College women, HPV genotyping and sexual behavior before HPV vaccination: Results from samples stored for a long time

HPV is the sexually transmitted agent most common among young people, like college students. The aim of study was to associate sexual behavior characteristics of women with HPV, detected in genital samples taken before the introduction of the HPV vaccine. Female students during 2001–2005 donated genital samples and the samples were re-analyzed in 2013 for HPV genotyping by RT-PCR. The frozen storage of the students’ genital samples allowed the detection of HPV DNA and its genotyping after years of sample collection. HPV prevalence was 22%, HPV16 3.9%, and HPV18 1.1%. Age, multiple sexual partners and the partner’s age at first sexual intercourse were significantly associated to HPV. Students with ≥ 3 sexual partners and who did not use condom had 12.8 higher odds of being HPV positive. These results made possible the analysis of HPV prevalence changes, before HPV vaccine introduction. Keywords: HPV, Women, Sexual behaviors, Condom, Vaccinatio

Differences in Body Composition in Older People from Two Regions of Mexico: Implications for Diagnoses of Sarcopenia and Sarcopenic Obesity

Abstract Background. Mexico is a country that is rich in ethnicity and cultural diversity, divided into three well-defined socioeconomic, ecological, and epidemiological areas. However, we do not know the influence that these factors may have on body composition. Therefore, this study was designed to assess body composition and compare appendicular skeletal muscle mass (ASM) in older people from two areas of the country. Methods. This is a cross-sectional study that included 430 subjects ≥60 years of age from northwestern and central Mexico. Body composition, including ASM, was measured by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, while anthropometry, handgrip strength, demographic variables, health status/chronic conditions, and energy expenditure data were all included. Results.Men and women fromthe northwestern region had 5.9 kg and 3.8 kg more body fat, respectively, and 3.9 kg more as a group than their counterparts from central Mexico (p ≤ 0.0001). While there were no significant differences across gender or region in terms of ASM, the older subjects from central Mexico had a significantly higher ASM index (ASMI) than the sample from the northwest. When ASM was adjusted for age, body weight, height, health status/chronic conditions, estimated energy expenditure, and demographic variables, the subjects from central Mexico had significantly higher adjusted mean values of ASM and ASMI than their counterparts from the northwest. Conclusion. Older people from two regions of Mexico had significantly different estimates of body composition. Our findings highlight the importance of regionalizing estimates of ASM and ASMI if they are to be used for diagnostic purposes. It is also important to emphasize that appendicular skeletal muscle mass, or the ASM index, should be adjusted for other associated biological variables

Is Spain Becoming a Country of Emigration Again? Data Evidence and Public Responses

Spain is one of the EU countries most affected by the economic crisis and its deleterious impact on the labour market. With unemployment at record levels and specially affecting the young, men and foreign nationals, it is no surprise that emigration has increased significantly. Thus, after being a country of emigration and then attracting large inflows of migrants, Spain’s migratory balance has become negative again. Nevertheless, there is little clarity as to how important these new outflows are numerically and their main characteristics, something that is reflected in the policy responses and public debate. To help throw light on this, the current chapter first reviews the main official statistics in order to ascertain how many people are leaving, where and who they are. Although in absolute numbers current outflows do not reflect the severity of the socioeconomic context, emigration is on the rise and affects both Spaniards and non-natives. However, there are differences in the sociodemographic characteristics and main destinations of both groups. Second, the chapter argues that policy responses have been almost absent and the public debate polarized along ideological lines. While certain political parties and media denounce these flows as economically motivated and alert about the negative consequences, the government and others portray the phenomenon as mainly affecting return migration and young people in search of new experiences.Depto. de Sociología AplicadaFac. de Ciencias de la InformaciónTRUEpu

The many faces of insulin-like peptide signalling in the brain

Central and peripheral insulin-like peptides (ILPs), which include insulin, insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1) and IGF2, exert many effects in the brain. Through their actions on brain growth and differentiation, ILPs contribute to building circuitries that subserve metabolic and behavioural adaptation to internal and external cues of energy availability. In the adult brain each ILP has distinct effects, but together their actions ultimately regulate energy homeostasis - they affect nutrient sensing and regulate neuronal plasticity to modulate adaptive behaviours involved in food seeking, including high-level cognitive operations such as spatial memory. In essence, the multifaceted activity of ILPs in the brain may be viewed as a system organization involved in the control of energy allocation. © 2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.Peer Reviewe

Discovering HIV related information by means of association rules and machine learning

Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is still one of the main health problems worldwide. It is therefore essential to keep making progress in improving the prognosis and quality of life of affected patients. One way to advance along this pathway is to uncover connections between other disorders associated with HIV/AIDS-so that they can be anticipated and possibly mitigated. We propose to achieve this by using Association Rules (ARs). They allow us to represent the dependencies between a number of diseases and other specific diseases. However, classical techniques systematically generate every AR meeting some minimal conditions on data frequency, hence generating a vast amount of uninteresting ARs, which need to be filtered out. The lack of manually annotated ARs has favored unsupervised filtering, even though they produce limited results. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised system, able to identify relevant ARs among HIV-related diseases with a minimal amount of annotated training data. Our system has been able to extract a good number of relationships between HIV-related diseases that have been previously detected in the literature but are scattered and are often little known. Furthermore, a number of plausible new relationships have shown up which deserve further investigation by qualified medical experts