Cancer diagnosis in Catalonia (Spain) after two years of COVID-19 pandemic: an incomplete recovery

Background: This study aimed to estimate potential undetected cancers over the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic in Catalonia. Methods: Cancer incidence was compared between pre-pandemic (2019) and pandemic (March 2020-January 2022) periods in the Catalan Pathology Registry (CPR) according to sex, age, and tumor site. The correlation between cancer diagnosis and COVID-19 health care workload was also evaluated by means of the Pearson's correlation coefficient (R). The expected incident cancers (E) during the pandemic were estimated by applying 2019 CPR cancer incidence specific rates by sex and 5-year age groups to the 2020 and 2021 Catalan population pyramids. CPR incident cancers were considered observed (O). Standardized incidence ratios (SIR) and 95% confidence intervals (as) were calculated using the 0/E ratio. Results: After two pandemic years, cancer diagnosis decreased by 12% (SIR 0.88, 95% a 0.87-0.89), or similar to 7700 undetected cancers (13 000 with nonmelanoma skin cancer). Without nonmelanoma skin cancer, 72% of the cancer underdiagnosis was generated in 2020. Diagnoses decreased more in men (whole pandemic -14%; 2020 -21%; 2021 8%) than in women (---9%, 19%, 3%, respectively), dropping significantly overall in all pandemic waves but the fifth (first -37%, second -16%, third -8%, fourth -6%, fifth -2%, sixth -6%), and across all adult age groups. In the first wave, CPR cancer diagnosis was inversely correlated with COVID-19 caseload in primary care (R -0.91, 95% CI -0.97 to -0.75) and occupancy in conventional hospital wards (R -0.91, 95% a -0.99 to -0.48) and intensive care (R 0.91, 95% a 95% 0.98 to 0.70). Conclusions: Our study evaluated the overall pandemic impact on cancer diagnosis on a large scale and with minimal selection bias, showing that as of February 2022, cancer detection in Catalonia had not yet recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Pending cancer incidence data from population-based cancer registries, early CPR data could inform the development of Spanish cancer control plans

The action of obestatin in skeletal muscle repair: stem cell expansion, muscle growth, and microenvironment remodeling

The development of therapeutic strategies for skeletal muscle diseases, such as physical injuries and myopathies, depends on the knowledge of regulatory signals that control the myogenic process. The obestatin/GPR39 system operates as an autocrine signal in the regulation of skeletal myogenesis. Using a mouse model of skeletal muscle regeneration after injury and several cellular strategies, we explored the potential use of obestatin as a therapeutic agent for the treatment of trauma-induced muscle injuries. Our results evidenced that the overexpression of the preproghrelin, and thus obestatin, and GPR39 in skeletal muscle increased regeneration after muscle injury. More importantly, the intramuscular injection of obestatin significantly enhanced muscle regeneration by simulating satellite stem cell expansion as well as myofiber hypertrophy through a kinase hierarchy. Added to the myogenic action, the obestatin administration resulted in an increased expression of VEGF/VEGFR2 and the consequent microvascularization, with no effect on collagen deposition in skeletal muscle. Furthermore, the potential inhibition of myostatin during obestatin treatment might contribute to its myogenic action improving muscle growth and regeneration. Taken together, our data demonstrate successful improvement of muscle regeneration, indicating obestatin is a potential therapeutic agent for skeletal muscle injury and would benefit other myopathies related to muscle regeneration

Machine learning for violence risk assessment using Dutch clinical notes

Algorithms and the Foundations of Software technolog

Observation of the Dependence of Scintillation from Nuclear Recoils in Liquid Argon on Drift Field

We have exposed a dual-phase Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LAr-TPC) to a low energy pulsed narrowband neutron beam, produced at the Notre Dame Institute for Structure and Nuclear Astrophysics to study the scintillation light yield of recoiling nuclei in a LAr-TPC. A liquid scintillation counter was arranged to detect and identify neutrons scattered in the LAr-TPC target and to select the energy of the recoiling nuclei. We report the observation of a significant dependence on drift field of liquid argon scintillation from nuclear recoils of 11 keV. This observation is important because, to date, estimates of the sensitivity of noble liquid TPC dark matter searches are based on the assumption that electric field has only a small effect on the light yield from nuclear recoils.Comment: v3 updated to reflect published version, including a set of plots for 49.9 keV dat

Diagnosis Classification in the Emergency Room Using Natural Language Processing

Diagnosis classification in the emergency room (ER) is a complex task. We developed several natural language processing classification models, looking both at the full classification task of 132 diagnostic categories and at several clinically applicable samples consisting of two diagnoses that are hard to distinguish

Fault-tolerant aggregation: Flow-Updating meets Mass-Distribution

Flow-Updating (FU) is a fault-tolerant technique that has proved to be efficient in practice for the distributed computation of aggregate functions in communication networks where individual processors do not have access to global information. Previous distributed aggregation protocols, based on repeated sharing of input values (or mass) among processors, sometimes called Mass-Distribution (MD) protocols, are not resilient to communication failures (or message loss) because such failures yield a loss of mass. In this paper, we present a protocol which we call Mass-Distribution with Flow-Updating (MDFU). We obtain MDFU by applying FU techniques to classic MD. We analyze the convergence time of MDFU showing that stochastic message loss produces low overhead. This is the first convergence proof of an FU-based algorithm. We evaluate MDFU experimentally, comparing it with previous MD and FU protocols, and verifying the behavior predicted by the analysis. Finally, given that MDFU incurs a fixed deviation proportional to the message-loss rate, we adjust the accuracy of MDFU heuristically in a new protocol called MDFU with Linear Prediction (MDFU-LP). The evaluation shows that both MDFU and MDFU-LP behave very well in practice, even under high rates of message loss and even changing the input values dynamically.- A preliminary version of this work appeared in [2]. This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation (CNS-1408782, IIS-1247750); the National Institutes of Health (CA198952-01); EMC, Inc.; Pace University Seidenberg School of CSIS; and by Project "Coral - Sustainable Ocean Exploitation: Tools and Sensors/NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000036" financed by the North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, and through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Quantum physics meets biology

Quantum physics and biology have long been regarded as unrelated disciplines, describing nature at the inanimate microlevel on the one hand and living species on the other hand. Over the last decades the life sciences have succeeded in providing ever more and refined explanations of macroscopic phenomena that were based on an improved understanding of molecular structures and mechanisms. Simultaneously, quantum physics, originally rooted in a world view of quantum coherences, entanglement and other non-classical effects, has been heading towards systems of increasing complexity. The present perspective article shall serve as a pedestrian guide to the growing interconnections between the two fields. We recapitulate the generic and sometimes unintuitive characteristics of quantum physics and point to a number of applications in the life sciences. We discuss our criteria for a future quantum biology, its current status, recent experimental progress and also the restrictions that nature imposes on bold extrapolations of quantum theory to macroscopic phenomena.Comment: 26 pages, 4 figures, Perspective article for the HFSP Journa