Prevalence of Connective Tissue Diseases in Egyptian Patients Presenting with Fever of Unknown Origin

Objective To estimate the prevalence of connective tissue diseases in patients presenting with fever of unknown origin (FUO). Patients and Methods In this study thirty patients diagnosed as FUO (Group 1), in 2008, were included in an observational study and diagnostic workup. Additionally, retrospective analysis of seventy patients’ files (Group 2), for patients who presented with prolonged unexplained pyrexia to the same hospital in the previous two years, was performed. Patients were subjected to: full clinical assessment including full history taking, thorough clinical examination, laboratory investigations including the basic investigations for patients with prolonged fever, complete blood count, erythrocytes sedimentation rate, urine analysis and culture, blood culture, sputum culture and plain chest X ray. Further diagnostic work up and/or procedures were requested according to the potential diagnostic clues (PDC) present in every patient. Results Out of 100 FUO patients, 50% were found to have infectious diseases, 24% were found to have connective tissue diseases, 8% miscellaneous causes and 7% neoplastic diseases ( P < 0.05). In 11 patients no definite cause for FUO could be identified. Connective tissue patients were: eight systemic lupus patients (33.3%), five patients with familial mediterranean fever (20.8%), four patients with rheumatoid arthritis (16.6%), three patients (12.5%) with Still's disease and Rheumatic fever and one patient with Behçet syndrome/Crohn's disease (4.3%), ( P < 0.05). Conclusions Despite the advanced technology, FUO remains a challenging medical problem. Infections were the most common cause of FUO in Egypt, confirming the trends found in other parts of the world. There was an increased prevalence of connective tissue patients presented with prolonged unexplained fever. A keen clinical eye, meticulous history taking and repeated physical examination remained the most important diagnostic tools in FUO patients

Profiles of the forms and functions of self-reported aggression in three adolescent samples

In the current study, we addressed several issues related to the forms (physical and relational) and functions (reactive and proactive) of aggression in community (n = 307), voluntary residential (n = 1,917) and involuntarily detained (n = 659) adolescents (ages 11 to 19 years). Across samples, boys self-reported more physical aggression and girls reported more relational aggression, with the exception of higher levels of both forms of aggression in detained girls. Further, few boys showed high rates of relational aggression without also showing high rates of physical aggression. In contrast, it was not uncommon for girls to show high rates of relational aggression alone and these girls tended to also have high levels of problem behavior (e.g., delinquency) and mental health problems (e.g., emotional dysregulation, callous-unemotional traits). Finally, for physical aggression in both boys and girls, and for relational aggression in girls, there was a clear pattern of aggressive behavior that emerged from cluster analyses across samples. Two aggression clusters emerged with one group showing moderately high reactive aggression and a second group showing both high reactive and high proactive aggression (combined group). On measures of severity (e.g., self-reported delinquency and arrests) and etiologically important variables (e.g., emotional regulation and callous-unemotional traits), the reactive aggression group was more severe than a non-aggressive cluster but less severe than the combined aggressive cluster

Which Results to Return: Subjective Judgments in Selecting Medically Actionable Genes

Background: Advances in genomics have led to calls for returning information about medically actionable genes (MAGs) to patients, research subjects, biobank participants, and through screening programs, the general adult population. Which MAGs are returned affects the harms and benefits of every genetic testing endeavor. Despite published recommendations of selection criteria for MAGs to return, scant data exist regarding how decision makers actually apply such criteria

Automatic Placement of Genomic Research Results in Medical Records: Do Researchers Have a Duty? Should Participants Have a Choice?

In genomics research, it is becoming common practice to return individualized primary and incidental findings to participants and several ongoing major studies have begun to automatically transfer these results to a participant's clinical medical record. This paper explores who should decide whether to place genomic research findings into a clinical medical record. Should participants make this decision, or does a researcher's duty to place this information in a medical record override the participant's autonomy? We argue that there are no clear ethical, legal, professional, or regulatory duties that mandate placement without the consent of the participant. We conclude that informing participants of results, together with a clear explanation, relevant recommendations and referral sources, and the option to consent to placement in the medical records will best discharge researchers' ethical and legal duties towards participants

Photonic-based integrated sources and antenna arrays for broadband wireless links in terahertz communications

This paper analyzes integrated components for ultra-broadband millimeter-wave wireless transmitters enabling the 5 G objective to increase the wireless data rates 10x to 100x . We have pursued the photonic-based approach to generate the millimeter-wave carrier (approximate to 97GHz in this paper) through photomixing. We have achieved up to 10 Gb s(-1) data rate using an OOK modulation format (to reduce latency) and either direct detection (DD) or coherent detection. We show that coherent detection enables a sensitivity improvement of 17 dB over DD. We also demonstrate in this work that such improvement can be achieved using as the transmitter a novel integrated antenna array-the self-complementary chessboard array. This avoids the use of complex coherent schemes at the receiver, enabling simple DD for ultra-broadband links.The authors acknowledge Dr David Gonzalez Ovejero for fruitful discussions on antenna simulation. This work has been financially supported by Ministerio de Economia, Industria y Competitividad iTWIT Proyect with references TEC2016-76 997-C3-2-R and TEC2016-76 997-C3-3-R. Authors also acknowledge Ayuda Fundacion BBVA a Investigadores y Creadores Culturales 2016' and 'Estancias de movilidad de profesores PRX16/00 021'

Exploiting oxidative phosphorylation to promote the stem and immunoevasive properties of pancreatic cancer stem cells

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), the fourth leading cause of cancer death, has a 5-year survival rate of approximately 7–9%. The ineffectiveness of anti-PDAC therapies is believed to be due to the existence of a subpopulation of tumor cells known as cancer stem cells (CSCs), which are functionally plastic, and have exclusive tumorigenic, chemoresistant and metastatic capacities. Herein, we describe a 2D in vitro system for long-term enrichment of pancreatic CSCs that is amenable to biological and CSC-specific studies. By changing the carbon source from glucose to galactose in vitro, we force PDAC cells to utilize OXPHOS, resulting in enrichment of CSCs defined by increased CSC biomarker and pluripotency gene expression, greater tumorigenic potential, induced but reversible quiescence, increased OXPHOS activity, enhanced invasiveness, and upregulated immune evasion properties. This CSC enrichment method can facilitate the discovery of new CSC-specific hallmarks for future development into targets for PDAC-based therapies

Fish Spawning Aggregations: Where Well-Placed Management Actions Can Yield Big Benefits for Fisheries and Conservation

Marine ecosystem management has traditionally been divided between fisheries management and biodiversity conservation approaches, and the merging of these disparate agendas has proven difficult. Here, we offer a pathway that can unite fishers, scientists, resource managers and conservationists towards a single vision for some areas of the ocean where small investments in management can offer disproportionately large benefits to fisheries and biodiversity conservation. Specifically, we provide a series of evidenced-based arguments that support an urgent need to recognize fish spawning aggregations (FSAs) as a focal point for fisheries management and conservation on a global scale, with a particular emphasis placed on the protection of multispecies FSA sites. We illustrate that these sites serve as productivity hotspots - small areas of the ocean that are dictated by the interactions between physical forces and geomorphology, attract multiple species to reproduce in large numbers and support food web dynamics, ecosystem health and robust fisheries. FSAs are comparable in vulnerability, importance and magnificence to breeding aggregations of seabirds, sea turtles and whales yet they receive insufficient attention and are declining worldwide. Numerous case-studies confirm that protected aggregations do recover to benefit fisheries through increases in fish biomass, catch rates and larval recruitment at fished sites. The small size and spatio-temporal predictability of FSAs allow monitoring, assessment and enforcement to be scaled down while benefits of protection scale up to entire populations. Fishers intuitively understand the linkages between protecting FSAs and healthy fisheries and thus tend to support their protection

Increasing importance of anthelmintic resistance in European livestock: creation and meta-analysis of an open database

Trabajo presentado al: COMBAR meeting (Combatting Anthelmintic Resistance in Ruminants). Atenas (Grecia). Febrero. 2022

Grain Surface Models and Data for Astrochemistry

AbstractThe cross-disciplinary field of astrochemistry exists to understand the formation, destruction, and survival of molecules in astrophysical environments. Molecules in space are synthesized via a large variety of gas-phase reactions, and reactions on dust-grain surfaces, where the surface acts as a catalyst. A broad consensus has been reached in the astrochemistry community on how to suitably treat gas-phase processes in models, and also on how to present the necessary reaction data in databases; however, no such consensus has yet been reached for grain-surface processes. A team of ∼25 experts covering observational, laboratory and theoretical (astro)chemistry met in summer of 2014 at the Lorentz Center in Leiden with the aim to provide solutions for this problem and to review the current state-of-the-art of grain surface models, both in terms of technical implementation into models as well as the most up-to-date information available from experiments and chemical computations. This review builds on the results of this workshop and gives an outlook for future directions