Performance of wine bag-in-box during storage: loss of oxygen barrier

Bag-in-box system is a convenient packaging system for wine. Its barrier to oxygen relies, in many cases, in an aluminium metallized polyester film laminated between two polyethylene (PE) layers as the inner bag. One on the most frequently observed system failures is the ingress of wine into the gap between the layers of the double bag. This study aimed at verifying if that influences the barrier of the system to oxygen. The results showed that the contact of wine with this barrier layer, although through a PE layer, promotes the demetallization and consequent loss of barrier properties. The type of wine, in particular its volatile acidity, and the temperatures were two variables assessed. Results showed that wine with higher acidity and stored at higher temperatures tend to yield a higher increase in oxygen transmission rate of the film.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Duodenal gastrointestinal stromal tumor and endoscopic ultrasound

Duodenal gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs) are a very rare condition. The pre-operative diagnosis can be a challenge but it is very important because GISTs have singularities that differ from other tumors and their location in the duodenum itself can have a major role in the choice of the surgical approach. We present two cases of duodenal GISTs where endoscopic ultrasound had a single role in their management, namely allowing the possibility to obtain material for immunocytochemical pre-operative diagnosis and regarding the precise relation to the papilla of Vater. The patients were operated and histological examination confirmed the diagnosis in both cases

Characterization of patterns of food packaging usage in portuguese homes

This study aimed to further refine the exposure assessment of migrants from food-contact materials by characterizing, at the household level, food packaging usage (amount and type) in Portuguese urban families. Packages from domestic use were collected from a sample of 105 consumers from 34 households over a 30-day period. Collected packages (more than 6000 items) were characterized in the laboratory and data were used to estimate: (i) global packaging usage and food intake; (ii) the consumption factors (CF) that describe the fraction of the daily diet expected to be in contact with specific packaging materials and (iii) the food-type factors (FTF) that reflect the fraction of all food contacting each material which differ in nature according to six major types: aqueous, acidic, alcoholic, milky, fatty and dry. The daily intake of packaged food and beverages consumed at home ranged from 5–50 g kg 1 bw. Considering all materials, total package usage ranged from 0.1 to 0.6dm2 day 1 kg 1 bw. The ratio between package surface area in contact and the quantity of food was determined for all packaging items collected and an average value of 25 dm2 kg 1 food was recorded. Data were gathered and presented in a manner compatible with current probabilistic approaches to exposure assessment. In this way, relevant consumption patterns from this type of population can be best represented in exposure assessments and subsequent risk assessments.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Heparan sulfate glycosaminoglycans: (un)expected allies in cancer clinical management

In an era when cancer glycobiology research is exponentially growing, we are witnessing a progressive translation of the major scientific findings to the clinical practice with the overarching aim of improving cancer patients’ management. Many mechanistic cell biology studies have demonstrated that heparan sulfate (HS) glycosaminoglycans are key molecules responsible for several molecular and biochemical processes, impacting extracellular matrix properties and cellular functions. HS can interact with a myriad of different ligands, and therefore, hold a pleiotropic role in regulating the activity of important cellular receptors and downstream signalling pathways. The aberrant expression of HS glycan chains in tumours determines main malignant features, such as cancer cell proliferation, angiogenesis, invasion and metastasis. In this review, we devote particular attention to HS biological activities, its expression profile and modulation in cancer. Moreover, we highlight HS clinical potential to improve both diagnosis and prognosis of cancer, either as HS-based biomarkers or as therapeutic targets.This work was financed by FEDER-Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional funds through the COMPETE 2020-Operacional Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalization (POCI), Portugal 2020, and by Portuguese funds through FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia/Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação in the framework of the project “Institute for Research and Innovation in Health Sciences” (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007274) and by the grant POCI-01-0145-FEDER-028489 (to A.M.). J.P. and C.M. are funded by FCT PhD scholarships SFRH/BD/137319/2018 and 2020.06412.BD, respectively. The APC was funded by FCT grant POCI-01-0145-FEDER-028489. The authors acknowledge the support of the COST Action CA18103 INNOGLY

The importance of ultrasound findings in the study of anal pain

ABSTRACT Objective: endoanal ultrasonography can detect organic causes of anal pain without pathology on physical examination. The aim of this study is to evaluate the importance of endoanal ultrasonography in the diagnosis and therapeutic management of idiopathic and functional anal pain. Material and methods: retrospective study, between 15 March 2005 and 15 June 2008, of all patients with proctalgia and normal examination or with alterations not responsible for anal pain at proctologic exam that have undergone an endoanal ultrasonography. Results: a total of 90 patients were analyzed, with a mean age of 50.5 years, 58% were female. Twenty-three patients had functional anal pain clinic criteria. Endoanal ultrasonography revealed alterations in 49% of patients. The primary findings were changes in sphincters in 14 patients, followed by anal sepsis in 12 patients, anal fissure in 10 patients, perirectal lesions in 6 patients and ulcer of the anal canal in 2 patients. Of the patients with sphincter defects, 5 patients had criteria of chronic anal pain. In this group of patients, no differences were found in manometric and defecographic results between the different ultrasound abnormalities. Conclusions: the endoanal ultrasonography detected occult organic lesions to proctologic examination, in half the patients with anal pain. Ultrasound abnormalities were found in 22% of patients with functional anal pain. However, there was no correlation between ultrasound findings and physiological studies, and therefore could not find etiological or pathogenic factors of functional anal pain

Implementação de um Estudo de Efetividade da Vacina Contra a Gripe no Contexto Hospitalar em Portugal: Projeto EVA Hospital

Introduction: The project ‘Integrated Monitoring of Vaccines in Europe’ aimed to measure seasonal influenza vaccine effectiveness against hospitalised adults, aged 65 years and over, with influenza. We describe the protocol implementation in Portugal. Material and Methods: We implemented a test-negative design, targeting community-dwelling patients aged 65 years old and over hospitalised with severe acute respiratory illness. Patients were reverse transverse-polymerase chain reaction tested for influenza. Cases were those positive for influenza while others were controls. Most variables were collected using hospital medical records. Selection bias was evaluated by comparison with the laboratory influenza test requests database according to demographic characteristics. Crude, season-adjusted influenza vaccine effectiveness was estimated as = 1 – odds ratio, and 95% confidence intervals were obtained by conditional logistical regression, matched with the disease onset month. Results: The recruitment rate was 37.8%. Most participants (n = 368) were female (55.8%) and aged 80 years old and over (55.8%). This was similar to values for potentially eligible severe acute respiratory illness patients (80 years old and over: 56.8%, female: 56.2%). The proportion of missing values was below 2.5% for 20 variables and above 5% (maximum 11.6%) for six variables. Influenza vaccine effectiveness estimates were 62.1% against AH1pdm09 (95% confidence intervals: -28.1 to 88.8), 14.9% against A(H3N2) (95% confidence intervals: -69.6 to 57.3), 43.6% against B/Yam (95% confidence intervals: -66.2 to 80.8). Discussion: Given the non-existence of a coded admission database in either participating hospital the selection of severe acute respiratory illness due to clinical features was the feasible one. These results are only valid for the older adult population residing in the catchment area of the two participating hospitals who were admitted to a public hospital with severe influenza or SARI symptoms. Conclusion: Despite the low participation rate, we observed comparable characteristics of participants and eligible severe acute respiratory illness patients. Data quality was high, and influenza vaccine effectiveness results were in accordance with the results of meta-analyses and European season-specific estimates. The final sample size was low, which inhibited obtaining estimates with good precision.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Virtual Reality And The Future Of Construction

Introduction: Despite the recent trends in technology, construction projects are becoming increasingly challenging, which, in the result, brings in more complex and dynamic construction environments. In fact, traditional management and monitoring methods are currently unable to keep up with the industry's quick development, leading to several problems in task efficiency and transfer of information between stakeholders. As a result, the Architecture Engineering Construction and Operations (AECO) sector is making use of the digitalization in order to improve project management, assist trade-crews and achieve a more proficient working environment. The adoption of Building Information Modelling (BIM) embodies a paradigm shift from the traditional approaches towards a collaborative and integrated working process. Though BIM is improving the aforesaid issues, not every construction entity can easily adapt and use it successfully. Therefore, supportive tools to assist BIM in achieving its full potential are in high demand. Objectives: The current research objective is to provide a review of previous works in the field of BIM-based Virtual Reality (VR), in order to establish a clear view of this research field. This work provides the primary data on such goals. Methodology: In order to conduct the research, the PRISMA Statement strategy was used. The selected primary keywords were "construction", "virtual reality" and "building information modelling" and their variants. The research was carried out in the main engineering databases and journals, being Scopus, Science Direct and IEEE Xplore some examples. Results: After the identification of 2,950 records, exclusion criteria were applied: year of publication, type of document, type of source and deduplication. The titles and abstracts of the publications were screened in order to determine the scope of the papers, leaving for full-text analysis just 75 studies. After going through the eligibility criteria, only 14 papers remained. Using the snowballing technique, two more papers were added to the study, resulting in 16 included papers. Most of the papers focused on the Construction Design, Construction Management, and Construction Safety fields, being "design" the most occurring construction stage. The highlighted target groups for the VR interfaces were Engineers, Architects and Workers. Most system architectures comprise, at least, three layers regarding a BIM software tool, a visual enhancement module and a game engine to provide the virtual environment and interaction functionalities. However, some studies referred to a fourth layer (database). Conclusions: The BIM-VR relation addressed in the articles was mainly focused on the model's geometric information since BIM provides an accurate display of building geometry. Most VR interfaces do not possess a database component to provide access to BIM parametric information, leading to the conclusion that BIM is not achieving its full potential with VR tools

Different isolation approaches lead to diverse glycosylated extracellular vesicle populations

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are a heterogeneous group of small secreted particles involved in inter-cellular communication and mediating a broad spectrum of biological functions. EVs cargo iscomposed of a large repertoire of molecules, including glycoconjugates. Herein, we report the firststudy on the impact of the isolation strategy on the EV populations’glycosylation profile. The use ofdifferent state-of-the-art protocols, namely differential ultracentrifugation (UC), total exosome isola-tion (TEI), OptiPrepTMdensity gradient (ODG) and size exclusion chromatography (SEC) resulted in EVpopulations displaying different sets of glycoconjugates. The EV populations obtained by UC, ODGand SEC methods displayed similar protein and glycan profiles, whereas TEI methodology isolated themost distinct EV population. In addition, ODG and SEC isolation protocols provided an enhanced EVglycoproteins detection. Remarkably, proteins displaying the tumour-associated glycan sialyl-Tn(STn) were identified as packaged cargo into EVs independently of the isolation methodology. STncarrying EV samples isolated by UC, ODG and SEC presented a considerable set of cancer-relatedproteins that were not detected in EVs isolated by TEI. Our work demonstrates the impact of usingdifferent isolation methodologies in the populations of EVs that are obtained, with consequences inthe glycosylation profile of the isolated population. Furthermore, our results highlight the importanceof selecting adequate EV isolation protocols and cell culture conditions to determine the structuraland functional complexity of the EV glycoconjugates.This work was funded by FEDER funds through theOperational Programme for Competitiveness Factors-COMPETE (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016585; POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007274; POCI-01-0145-FEDER-028489) and NationalFunds through the Foundation for Science and Technology(FCT), under the projects: PTDC/BBB-EBI/0567/2014 (toCAR), PTDC/MED-ONC/28489/2017 (to AM) and UID/BIM/04293/2013; and the project NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000029, supported by Norte Portugal Regional Programme(NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 PartnershipAgreement, through the European Regional DevelopmentFund (ERDF). DF acknowledges the FCT PhD Programmesand Programa Operacional Potencial Humano (POPH), speci-fically the Biotech Health Programme (Doctoral Programme onCellular and Molecular Biotechnology Applied to HealthSciences), with the reference PD/0016/2012 funded by FCTand the grant SFRH/BD/110636/2015 from FCT, POPH andFSE (Fundo Social Europeu); MB acknowledges the EuropeanUnion’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programmeunder the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No.748880; and JP acknowledges FCT (SFRH/BD/137319/2018).The authors acknowledge Rede Nacional de Espectrometria deMassa, ROTEIRO/0028/2013, ref. LISBOA-01-0145-FEDER-022125, supported by COMPETE and North PortugalRegional Operational Programme (Norte2020), under thePORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through theEuropean Regional Development Fund (ERDF). SV acknowl-edges the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF107)