Encefalitis chagásica pseudotumoral en pacientes con SIDA: presentación atípica en uno de ellos e historia de la enfermedad en una pequeña serie de casos

Chagas' disease is an intracellular parasitic infection owed to a protozoarium, the Trypanosoma cruzi1, affecting a large population in Latinamerica. Within the region 15 to 16 million people are infected2. The worldwide pandemia, due to the infection of the HIV 1 virus, also affects Latinamerican countries. The number of patients with this condition in Central and South Americas amounts to 1.6 million persons3,4. Therefore, both illnesses overlap in a broad geographical area and may coincide in the same patient. The HIV infection, which causes the AIDS syndrome, impairs the immunological system and predisposes to the appearance of opportunistic infections, which may have been hosted unnoticed by the patient until then. Therefore, Chagas' disease, which is a dormant infection in most patients5, may reactivate if the immunological surveillance wanes off as the consequence of the viral insult. Along the last years we6,7 and others8-10 found patients afflicted by AIDS, who developed brain lesions yielded by the Trypanosoma cruzi. The present communication describes three further patients with this condition; one of them is unique because his clinical, radiological and immunological findings differ from those previously reported in the literature.Fil: Sica, Roberto E. P.. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Medicina; Argentina. Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Hospital General de Agudos "Ramos Mejía"; ArgentinaFil: Gargiulo Monachelli, Gisella Mariana. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental. Fundación de Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental. Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental; Argentina. Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Hospital General de Agudos "Ramos Mejía"; ArgentinaFil: Papayanis, Cristina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Medicina; Argentina. Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Hospital General de Agudos "Ramos Mejía"; Argentin

Fusion in New York Politics

This descriptive study seeks to answer the question: How does fusion function in the New York state electoral system, and how does that translate into the operations of the New York Legislature - such as, possible coalitions and the allegiances of candidates who are anomalies in the endorsement they receive? Fusion is when parties cross-endorse a candidate for political office with this support appearing on the general election ballot. Anomalies are defines as legislators who receive support from parties in addition to their own that do not occupy the same position in the left-right ideological continuum as their political registration. The research looks at the impact of fusion historically (the elections in 1934 and 1936 in New York) and more recent demographics (1998 to the present). While there have been some studies on fusion, more research is needed. This study tries to fill part of the void by looking at the elected officials and tracing their history with minor parties from elections to the legislature and seeing the policies where the legislators collaborate together on behalf of the minor parties. In short, the study finds that while minor parties do not appear to be well represented when we analyse party membership among legislators, these parties tend to find ways to overcome this shortcoming by strategically cross-endorsing members from both political parties. In the process, the parties can claim association with numerous senators and assembly members

The networking dynamics of the Italian biofuel industry in time of crisis: Finding an effective instrument mix for fostering a sustainable energy transition

This paper aims to design the effective instrument mixes for fostering a sustainable energy transition in times of crises. We focus on a sufficiently developed green niche – namely the Italian biofuel sector – implementing a two-step investigation: 1) a social network analysis, to study the effects of the crisis on the basic niche development mechanisms, with the aim of eliciting its development needs; 2) a fuzzy inference simulation based on a causal-effect map drawn from experts' knowledge to identify the most effective instrument mix for the development of the niche studied. The major needs emerged in the case investigated are for an increase of actors' expectations towards the further development of the sector, and a need for a tailored networking activity, devoted to attracting specific knowledgeable actors. The results indicate that, among others, effective policy instruments are, in this case, the cooperation that has the best outcome in terms of networking, and the public procurement, which remarkably increases the level of expectation. The analysis presented constitutes a model to evaluate single policy drivers and their combinations to find adequate policy actions to promote the green energy transition in times of crisis

A Combined method to model policy interventions for local communities based on people knowledge

Policy interventions to promote innovative industries in peripheral regions are often hampered by lack of information on the functioning of the local socio-economic systems, due to their complexity. This might result in mismatches between policy objectives and the actual needs and capability of local communities. To overcome this drawback, it is crucial to obtain appropriate knowledge on the local system, which nevertheless is typically embedded in local actors’ minds in uncodified and tacit form. Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) have been employed to decode this kind of knowledge in a reproducible manner. However, some problems remain as to how to integrate the necessary vagueness of local actors’ heuristic with experts’ knowledge into a rational framework. The following methodology customization is proposed: • Combine the FCMs with the Discourse Analysis to obtain relevant narratives (i.e. concepts, visions, insights, etc.) needed to define system boundaries and variables. • Employ individual interviews – rather than a participatory approach – to define the causal relations among system variables. • Integrate tacit and uncodified knowledge embedded in local actors within experts’ scientific knowledge

Model-measurement comparison of mesospheric temperature inversions, and a simple theory for their occurrence

Mesospheric temperature inversions are well established observed phenomena, yet their properties remain the subject of ongoing research. Comparisons between Rayleigh-scatter lidar temperature measurements obtained by the University of Western Ontario's Purple Crow Lidar (42.9°N, 81.4°W) and the Canadian Middle Atmosphere Model are used to quantify the statistics of inversions. In both model and measurements, inversions occur most frequently in the winter and exhibit an average amplitude of ∼10 K. The model exhibits virtually no inversions in the summer, while the measurements show a strongly reduced frequency of occurrence with an amplitude about half that in the winter. A simple theory of mesospheric inversions based on wave saturation is developed, with no adjustable parameters. It predicts that the environmental lapse rate must be less than half the adiabatic lapse rate for an inversion to form, and it predicts the ratio of the inversion amplitude and thickness as a function of environmental lapse rate. Comparison of this prediction to the actual amplitude/thickness ratio using the lidar measurements shows good agreement between theory and measurements

SPARC is a new myeloid-derived suppressor cell marker licensing suppressive activities

Myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSC) are well-known key negative regulators of the immune response during tumor growth, however scattered is the knowledge of their capacity to influence and adapt to the different tumor microenvironments and of the markers that identify those capacities. Here we show that the secreted protein acidic and rich in cysteine (SPARC) identifies in both human and mouse MDSC with immune suppressive capacity and pro-tumoral activities including the induction of epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and angiogenesis. In mice the genetic deletion of SPARC reduced MDSC immune suppression and reverted EMT. Sparc−/− MDSC were less suppressive overall and the granulocytic fraction was more prone to extrude neutrophil extracellular traps (NET). Surprisingly, arginase-I and NOS2, whose expression can be controlled by STAT3, were not down-regulated in Sparc−/− MDSC, although less suppressive than wild type (WT) counterpart. Flow cytometry analysis showed equal phosphorylation of STAT3 but reduced ROS production that was associated with reduced nuclear translocation of the NF-kB p50 subunit in Sparc−/− than WT MDSC. The limited p50 in nuclei reduce the formation of the immunosuppressive p50:p50 homodimers in favor of the p65:p50 inflammatory heterodimers. Supporting this hypothesis, the production of TNF by Sparc−/− MDSC was significantly higher than by WT MDSC. Although associated with tumor-induced chronic inflammation, TNF, if produced at high doses, becomes a key factor in mediating tumor rejection. Therefore, it is foreseeable that an unbalance in TNF production could skew MDSC toward an inflammatory, anti-tumor phenotype. Notably, TNF is also required for inflammation-driven NETosis. The high level of TNF in Sparc−/− MDSC might explain their increased spontaneous NET formation as that we detected both in vitro and in vivo, in association with signs of endothelial damage. We propose SPARC as a new potential marker of MDSC, in both human and mouse, with the additional feature of controlling MDSC suppressive activity while preventing an excessive inflammatory state through the control of NF-kB signaling pathway

The flow of plasma in the solar terrestrial environment

The overall goal of our NASA Theory Program was to study the coupling, time delays, and feedback mechanisms between the various regions of the solar-terrestrial system in a self-consistent, quantitative manner. To accomplish this goal, it will eventually be necessary to have time-dependent macroscopic models of the different regions of the solar-terrestrial system and we are continually working toward this goal. However, with the funding from this NASA program, we concentrated on the near-earth plasma environment, including the ionosphere, the plasmasphere, and the polar wind. In this area, we developed unique global models that allowed us to study the coupling between the different regions. These results are highlighted in the next section. Another important aspect of our NASA Theory Program concerned the effect that localized 'structure' had on the macroscopic flow in the ionosphere, plasmasphere, thermosphere, and polar wind. The localized structure can be created by structured magnetospheric inputs (i.e., structured plasma convection, particle precipitation or Birkland current patterns) or time variations in these input due to storms and substorms. Also, some of the plasma flows that we predicted with our macroscopic models could be unstable, and another one of our goals was to examine the stability of our predicted flows. Because time-dependent, three-dimensional numerical models of the solar-terrestrial environment generally require extensive computer resources, they are usually based on relatively simple mathematical formulations (i.e., simple MHD or hydrodynamic formulations). Therefore, another goal of our NASA Theory Program was to study the conditions under which various mathematical formulations can be applied to specific solar-terrestrial regions. This could involve a detailed comparison of kinetic, semi-kinetic, and hydrodynamic predictions for a given polar wind scenario or it could involve the comparison of a small-scale particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation of a plasma expansion event with a similar macroscopic expansion event. The different mathematical formulations have different strengths and weaknesses and a careful comparison of model predictions for similar geophysical situations provides insight into when the various models can be used with confidence

Cross Sectional and Longitudinal Fuzzy Clustering of the NUTS and Positioning of the Italian Regions with Respect to the Regional Competitiveness Index (RCI) Indicators with Contiguity Constraints

In socio-economical clustering often the empirical information is represented by time-varying data generated by indicators observed over time on a set of subnational (regional) units. Usually among these units may exist contiguity relations, spatial but not only.In this paper we propose a fuzzy clustering model of multivariate time-varying data, the longitudinal fuzzy C-Medoids clustering with contiguity constraints. The temporal aspect is dealt with by using appropriate measures of dissimilarity between time trajectories. The contiguity among units is dealt with adding a contiguity matrix as a penalization term in the clustering model.The cross sectional fuzzy C-Medoids clustering with contiguity constraints is obtained considering one instant of time. The model is applied to the classification of the European NUTS on the basis of the observed dynamics of the Basic, Efficiency and Innovation subindexes of the Regional Competitiveness Index (RCI) 2013 and 2016. The positioning of the Italian regions is analyzed through the values of the medoids of the clusters and shows the peculiarities of the regions with respect to the subindexes either in single times or in the dynamic. Two contiguity constraints, one based on the European Western, Southern, Central and Northern geographic areas and one on the level of GDP—taken into account in the computation of the RCI—are also introduced in the models

Letter to the Editor commenting on “Efficacy of serratus anterior plane block versus thoracic paravertebral block for postoperative analgesia after breast cancer surgery: a randomized trial”

We have read with very great interest the study published by Arora S et al.: “Efficacy of serratus anterior plane block versus thoracic paravertebral block for postoperative analgesia after breast cancer surgery: a randomized trial”, especially for the attention paid to the key points in the management of breast surgery: postoperative analgesia optimization, incidence of postoperative nausea and vomiting reduction, prevention of the onset of chronic pain and functional impotenc

New Technologies for Ecosystem Analysis Planning and Management

Planning the rural environment is one of the most intriguing examples of technical challenge where a multi-disciplinary approach plays a crucial role. The agricultural production, both food and non-food, the social role of rural settlements, the state and diffusion of the infrastructural networks, the rural architectonic heritage that in many countries constitutes a major positive value, should be appropriately considered and sinergically interlaced for a sound planning of agricultural biosystems. Human activities impose a transformation of the extra-urban land that may lead to the modification of the frail equilibrium of whole ecosystems. Sound planning strategies should be therefore pursued, employing a multidisciplinary approach that should take into account geographical, environmental and landscape factors as variables interacting among themselves and with the social and economic aspects. In order to simultaneously analyse all these properties, tools able to manage, interpret and integrate several data are necessary