Radical treatment of Sister Mary-Joseph nodule: case report and literature review

Sister Mary-Joseph nodule (NSMJ) is a cutaneous metastasis of the umbilicus, rare and accounts for 2-3% of the patients with advanced stages of colorectal adenocarcinoma. Here we report the observation of a 48-year-old Moroccan man, referred to our hospital to manage a painful ulcero-budding nodule of the umbilicus; computed tomography revealed that the processes infiltrated the urachus and the bladder. Laboratory parameters were normal and radical surgery was performed to remove the tumor and embryological remnant of the umbilicus. The histological assessment confirmed the sigmoidal origin of the umbilical nodule. This kind of disease always poses a problem of treatment. It was considered for a long time as an outdated stage of tumor disease that deserves just palliative treatment. Several cases published in the international literature with radical treatment had good survival and evolution, which gives hope to patients with this disease

Cyberactivisim in the Process of Political and Social Change in Arab Countries

Esta investigación analiza la contribución del ciberactivismo al cambio político y social en Túnez, en Egipto y en Libia, y la opinión de los jóvenes árabes sobre la situación actual. Para disponer de información relevante sobre estos hechos se ha entrevistado periódicamente durante los últimos cinco años a 30 universitarios que ya habían participado en el proceso que impulsó las revueltas de 2011 y que siguen siendo ciberactivistas desde entonces. La utilización de una metodología mixta permite realizar un estudio donde los aspectos de carácter cuantitativo se complementan con contenidos cualitativos. Los resultados demuestran que los países árabes todavía no se han desprendido de muchas de las estructuras que sostenían a los regímenes anteriores a 2011, que son las que dificultan la consolidación de un sistema moderno. En este momento en Túnez, en Egipto y en Libia todavía conviven dos realidades que provocan un choque permanente entre las tradiciones milenarias, muy arraigadas en determinados sectores de la sociedad, y los valores asociados a las revoluciones, más progresistas. En un contexto donde es necesaria la unidad de acción, el ciberactivismo juega un papel fundamental porque congrega en un espacio virtual común a la ciudadanía crítica comprometida con el proceso de cambio, permite organizarse, mantener contacto con el exterior al margen de la censura oficial, hacer visibles las protestas en escenarios internacionales y vigilar las acciones del GobiernoThis research analyses the contribution of cyberactivism to the political and social change in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, as well as the opinion of young Arabs on the present context. Meaningful information has been extracted from regular interviews to 30 undergraduates over a five-year period. These students had already participated in the process boosting the Arab Spring in 2011, and they keep practising cyberactivism ever since. The use of a mixed method research allows for carrying out a study where quantitative elements are complemented by qualitative ones. Findings show that Arab countries have not yet shaken off the former structures that supported the regimes preceding 2011, which are those that hamper the consolidation of a modern country. At the moment, there are still two conflicting realities between millenary traditions and values connected to revolutions and symbols of progressivism in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. In a context where the unity of action action is needed, cyberactivism plays an essential role, as it brings together critical citizens in a common and virtual space. These groups are committed to change, they keep in touch with the outside world and beyond censorship, they make protests visible to the international arena, and monitor government action

Mixed neuroendocrine-non-neuroendocrine neoplasms of the right colon: a case report

Mixed neuroendocrine-non neuroendocrine neoplasm (MiNENs) is a rare gastrointestinal neoplasm that has been redefined by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2017 as the association of two types of components, neuroendocrine and non-neuroendocrine, each of them present in at least 30% of the tumour mass. Small case reports and case series have demonstrated the occurrence of this neoplasm in the colon. We here report the case of a 47-year-old man undergoing colonscopy for anemia. This showed impassable polypoidal tumor budding in the right colic flexure. Computerized tomography (CT) scan and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed the presence of liver metastases. As the tumor was hemorrhagic, right hemicolectomy with lymph node dissection was performed. The histological examination showed MiNEN of the ascending colon. The patient received adjuvant chemotherapy

Voces por una primavera marchita Reportaje multimedia sobre el uso de las redes sociales durante la Primavera Árabe en Egipto

En 2011, miles de ciudadanos egipcios llenaron la plaza Tahrir en El Cairo durante 18 días hasta el derrocamiento de su entonces presidente, Hosni Mubarak, dentro de los movimientos denominados Primavera Árabe. Durante las protestas, los medios de comunicación sufrieron censura informativa por parte del gobierno y los manifestantes optaron por utilizar Twitter y Facebook para comunicarse e informar al resto de países. Esta práctica, calificada como “periodismo ciudadano”, ha sido criticada a menudo por profesionales, aunque se siga poniendo en práctica en revueltas parecidas, como las que han tenido lugar este año en Sudán y Argelia. Este reportaje multimedia, titulado Voces por una primavera marchita, pretende explicar el uso de las redes sociales durante la revolución egipcia de 2011 y señalar la importancia de esos acontecimientos después de ocho años, fecha que coincide con las nuevas Primaveras Árabes de Sudán y Argelia. Los testimonios de tres personas de origen egipcio, de dos periodistas que cubrieron estos días históricos para medios extranjeros y de una investigadora postdoctoral especializada en las manifestaciones en Egipto, son las voces que guían al lector a través de una revolución que todavía hoy continúa.In 2011, thousands of Egyptian citizens filled up the Tahrir Square in Cairo during the 18 days until the Hosni Mubarak’s overthrow, who was the president in this moment, along the Arab Spring. During the demonstrations, the media suffered the censorship of the government and the protesters preferred Twitter and Facebook to communicate among them and also inform to other countries. This practise, called “citizen journalism”, was usually criticised by the media professionals, although it is being used in similar revolutions, such as in Sudan and Algeria this year. This multimedia report, titled Voces por una primavera marchita, pretend to explain the use of social media during the Egyptian revolution in 2011 and to highlight the importance of this events after eight years, the same date like the new Arab Springs in Sudan and Algeria. Three testimonies of Egyptian people, two journalists that covered these historic days for foreign media and a postdoctoral investigator specialised in the Egyptian demonstrations, were the voices that lead the reader through a revolution which still continues.Grado en Periodism

Changes in salivary physiological stress markers induced by muscle stretching in patients with irritable bowel syndrome

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Psychophysiological processing has been reported to play a crucial role in irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) but there has been no report on modulation of the stress marker chromogranin A (CgA) resulting from muscle stretching. We hypothesized that abdominal muscle stretching as a passive operation would have a beneficial effect on a biochemical index of the activity of the sympathetic/adrenomedullary system (salivary CgA) and anxiety.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Fifteen control and eighteen untreated IBS subjects underwent experimental abdominal muscle stretching for 4 min. Subjects relaxed in a supine position with their knees fully flexed while their pelvic and trunk rotation was passively and slowly moved from 0 degrees of abdominal rotation to about 90 degrees or the point where the subject reported feeling discomfort.</p> <p>Changes in the Gastrointestinal Symptoms Rating Scale (GSRS), State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), Self-rating Depression Scale (SDS), ordinate scale and salivary CgA levels were compared between controls and IBS subjects before and after stretching. A three-factor analysis of variance (ANOVA) with period (before vs. after) as the within-subject factor and group (IBS vs. Control), and sex (men vs. female) as the between-subject factors was carried out on salivary CgA.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>CgA showed significant interactions between period and groups (F[1, 31] = 4.89, p = 0.03), and between groups and sex (F[1, 31] = 4.73, p = 0.03). Interactions between period and sex of CgA secretion were not shown (F[1, 3] = 2.60, p = 0.12). At the baseline, salivary CgA in IBS subjects (36.7 ± 5.9 pmol/mg) was significantly higher than in controls (19.9 ± 5.5 pmol/mg, p < 0.05). After the stretching, salivary CgA significantly decreased in the IBS group (25.5 ± 4.5 pmol/mg), and this value did not differ from that in controls (18.6 ± 3.9 pmol/mg).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our results suggest the possibility of improving IBS pathophysiology by passive abdominal muscle stretching as indicated by CgA, a biochemical index of the activity of the sympathetic/adrenomedullary system.</p

Las mujeres marroquíes en los medios de comunicación

El diagnóstico de situación de las mujeres es siempre el del desarrollo, la justicia social, los derechos y los discursos de un país. En Marruecos, como en otros países árabes, la tradición y la religión presionan sobre los cambios sociales como argumentos para un inmovilismo que, en medio de los crecientes flujos de la comunicación y la movilidad, quedan cuestionados. Aunque se trata de uno de los escasos casos entre esas naciones que han modificado el estatuto de la mujer, la falta de voz y visibilidad de la causa provocan la contradicción entre un estatuto más avanzado que el de otros países y las normas no escritas y el control social que presiona a diario sobre ellas, sobre todo en las ciudades medianas y en las áreas rurales. El reconocimiento formal de estos avances no va mucho más allá en un contexto de falta de empoderamiento que se apoya en las estructuras ancestrales que han permitido una tasa inexplicable de analfabetismo, la censura social y mediática de sus luchas por los derechos.91-10

Comunicación digital y modelos de ciudadanía en las orillas del Estrecho

En el actual contexto de la Era de la Información (Castells, 1997, 2009), lo “digital” polariza la atención, en detrimento de las otras dos dimensiones incluidas en el título de este trabajo: la comunicación y la ciudadanía. Esta inercia termina por generar la sensación de que se abre un nuevo periodo, en lo tecnológico, que va acompañado de nuevas formas de comunicar y de nuevos modos de ejercer la ciudadanía. Pero, como señala Armand Mattelart, los cambios tecnológicos que se vienen sucediendo en Occidente desde la invención del telégrafo van acompañados de la apertura de la caja de Pandora de las utopías tecnocomunicativas y políticas que llegan gracias a los nuevos inventos. Por desgracia, las promesas de igualdad y bienestar asociadas a este discurso mítico no llegan a cumplirse en la realidad. El nuevo entorno digital sirve, con más frecuencia de la deseada, para que se reproduzcan viejos estilos y viejos modelos de comunicación, así como unos modelos y prácticas de relación con la ciudadanía que continúan relegándola a un papel secundario y dependiente.(pp. 49-66

GABA is excitatory in adult vasopressinergic neuroendocrine cells

Neuronal excitability in the adult brain is controlled by a balance between synaptic excitation and inhibition mediated by glutamate and GABA, respectively. While generally inhibitory in the adult brain, GABAA receptor activation is excitatory under certain conditions in which the GABA reversal potential is shifted positive due to intracellular Cl-accumulation, such as during early postnatal development and brain injury. However, the conditions under which GABA is excitatory are generally either transitory or pathological. Here, we reveal GABAergic synaptic inputs to be uniformly excitatory in vasopressin (VP)-secreting magnocellular neurons in the adult hypothalamus under normal conditions. The GABA reversal potential (EGABA) was positive to resting potential and spike threshold in VP neurons, but not in oxytocin (OT)-secreting neurons. The VP neurons lacked expression of the K+-Cl-cotransporter 2 (KCC2), the predominant Cl- exporter in the adult brain. The EGABA was unaffected by inhibition of KCC2 in VP neurons, but was shifted positive in OT neurons, which express KCC2. Alternatively, inhibition of the Na+-K+-Cl-cotransporter 1 (NKCC1), aCl-importer expressed in most cell types mainly during postnatal development, caused a negative shift in EGABA in VP neurons, but had no effect on GABA currents in OT neurons. GABAA receptor blockade caused a decrease in the firing rate of VP neurons, but an increase in firing in OT neurons. Our findings demonstrate that GABA is excitatory in adultVPneurons, suggesting that the classical excitation/inhibition paradigm of synaptic glutamate and GABA control of neuronal excitability does not apply to VP neurons. © 2012 the authors

Deep Fusion of Multiple Term-Similarity Measures For Biomedical Passage Retrieval

[EN] Passage retrieval is an important stage of question answering systems. Closed domain passage retrieval, e.g. biomedical passage retrieval presents additional challenges such as specialized terminology, more complex and elaborated queries, scarcity in the amount of available data, among others. However, closed domains also offer some advantages such as the availability of specialized structured information sources, e.g. ontologies and thesauri, that could be used to improve retrieval performance. This paper presents a novel approach for biomedical passage retrieval which is able to combine different information sources using a similarity matrix fusion strategy based on convolutional neural network architecture. The method was evaluated over the standard BioASQ dataset, a dataset specialized on biomedical question answering. The results show that the method is an effective strategy for biomedical passage retrieval able to outperform other state-of-the-art methods in this domain.COLCIENCIAS, REF. Agreement #727, 2016 provided financial as well as logistical and planning support. Mindlab research group (Universidad Nacional de Colombia sede Bogota) with the cooperation of INAOE (Instituto Nacional de Astrofisica, optica y Electronica) and Universitat Politecnica de Valencia wich also provided technical support for this work. The work of Paolo Rosso was carried out in the framework of the research project PROMETEO/2019/121.Rosso-Mateus, A.; Montes Gomez, M.; Rosso, P.; González, F. (2020). Deep Fusion of Multiple Term-Similarity Measures For Biomedical Passage Retrieval. Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems. 39(2):2239-2248. https://doi.org/10.3233/JIFS-179887S22392248392Humphreys, B. L., McCray, A. T., & Lindberg, D. A. B. (1993). The Unified Medical Language System. Methods of Information in Medicine, 32(04), 281-291. doi:10.1055/s-0038-1634945Malakasiotis P. , Androutsopoulos I. , Bernadou A. , Chatzidiakou N. , Papaki E. , Constantopoulos P. , Pavlopoulos I. , Krithara A. , Almyrantis Y. and Polychronopoulos D. , et al., Challenge evaluation report 2 and roadmap, BioASQ Deliverable D 5 2014.National Institutes of Health. Pubmed baseline repository.Tsatsaronis, G., Balikas, G., Malakasiotis, P., Partalas, I., Zschunke, M., Alvers, M. R., … Paliouras, G. (2015). An overview of the BIOASQ large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question answering competition. BMC Bioinformatics, 16(1). doi:10.1186/s12859-015-0564-6Wasim, M., Waqar, D., & Usman, D. (2017). A Survey of Datasets for Biomedical Question Answering Systems. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 8(7). doi:10.14569/ijacsa.2017.080767Yin, W., Schütze, H., Xiang, B., & Zhou, B. (2016). ABCNN: Attention-Based Convolutional Neural Network for Modeling Sentence Pairs. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 4, 259-272. doi:10.1162/tacl_a_0009