The Persistence of the Catholic Movement (November 5, 2003)

Pope John XXIII Lecture, delivered at Catholic University, Columbus School of Law on November 5, 200

A new order of religious freedom

"More than he wanted to be remembered for having been President, Mr. Jefferson wanted to be remembered as the author of the Virginia “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom.” In his draft of that bill he wrote: “The opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction.” In a republic of free citizens, every opinion, every prejudice, every aspiration, every moral discernment has access to the public square in which we deliberate the ordering of our life together."(...

The 10th Biennial Hatter Cardiovascular Institute workshop: cellular protection—evaluating new directions in the setting of myocardial infarction, ischaemic stroke, and cardio-oncology

Due to its poor capacity for regeneration, the heart is particularly sensitive to the loss of contractile cardiomyocytes. The onslaught of damage caused by ischaemia and reperfusion, occurring during an acute myocardial infarction and the subsequent reperfusion therapy, can wipe out upwards of a billion cardiomyocytes. A similar program of cell death can cause the irreversible loss of neurons in ischaemic stroke. Similar pathways of lethal cell injury can contribute to other pathologies such as left ventricular dysfunction and heart failure caused by cancer therapy. Consequently, strategies designed to protect the heart from lethal cell injury have the potential to be applicable across all three pathologies. The investigators meeting at the 10th Hatter Cardiovascular Institute workshop examined the parallels between ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), ischaemic stroke, and other pathologies that cause the loss of cardiomyocytes including cancer therapeutic cardiotoxicity. They examined the prospects for protection by remote ischaemic conditioning (RIC) in each scenario, and evaluated impasses and novel opportunities for cellular protection, with the future landscape for RIC in the clinical setting to be determined by the outcome of the large ERIC-PPCI/CONDI2 study. It was agreed that the way forward must include measures to improve experimental methodologies, such that they better reflect the clinical scenario and to judiciously select combinations of therapies targeting specific pathways of cellular death and injury

Association between Use of HMG CoA Reductase Inhibitors and Mortality in HIV-Infected Patients

HIV infection is a disease associated with chronic inflammation and immune activation. Antiretroviral therapy reduces inflammation, but not to levels in comparable HIV-negative individuals. The HMG-coenzyme A reductase inhibitors (statins) inhibit several pro-inflammatory processes and suppress immune activation, and are a logical therapy to assess for a possible salutary effect on HIV disease progression and outcomes.Eligible patients were patients enrolled in the Johns Hopkins HIV Clinical Cohort who achieved virologic suppression within 180 days of starting a new highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) regimen after January 1, 1998. Assessment was continued until death in patients who maintained a virologic suppression, with right-censoring of their follow-up time if they had an HIV RNA > 500 copies/ml. Cox proportional hazards regression was used to assess statin use as a time-varying covariate, as well as other demographic and clinical factors.A total of 1538 HIV-infected patients fulfilled eligibility criteria, of whom 238 (15.5%) received a statin while taking HAART. There were 85 deaths (7 in statin users, 78 in non-users). By multivariate Cox regression, statin use was associated with a relative hazard of 0.33 (95% CI: 0.14, 0.76; P =  0.009) after adjusting for CD4, HIV-1 RNA, hemoglobin and cholesterol levels at the start of HAART, age, race, HIV risk group, prior use of ART, year of HAART start, NNRTI vs. PI-based ART, prior AIDS-defining illness, and viral hepatitis coinfection. Malignancy, non-AIDS-defining infection and liver failure were particularly prominent causes of death.Statin use was associated with significantly lower hazard of dying in these HIV-infected patients who were being effectively treated with HAART as determined by virologic suppression. Our results suggest the need for confirmation in other observational cohorts, and if confirmed, the need for a clinical trial of statin use in HIV infection

The economics of debt clearing mechanisms

We examine the evolution of decentralized clearinghouse mechanisms from the 13th to the 18th century; in particular, we explore the clearing of non- or limitedtradable debts like bills of exchange. We construct a theoretical model of these clearinghouse mechanisms, similar to the models in the theoretical matching literature, and show that specific decentralized multilateral clearing algorithms known as rescontre, skontrieren or virement des parties used by merchants were efficient in specific historical contexts. We can explain both the evolutionary self-organizing emergence of late medieval and early modern fairs, and its robustness during the 17th and 18th century

Clinical correlates and prognostic impact of neurologic disorders in Takotsubo syndrome

© The Author(s) 2021. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.Cardiac alterations are frequently observed after acute neurological disorders. Takotsubo syndrome (TTS) represents an acute heart failure syndrome and is increasingly recognized as part of the spectrum of cardiac complications observed after neurological disorders. A systematic investigation of TTS patients with neurological disorders has not been conducted yet. The aim of the study was to expand insights regarding neurological disease entities triggering TTS and to investigate the clinical profile and outcomes of TTS patients after primary neurological disorders. The International Takotsubo Registry is an observational multicenter collaborative effort of 45 centers in 14 countries (ClinicalTrials.gov, identifier NCT01947621). All patients in the registry fulfilled International Takotsubo Diagnostic Criteria. For the present study, patients were included if complete information on acute neurological disorders were available. 2402 patients in whom complete information on acute neurological status were available were analyzed. In 161 patients (6.7%) an acute neurological disorder was identified as the preceding triggering factor. The most common neurological disorders were seizures, intracranial hemorrhage, and ischemic stroke. Time from neurological symptoms to TTS diagnosis was ≤ 2 days in 87.3% of cases. TTS patients with neurological disorders were younger, had a lower female predominance, fewer cardiac symptoms, lower left ventricular ejection fraction, and higher levels of cardiac biomarkers. TTS patients with neurological disorders had a 3.2-fold increased odds of in-hospital mortality compared to TTS patients without neurological disorders. In this large-scale study, 1 out of 15 TTS patients had an acute neurological condition as the underlying triggering factor. Our data emphasize that a wide spectrum of neurological diseases ranging from benign to life-threatening encompass TTS. The high rates of adverse events highlight the need for clinical awareness.The International Takotsubo Registry was supported by the Biss Davies Charitable Trust. Dr. Scheitz has been supported by the Corona Foundation. Dr. Templin has been supported by the H.H. Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad Al-Thani Research Programme and the Swiss Heart Foundation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio