Emprego da Ecocardiografia Convencional na Avaliaçao de Pacientes com Miocardiopatia Dilatada, candidatos à Terapia de Ressincronizaçao

O advento da ressincronizaçao cardíaca (RC) representou um enorme avanço no campo da terapêutica da insuficiência cardíaca. No entanto, aproximadamente 30% dos pacientes nao respondem à RC, o que pode estar relacionado aos critérios de seleçao. A ecocardiografia-doppler convencional vem auxiliando na seleçao dos possíveis candidatos à RC, no ajuste da programaçao para cada paciente e na avaliaçao dos resultados agudos e a longo prazo

Emprego da Ecocardiografia Convencional na Avaliaçao de Pacientes com Miocardiopatia Dilatada, candidatos à Terapia de Ressincronizaçao

O advento da ressincronizaçao cardíaca (RC) representou um enorme avanço no campo da terapêutica da insuficiência cardíaca. No entanto, aproximadamente 30% dos pacientes nao respondem à RC, o que pode estar relacionado aos critérios de seleçao. A ecocardiografia-doppler convencional vem auxiliando na seleçao dos possíveis candidatos à RC, no ajuste da programaçao para cada paciente e na avaliaçao dos resultados agudos e a longo prazo

Effect of High vs Low Doses of Chloroquine Diphosphate as Adjunctive Therapy for Patients Hospitalized With Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Infection: A Randomized Clinical Trial.

There is no specific antiviral therapy recommended for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). In vitro studies indicate that the antiviral effect of chloroquine diphosphate (CQ) requires a high concentration of the drug.To evaluate the safety and efficacy of 2 CQ dosages in patients with severe COVID-19. This parallel, double-masked, randomized, phase IIb clinical trial with 81 adult patients who were hospitalized with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection was conducted from March 23 to April 5, 2020, at a tertiary care facility in Manaus, Brazilian Amazon. - Patients were allocated to receive high-dosage CQ (ie, 600 mg CQ twice daily for 10 days) or low-dosage CQ (ie, 450 mg twice daily on day 1 and once daily for 4 days). - Label: Main Outcomes and Measures Primary outcome was reduction in lethality by at least 50% in the high-dosage group compared with the low-dosage group. Data presented here refer primarily to safety and lethality outcomes during treatment on day 13. Secondary end points included participant clinical status, laboratory examinations, and electrocardiogram results. Outcomes will be presented to day 28. Viral respiratory secretion RNA detection was performed on days 0 and 4. Out of a predefined sample size of 440 patients, 81 were enrolled (41 [50.6%] to high-dosage group and 40 [49.4%] to low-dosage group). Enrolled patients had a mean (SD) age of 51.1 (13.9) years, and most (60 [75.3%]) were men. Older age (mean [SD] age, 54.7 [13.7] years vs 47.4 [13.3] years) and more heart disease (5 of 28 [17.9%] vs 0) were seen in the high-dose group. Viral RNA was detected in 31 of 40 (77.5%) and 31 of 41 (75.6%) patients in the low-dosage and high-dosage groups, respectively. Lethality until day 13 was 39.0% in the high-dosage group (16 of 41) and 15.0% in the low-dosage group (6 of 40). The high-dosage group presented more instance of QTc interval greater than 500 milliseconds (7 of 37 [18.9%]) compared with the low-dosage group (4 of 36 [11.1%]). Respiratory secretion at day 4 was negative in only 6 of 27 patients (22.2%). - Label: Conclusions and Relevance The preliminary findings of this study suggest that the higher CQ dosage should not be recommended for critically ill patients with COVID-19 because of its potential safety hazards, especially when taken concurrently with azithromycin and oseltamivir. These findings cannot be extrapolated to patients with nonsevere COVID-19

Updated cardiovascular prevention guideline of the Brazilian Society of Cardiology: 2019

Sem informação113478788

The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics' resources: focus on curated databases

The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (www.isb-sib.ch) provides world-class bioinformatics databases, software tools, services and training to the international life science community in academia and industry. These solutions allow life scientists to turn the exponentially growing amount of data into knowledge. Here, we provide an overview of SIB's resources and competence areas, with a strong focus on curated databases and SIB's most popular and widely used resources. In particular, SIB's Bioinformatics resource portal ExPASy features over 150 resources, including UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, ENZYME, PROSITE, neXtProt, STRING, UniCarbKB, SugarBindDB, SwissRegulon, EPD, arrayMap, Bgee, SWISS-MODEL Repository, OMA, OrthoDB and other databases, which are briefly described in this article

De novo genomics of non-model arthropods

The extreme diversity of arthropods provides many opportunities for understating how ecological and genetic factors have interacted over the course of evolution. However, there is a marked imbalance on the genomic sampling of the arthropod tree of life due to a variety of reasons. Entire orders of basal arthropods have gone entirely unsampled in terms of genomic data, although they would be very informative for evolutionarily comparisons. This sparseness of available sequencing data is partially explained due to the inherent difficulties in sequencing organisms possessing both large genome sizes and high levels of heterozygosis, further compounded by an absence of inbred laboratory colonies for most of these clades. To enable genomic evolutionarily comparisons of early radiated arthropod lineages, we sequenced, de novo assembled, and annotated the genomes of several basal insects, including some previously unsampled arthropod orders, such Notoptera and Odonata

Escape from meiotic silencing of sex chromosomes

During the first meiotic prophase of mammalian spermatogenesis, the sex chromosomes generally undergo a transient process of transcriptional inactivation called meiotic sex chromosome inactivation (MSCI). This process is initiated shortly after the formation of meiotic double-strand breaks (DSBs), when DNA damage response proteins accumulate on these unsynapsed chromosomes, triggering local chromatin changes. However, recent studies have shown that MSCI is not a complete process, as 80% of X-linked miRNA genes manage to escape it. While the observation that these miRNAs are mostly found in multiple copies suggests a possible role for homologous recombination based repair in allowing evasion from the silencing machinery, so far what allows genes to escape MSCI remains unkown. Using RNA-sequencing data for three mouse spermatogenic cell types, we observe that the response of X-linked protein-coding genes to MSCI is highly variable. To explain this variability, we analysed the contribution of several gene characteristics, including their ability to avoid and repair DSBs, their evolutionary age, and the level of post-transcriptional regulation their transcripts are submitted to. Finally, we generated a linear model capable of explaining 35% of the observed gene expression variability during MSCI

Scorpion diversity in two types of seasonally dry tropical forest in the semi-arid region of Northeastern Brazil

Knowledge on arthropod assemblages in the Brazilian semideciduous dry forest (caatinga) is scarce, despite the increasing exposure to degradation due to human activities such as logging and intensive agriculture. We performed a short-term survey on the diversity of scorpions in two types of caatinga (hipoxerophytic and hiperxerophytic) in Pernambuco State, Northeastern Brazil. A combination of active collection and pitfall traps was used to sample soil scorpions. Six species belonging to two families were registered: Bothriurus asper, Bothriurus rochai (Bothriuridae), Tityus stigmurus, Tityus pusillus, Rhopalurus rochai and Ananteris franckei (Buthidae). There was no significant difference in the richness and the abundance of scorpions in the two types of caatinga. Bothriurus asper was the most abundant species in both environments. Regarding constancy, all species were classified as accidental