25 research outputs found
Sepsis outcomes in patients receiving statins prior to hospitalization for sepsis: comparison of in-hospital mortality rates between patients who received atorvastatin and those who received simvastatin
The management of acute venous thromboembolism in clinical practice. Results from the European PREFER in VTE Registry
Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in Europe. Data from real-world registries are necessary, as clinical trials do not represent the full spectrum of VTE patients seen in clinical practice. We aimed to document the epidemiology, management and outcomes of VTE using data from a large, observational database. PREFER in VTE was an international, non-interventional disease registry conducted between January 2013 and July 2015 in primary and secondary care across seven European countries. Consecutive patients with acute VTE were documented and followed up over 12 months. PREFER in VTE included 3,455 patients with a mean age of 60.8 ± 17.0 years. Overall, 53.0 % were male. The majority of patients were assessed in the hospital setting as inpatients or outpatients (78.5 %). The diagnosis was deep-vein thrombosis (DVT) in 59.5 % and pulmonary embolism (PE) in 40.5 %. The most common comorbidities were the various types of cardiovascular disease (excluding hypertension; 45.5 %), hypertension (42.3 %) and dyslipidaemia (21.1 %). Following the index VTE, a large proportion of patients received initial therapy with heparin (73.2 %), almost half received a vitamin K antagonist (48.7 %) and nearly a quarter received a DOAC (24.5 %). Almost a quarter of all presentations were for recurrent VTE, with >80 % of previous episodes having occurred more than 12 months prior to baseline. In conclusion, PREFER in VTE has provided contemporary insights into VTE patients and their real-world management, including their baseline characteristics, risk factors, disease history, symptoms and signs, initial therapy and outcomes
Antipyretic and antioxidant activities of 5-trifluoromethyl-4,5-dihydro-1H-pyrazoles in rats
Assessing parallel gene histories in viral genomes
Background: The increasing abundance of sequence data has exacerbated a long known problem: gene trees and species trees for the same terminal taxa are often incongruent. Indeed, genes within a genome have not all followed the same evolutionary path due to events such as incomplete lineage sorting, horizontal gene transfer, gene duplication and deletion, or recombination. Considering conflicts between gene trees as an obstacle, numerous methods have been developed to deal with these incongruences and to reconstruct consensus evolutionary histories of species despite the heterogeneity in the history of their genes. However, inconsistencies can also be seen as a source of information about the specific evolutionary processes that have shaped genomes.
Results: The goal of the approach here proposed is to exploit this conflicting information: we have compiled eleven variables describing phylogenetic relationships and evolutionary pressures and submitted them to dimensionality reduction techniques to identify genes with similar evolutionary histories. To illustrate the applicability of the method, we have chosen two viral datasets, namely papillomaviruses and Turnip mosaic virus (TuMV) isolates, largely dissimilar in genome, evolutionary distance and biology. Our method pinpoints viral genes with common evolutionary patterns. In the case of papillomaviruses, gene clusters match well our knowledge on viral biology and life cycle, illustrating the potential of our approach. For the less known TuMV, our results trigger new hypotheses about viral evolution and gene interaction.
Conclusions: The approach here presented allows turning phylogenetic inconsistencies into evolutionary information, detecting gene assemblies with similar histories, and could be a powerful tool for comparative pathogenomics.IGB was funded by the disappeared Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation (CGL2010-16713). Work in Valencia was supported by grant BFU2012-30805 from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) to SFE. BMC is the recipient of an IDIBELL PhD fellowship.Mengual-Chuliá, B.; Bedhomme, S.; Lafforgue, G.; Elena Fito, SF.; Bravo, IG. (2016). Assessing parallel gene histories in viral genomes. BMC Evolutionary Biology. 16:1-15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-016-0605-4S11516Hess J, Goldman N. Addressing inter-gene heterogeneity in maximum likelihood phylogenomic analysis: Yeasts revisited. PLoS ONE. 2011;6:e22783.Salichos L, Rokas A. Inferring ancient divergences requires genes with strong phylogenetic signals. 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AquaLog: an ontology-driven question answering system for organizational semantic intranets
The semantic web vision is one in which rich, ontology-based semantic markup will become widely available. The availability of semantic markup on the web opens the way to novel, sophisticated forms of question answering. AquaLog is a portable question-answering system which takes queries expressed in natural language and an ontology as input, and returns answers drawn from one or more knowledge bases (KBs). We say that AquaLog is portable because the configuration time required to customize the system for a particular ontology is negligible. AquaLog presents an elegant solution in which different strategies are combined together in a novel way. It makes use of the GATE NLP platform, string metric algorithms. WordNet and a novel ontology-based relation similarity service to make sense of user queries with respect to the target KB. Moreover it also includes a learning componment, which ensures that the performance of the system improves over the time, in response to the particular community jargon used by end users
Naïve and memory CD8 T cell pool homeostasis in advanced aging: impact of age and of antigen-specific responses to cytomegalovirus.
Alterations in the circulating CD8+ T cell pool, with a loss of naïve and accumulation of effector/effector memory cells, are pronounced in older adults. However, homeostatic forces that dictate such changes remain incompletely understood. This observational cross-sectional study explored the basis for variability of CD8+ T cell number and composition of its main subsets: naïve, central memory and effector memory T cells, in 131 cytomegalovirus (CMV) seropositive subjects aged over 60 years. We found great heterogeneity of CD8+ T cell numbers, which was mainly due to variability of the CD8 + CD28- T cell subset regardless of age. Analysis, by multiple regression, of distinct factors revealed that age was a predictor for the loss in absolute number of naïve T cells, but was not associated with changes in central or effector memory CD8+ T cell subsets. By contrast, the size of CD8+ T cells specific to pp65 and IE-1 antigens of CMV, predicted CD28 - CD8+ T cell, antigen-experienced CD8+ T cell, and even total CD8+ T cell numbers, but not naïve CD8+ T cell loss. These results indicate a clear dichotomy between the homeostasis of naïve and antigen-experienced subsets of CD8+ T cells which are independently affected, in human later life, by age and antigen-specific responses to CMV, respectively