Morbid obesity and thyroid cancer rate. A review of literature

In the past three decades, several recent studies have analyzed the alarming increase of obesity worldwide, and it has been well established that the risk of many types of malignancies is increased in obese individuals; in the same period, thyroid cancer has become the fastest growing cancer of all malignancies. We investigated the current literature to underline the presence of a connection between excess body weight or Body Mass Index (BMI) and risk of thyroid cancer. Previous studies stated that the contraposition between adipocytes and adipose-resident immune cells enhances immune cell production of multiple pro-inflammatory factors with subsequent induction of hyperlipidemia and vascular injury; these factors are all associated with oxidative stress and cancer development and/or progression. Moreover, recent studies made clear the mitogenic and tumorigenic action of insulin, carried out through the stimulation of mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) and phosphoinositide-3 kinase/AKT (PI3K/AKT) pathways, which is correlated to the hyperinsulinemia and hyperglycemia found in obese population. Our findings suggest that obesity and excess body weight are related to an increased risk of thyroid cancer and that the mechanisms that combine overweight with this cancer should be searched for in the adipokine pathways and chronic inflammation onset

Influence of tumor microenvironment and fibroblast population plasticity on melanoma growth, therapy resistance and immunoescape

Cutaneous melanoma (CM) tissue represents a network constituted by cancer cells and tumor microenvironment (TME). A key feature of CM is the high structural and cellular plasticity of TME, allowing its evolution with disease and adaptation to cancer cell and environmental alter-ations. In particular, during melanoma development and progression each component of TME by interacting with each other and with cancer cells is subjected to dramatic structural and cellular modifications. These alterations affect extracellular matrix (ECM) remodelling, phenotypic profile of stromal cells, cancer growth and therapeutic response. The stromal fibroblast populations of the TME include normal fibroblasts and melanoma‐associated fibroblasts (MAFs) that are highly abun-dant and flexible cell types interacting with melanoma and stromal cells and differently influencing CM outcomes. The shift from the normal microenvironment to TME and from normal fibroblasts to MAFs deeply sustains CM growth. Hence, in this article we review the features of the normal mi-croenvironment and TME and describe the phenotypic plasticity of normal dermal fibroblasts and MAFs, highlighting their roles in normal skin homeostasis and TME regulation. Moreover, we dis-cuss the influence of MAFs and their secretory profiles on TME remodelling, melanoma progres-sion, targeted therapy resistance and immunosurveillance, highlighting the cellular interactions, the signalling pathways and molecules involved in these processes

miR-519d Overexpression Is Associated With Human Obesity

Obesity is a consequence of imbalance of food intake and energy expenditure that results in storage of energy as fat, primarily in adipose tissue. MicroRNAs are non-coding RNAs that regulate gene expression in metabolic pathways and they are also involved in fat-cell development. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether microRNA dysfunction contributes to obesity. We analyzed, by microarray, the expression profile of 1,458 microRNAs in subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) from nondiabetic severely obese (n = 20) and nonobese adults (n = 8). Among 42 differently expressed microRNAs, we confirmed by reverse-transcription PCR (RT-PCR) that miR-519d was overexpressed whereas the protein levels of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-α (PPARA) (a predicted miR 519d target) were lower, at western analysis, in severely obese vs. nonobese subjects. We also show that miR-519d specifically and dose-dependently suppressed translation of the PPARA protein, and increased lipid accumulation during preadipocyte differentiation. Because PPARA plays a central role in fatty acid homeostasis, and in the transcriptional regulation of genes that are necessary for maintenance of the redox balance during the oxidative catabolism of fatty acids, we suggest that PPARA loss and miR-519d overexpression could be associated with metabolic imbalance and subsequent adipocyte hypertrophy in SAT during obesity

A lung-specific mutational signature enables inference of viral and bacterial respiratory niche

Exposure to different mutagens leaves distinct mutational patterns that can allow inference of pathogen replication niches. We therefore investigated whether SARS-CoV-2 mutational spectra might show lineage-specific differences, dependent on the dominant site(s) of replication and onwards transmission, and could therefore rapidly infer virulence of emergent variants of concern (VOCs). Through mutational spectrum analysis, we found a significant reduction in G>T mutations in the Omicron variant, which replicates in the upper respiratory tract (URT), compared to other lineages, which replicate in both the URT and lower respiratory tract (LRT). Mutational analysis of other viruses and bacteria indicates a robust, generalizable association of high G>T mutations with replication within the LRT. Monitoring G>T mutation rates over time, we found early separation of Omicron from Beta, Gamma and Delta, while mutational patterns in Alpha varied consistent with changes in transmission source as social restrictions were lifted. Mutational spectra may be a powerful tool to infer niches of established and emergent pathogens.Fil: Ruis, Christopher. University of Cambridge; Estados UnidosFil: Peacock, Thomas P.. Imperial College London; Reino UnidoFil: Polo Ilacqua, Luis Mariano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto de Histología y Embriología de Mendoza Dr. Mario H. Burgos. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas. Instituto de Histología y Embriología de Mendoza Dr. Mario H. Burgos; ArgentinaFil: Masone, Diego Fernando. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto de Histología y Embriología de Mendoza Dr. Mario H. Burgos. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas. Instituto de Histología y Embriología de Mendoza Dr. Mario H. Burgos; ArgentinaFil: Alvarez, Maria Soledad. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto de Medicina y Biología Experimental de Cuyo; ArgentinaFil: Hinrichs, Angie S.. University Of California At Santa Cruz.; Estados UnidosFil: Turakhia, Yatish. University of California at San Diego; Estados UnidosFil: Cheng, Ye. University of California at San Diego; Estados UnidosFil: McBroome, Jakob. University Of California At Santa Cruz.; Estados UnidosFil: Corbett Detig, Russell. University Of California At Santa Cruz.; Estados UnidosFil: Parkhill, Julian. University of Cambridge; Reino UnidoFil: Floto, R. Andres. University of Cambridge; Reino Unid

VPR-Bench: An Open-Source Visual Place Recognition Evaluation Framework with Quantifiable Viewpoint and Appearance Change

Visual place recognition (VPR) is the process of recognising a previously visited place using visual information, often under varying appearance conditions and viewpoint changes and with computational constraints. VPR is related to the concepts of localisation, loop closure, image retrieval and is a critical component of many autonomous navigation systems ranging from autonomous vehicles to drones and computer vision systems. While the concept of place recognition has been around for many years, VPR research has grown rapidly as a field over the past decade due to improving camera hardware and its potential for deep learning-based techniques, and has become a widely studied topic in both the computer vision and robotics communities. This growth however has led to fragmentation and a lack of standardisation in the field, especially concerning performance evaluation. Moreover, the notion of viewpoint and illumination invariance of VPR techniques has largely been assessed qualitatively and hence ambiguously in the past. In this paper, we address these gaps through a new comprehensive open-source framework for assessing the performance of VPR techniques, dubbed “VPR-Bench”. VPR-Bench (Open-sourced at: https://github.com/MubarizZaffar/VPR-Bench) introduces two much-needed capabilities for VPR researchers: firstly, it contains a benchmark of 12 fully-integrated datasets and 10 VPR techniques, and secondly, it integrates a comprehensive variation-quantified dataset for quantifying viewpoint and illumination invariance. We apply and analyse popular evaluation metrics for VPR from both the computer vision and robotics communities, and discuss how these different metrics complement and/or replace each other, depending upon the underlying applications and system requirements. Our analysis reveals that no universal SOTA VPR technique exists, since: (a) state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance is achieved by 8 out of the 10 techniques on at least one dataset, (b) SOTA technique in one community does not necessarily yield SOTA performance in the other given the differences in datasets and metrics. Furthermore, we identify key open challenges since: (c) all 10 techniques suffer greatly in perceptually-aliased and less-structured environments, (d) all techniques suffer from viewpoint variance where lateral change has less effect than 3D change, and (e) directional illumination change has more adverse effects on matching confidence than uniform illumination change. We also present detailed meta-analyses regarding the roles of varying ground-truths, platforms, application requirements and technique parameters. Finally, VPR-Bench provides a unified implementation to deploy these VPR techniques, metrics and datasets, and is extensible through templates

The MURAVES muon telescope: a low power consumption muon tracker for muon radiography applications

Muon Radiography or muography is based on the measurement of the absorption or scattering of cosmic muons, as they pass through the interior of large scale bodies, In particular, absorption muography has been applied to investigate the presence of hidden cavities inside the pyramids or underground, as well as the interior of volcanoes' edifices. The MURAVES project has the challenging aim of investigating the density distribution inside the summit of Mt. Vesuvius. The information, together with that coming from gravimetric measurements, is useful as input to models, to predict how an eruption may develop. The MURAVES apparatus is a robust and low power consumption muon telescope consisting of an array of three identical and independent muon trackers, which provide in a modular way a total sensitive area of three square meters. Each tracker consists of four doublets of planes of plastic scintillator bars with orthogonal orientation, optically coupled to Silicon photomultipliers for the readout of the signal. The muon telescope has been installed on the slope of the volcano and has collected a first set of data, which are being analyzed

The MURAVES Experiment: A Study of the Vesuvius Great Cone with Muon Radiography

The MURAVES experiment aims at the muographic imaging of the internal structure of the summit of Mt. Vesuvius, exploiting muons produced by cosmic rays. Though presently quiescent, the volcano carries a dramatic hazard in its highly populated surroundings. The challenging measurement of the rock density distribution in its summit by muography, in conjunction with data from other geophysical techniques, can help the modeling of possible eruptive dynamics. The MURAVES apparatus consists of an array of three independent and identical muon trackers, with a total sensitive area of 3 square meters. In each tracker, a sequence of 4 XY tracking planes made of plastic scintillators is complemented by a 60 cm thick lead wall inserted between the two downstream planes to improve rejection of background from low-energy muons. The apparatus is currently acquiring data. Preliminary results from the analysis of the first data sample are presented

Imaging of the Inner Zone of Blast Furnaces Using MuonRadiography: The BLEMAB Project

The aim of the BLEMAB project (BLast furnace stack density Estimation through online Muons ABsorption measurements) is the application of muon radiography techniques, to image a blast furnace’s inner zone. In particular, the goal of the study is to characterize the geometry and size of the so-called “cohesive zone”, i.e., the spatial region where the slowly downward-moving material begins to soften and melt, which plays such an important role in the performance of the blast furnace itself. Thanks to the high penetration power of natural cosmic-ray muon radiation, muon transmission radiography could be an appropriate non invasive methodology for the imaging of large high-density structures such as a blast furnace, whose linear dimensions can be up to a few tens of meters. A state-of-the-art muon tracking system is currently in development and will be installed at a blast furnace on the ArcelorMittal site in Bremen (Germany), where it will collect data for a period of various months. In this paper, the status of the project and the expectations based on preliminary simulations are presented and briefly discussed