Headache in pediatric practice: multifactor analysis of clinical and social predictors

The purpose of this work is to define the clinical and social predictors of headaches in children and adolescents. Material and Methods. We performed clinical examination of children and adolescents, which included studying their symptoms, anamnesis, somatic and neurological objective signs, survey using our original questionnaire and survey in the framework of an international project to study headaches «World Children and Adolescent Headache Project». The type of headache was diagnosed using international diagnostic criteria of the International Classification of Headache Disorders, 3rd edition (beta release). As a result of our study, we obtained the data about the most significant lifestyle factors (among those studied) influencing the number of days with headache per month, calculated linear coefficients and a predicting mathematical model for children. The sensitivity of the model for the prognosis of chronic tension type headache is 63%, specificity — 81 %. Conclusion. In this paper we describe criteria for the prognosis of primary headaches in patients aged from 8 to 18 years old

Medicine and tourism as agents of medical tourism

© 2020, Advanced Scientific Research. All rights reserved. In article approaches to studying medical tourism are considered. On the basis of the analysis the conclusion is drawn that, despite the main mission of medical tourism as instrument of improvement of the population, his key agent is the tourist market. This segment of the market is capable to organize a travel to the vacation spot and to provide necessary service, and receiving medical services predetermines only the purpose and can influence the choice of the vacation spot. Scientists in the field of tourism, health care and economy consider medical tourism one of the most perspective types of the industry in the 21st century that causes development of medicine, improvement of quality of the provided medical services, improvement of efficiency of health care systems, development of the sphere of tourism and the industries accompanying it, increase in a contribution to GDP of the region/country

Microstructured Substrates for Counting Bacteria Formed by Ion Implantation

© 2020, Pleiades Publishing, Ltd. Abstract: A novel technological approach based on ion implantation for obtaining nanostructured substrates for the visual characterization of ultrasmall biological objects and microorganisms has been described. By means of argon-ion implantation of silicate glasses through surface masks made of copper wire mesh, periodic microstructures in the form of gratings with mesh sizes of 50 × 50 μm were formed. The novel substrates were tested by scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray analysis, as well as atomic force microscopy, using bacteria of the genera Bacillus and Staphylococcus deposited onto their surface

Biological cell scaffolds based on nanoporous germanium layers formed by ion implantation

© 2020 Elsevier Ltd New experiments demonstrated the effect of porous germanium (PGe) surface fabricated by the implantation with various transition metal ions (Cr+ and Ni+) on the growth of small microorganisms and continuous biofilms on the case of Staphylococcus bacteria deposition. The specific properties of PGe layers depending on the type of introduced metal ions useful for practical medicine were observed such as toxic effects for these bacteria with partial destruction of cells and essential decrease in their adhesive activity to the PGe surface

Insights into the health effects of acrolein and crotonaldehyde in Russian smokers switching from regular cigarettes to heated tobacco products

The effects of acrolein and crotonaldehyde on the health of Russian smokers upon switching to heated tobacco product use were analyzed in a five-day randomized clinical trial. The findings suggest that heated tobacco products significantly reduce exposure to these toxicants, with the adverse effects becoming less pronounced in just one day and comparable to complete cessation of smoking. The dynamics of nicotine intake and metabolism in the smokers who switched to heated tobacco products remained stable throughout the study and was similar to that in the group of regular cigarette smokers. Therefore, our study, which has been performed for the first time among the Russian population, shows that smokers switching to heated tobacco products are less exposed to harmful chemicals like acrolein and crotonaldehyde and thus may be protected against some of the negative health effects often associated with regular cigarettes

Chromatin Organization in Early Land Plants Reveals an Ancestral Association between H3K27me3, Transposons, and Constitutive Heterochromatin

© 2019 Genome packaging by nucleosomes is a hallmark of eukaryotes. Histones and the pathways that deposit, remove, and read histone modifications are deeply conserved. Yet, we lack information regarding chromatin landscapes in extant representatives of ancestors of the main groups of eukaryotes, and our knowledge of the evolution of chromatin-related processes is limited. We used the bryophyte Marchantia polymorpha, which diverged from vascular plants circa 400 mya, to obtain a whole chromosome genome assembly and explore the chromatin landscape and three-dimensional genome organization in an early diverging land plant lineage. Based on genomic profiles of ten chromatin marks, we conclude that the relationship between active marks and gene expression is conserved across land plants. In contrast, we observed distinctive features of transposons and other repetitive sequences in Marchantia compared with flowering plants. Silenced transposons and repeats did not accumulate around centromeres. Although a large fraction of constitutive heterochromatin was marked by H3K9 methylation as in flowering plants, a significant proportion of transposons were marked by H3K27me3, which is otherwise dedicated to the transcriptional repression of protein-coding genes in flowering plants. Chromatin compartmentalization analyses of Hi-C data revealed that repressed B compartments were densely decorated with H3K27me3 but not H3K9 or DNA methylation as reported in flowering plants. We conclude that, in early plants, H3K27me3 played an essential role in heterochromatin function, suggesting an ancestral role of this mark in transposon silencing. Montgomery et al. provide a chromosome-scale genome assembly of the early diverging land plant Marchantia polymorpha. Profiling of chromatin marks shows conserved roles of active marks and suggests an ancestral association between H3K27me3 and transposons that is partly retained in Marchantia and replaced by H3K9 methylation in flowering plants