y objetivos estratégicos, realiza el Primer Congreso Científico del 5 al 9 de octubre de 2015, con el lema: “Impulsando la cultura, la ciencia y la humanidad”. En atención al Plan Estratégico del Gobierno de la República de Panamá 2015-2019; al Plan Estratégico Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (PENCYT) 2015-2019 de la Secretaría Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (SENACYT); al Plan Estratégico Institucional 2013-2018 de la Universidad Autónoma de Chiriquí y a las Políticas de Investigación e Innovación de la Universidad, se presenta a la consideración de la comunidad científica universitaria y a la sociedad panameña, los resultados de las investigaciones correspondientes al período académico 2014-2015. Las investigaciones que hoy se presentan, corresponden a trabajos realizados por investigadores procedentes de nuestra institución, de universidades y centros de investigación del país y de investigadores procedentes de países hermanos, quienes comparten con nosotros los productos de sus muchas horas de trabajo realizadas en sus laboratorios, redes temáticas y giras de campo. El Congreso tiene sus antecedentes en los seis encuentros científicos realizados, anualmente en la universidad, desde el año 2009 hasta el año 2014. No obstante, dado el impulso y decidido respaldo de la Magnífica Rectora, Etelvina Medianero de Bonagas, al eje de investigación e innovación y al trabajo realizado por nuestros investigadores, se presentó ante el Consejo Académico N° 11-2015, del 16 de junio de 2015, la propuesta para elevar los encuentros a congreso científico, y que fue aprobada por unanimidad. Se convierte este evento académico, en un reto para la institución y a la vez en una gran oportunidad para el fortalecimiento de la investigación e innovación, al servicio de la sociedad y de los grandes temas de interés nacional. Con mucho agrado se puede señalar que en el Congreso se exponen conferencias magistrales, conferencias cortas, ponencias, mesas redondas, videoconferencias y dos exposiciones fotográficas tituladas: “Nuestros ríos, nuestro futuro” y “La luz en las ciencias”. Por segundo año consecutivo se realiza el reconocimiento al investigador del año; en esta oportunidad se honrará al connotado ambientalista Demetrio Miranda Miranda. Se presentan investigadores nacionales de la Secretaría Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación; de la Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá; del Instituto de Investigaciones Científicas y Servicios de Alta Tecnología; de la Universidad de Panamá; del Ministerio de Salud y de la Universidad Autónoma de Chiriquí. También se cuenta con investigadores internacionales procedentes de Estados Unidos, Honduras, Costa Rica y de República Dominicana. Los registros de los participantes, en la página web de la universidad, nos indican que durante el congreso se tendrá la participación de investigadores procedentes de las áreas de las ciencias económicas administrativas, de las ciencias de la salud, de las ciencias sociales y humanidades y de las ciencias naturales y exactas, estos últimos en un mayor porcentaje. Atendiendo a sus políticas institucionales, la UNACHI está cimentando las bases de un sistema de investigación e innovación, a través de acciones muy puntuales, las cuales aspiran a convertir a la Institución, en un centro de educación superior de excelencia y a disponer de un conjunto de investigadores de alto nivel. Con este propósito, se ha aprobado en el Consejo Académico, el Reglamento de Investigación e Innovación, donde se establece por primera vez, la figura del investigador a tiempo completo, a fin de impulsar la investigación en todas las áreas del conocimiento humano; se ha firmado un convenio con SENACYT para la reinserción de talentos en el nivel doctoral, a partir del año 2015, con miras a fortalecer la investigación científica y se han incrementado, significativamente, los fondos destinados a los subsidios de las investigaciones de las tesis de licenciatura, de las tesis de maestrías, de las tesis de doctorados y de los docentes investigadores, con proyectos que se encuentran en este momento en revisión por los evaluadores externos

First large-scale study reveals important losses of managed honey bee and stingless bee colonies in Latin America

International audienceOver the last quarter century, increasing honey bee colony losses motivated standardized large-scale surveys of managed honey bees ( Apis mellifera ), particularly in Europe and the United States. Here we present the first large-scale standardized survey of colony losses of managed honey bees and stingless bees across Latin America. Overall, 1736 beekeepers and 165 meliponiculturists participated in the 2-year survey (2016–2017 and 2017–2018). On average, 30.4% of honey bee colonies and 39.6% of stingless bee colonies were lost per year across the region. Summer losses were higher than winter losses in stingless bees (30.9% and 22.2%, respectively) but not in honey bees (18.8% and 20.6%, respectively). Colony loss increased with operation size during the summer in both honey bees and stingless bees and decreased with operation size during the winter in stingless bees. Furthermore, losses differed significantly between countries and across years for both beekeepers and meliponiculturists. Overall, winter losses of honey bee colonies in Latin America (20.6%) position this region between Europe (12.5%) and the United States (40.4%). These results highlight the magnitude of bee colony losses occurring in the region and suggest difficulties in maintaining overall colony health and economic survival for beekeepers and meliponiculturists

Childhood asthma outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic: Findings from the PeARL multi-national cohort

International audienc