A Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Pilot Study to Evaluate the Effect of Calcium Fructoborate on Systemic Inflammation and Dyslipidemia Markers for Middle-Aged People with Primary Osteoarthritis

The objective of this pilot study was to determine whether 15 days of dietary supplementation with calcium fructoborate could acutely modulate inflammatory and lipid blood markers in individuals diagnosed with primary osteoarthritis. During 2 weeks, a placebo-controlled, randomized, double-blind study was conducted on 116 subjects that were initially recruited. Seventy-two subjects started the study, being divided into four groups, and only 60 completed the study as designed. The aim was to compare the effects of calcium fructoborate to placebo on subjects diagnosed with knee primary osteoarthritis. The obtained outcomes were inflammation biomarkers (C-reactive protein, fibrinogen, and erythrocyte sedimentation rate) and lipid markers (triglycerides, total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and HDL cholesterol). No serious adverse events were reported. The calcium fructoborate showed beneficial effect on the inflammatory markers for all groups subjected to the treatment when compared with the placebo group and slight changes in the lipid metabolism. This study suggests that short-term (2 weeks) calcium fructoborate supplementation in patients with osteoarthritis symptoms has a favorable prognosis on inflammation diseases

What Makes Russian Women (Un)Happy? A Closer Look at the Family

Two decades of economic transition revealed that Russian women are on average less happy than men. This paper addresses individual subjective well-being from the intra-family perspective and investigates whether the gender satisfaction gap could be caused, among all, by a mismatch between the socially imposed patriarchal family gender roles and the actually performed ones. I test for the presence of the following phenomena: (1) a fair share of income brought by each of the spouses into their household is judged according to the patriarchal model attributing the role of the breadwinner to men; (2) division of housework, with women, even if working, holding the main responsibility for housekeeping activities, is perceived as fair. Prime-age working adults living in partnership constitute the dataset which is a part of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey for 1994-2004. Life satisfaction is modelled with the help of the seemingly unrelated bivariate ordered probit model aiming at the adjustment for unobserved factors influencing happiness evaluation of both partners. For the period 1994-1998, the results show that women's relative unhappiness is likely to be causes by their increasing earning powers with relative to men, and overload with hours spent on housekeeping in households with children. In the second period of economic growth, 2000 - 2004, I observe a change in women's preferences over time-use and total income shares, suggesting a tendency towards their emancipation

Elucidating design principles for engineering cell-derived vesicles to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 infection

AbstractThe ability of pathogens to develop drug resistance is a global health challenge. The SARS-CoV-2 virus presents an urgent need wherein several variants of concern resist neutralization by monoclonal antibody therapies and vaccine-induced sera. Decoy nanoparticles—cell-mimicking particles that bind and inhibit virions—are an emerging class of therapeutics that may overcome such drug resistance challenges. To date, we lack quantitative understanding as to how design features impact performance of these therapeutics. To address this gap, here we perform a systematic, comparative evaluation of various biologically-derived nanoscale vesicles, which may be particularly well-suited to sustained or repeated administration in the clinic due to low toxicity, and investigate their potential to inhibit multiple classes of model SARS-CoV-2 virions. A key finding is that such particles exhibit potent antiviral efficacy across multiple manufacturing methods, vesicle subclasses, and virus-decoy binding affinities. In addition, these cell-mimicking vesicles effectively inhibit model SARS-CoV-2 variants that evade monoclonal antibodies and recombinant protein-based decoy inhibitors. This study provides a foundation of knowledge that may guide the design of decoy nanoparticle inhibitors for SARS-CoV-2 and other viral infections.</jats:p