Effect of Different Diet on the Lung Fatty Acid Modification

The effect of dietary fat on the composition of lung fatty acids was studied in Fischer rats fed two experimental semisynthetic, isocaloric diets containing different qualities of fat (low fat diet (LFD) and medium-chain triacylglycerols diet (MCTD)). The effect of MCTs preparation on the lung phospho- and neutral lipids is manifested as a change in the degree of saturation expressed as a ratio of saturation index (RSj) MCTD vs. CD. The saturation increased; in neutral lipids by 70%, in phosphatidylcholine fraction by 152.6%, and in other phospholipids by 39.5%. The results on the fatty acid composition of lipids obtained using LFD showed the effect of desaturation expressed as a ratio of desaturation index (RD;), in phosphatidylcholine fraction -1.95. The observed effect of desaturation was a consequence of the administered LFD, which contains a lower amount of essential fatty acids, which strongly affects the conversion of palmitic acid into palmitooleic acid. The LFD can be useful as a carbohydrate diet in a special clinical situation only if enriched with a certain amount of essential fatty acids, especially linoleic acid

Back to People's Health in Croatia – Generating new forms of collective agency

This paper concerns new forms of collective agency in the area of health care in Croatia from 2015 until 2018. These new forms developed in the midst of the growing privatization and commodification of health care and the simultaneous decrease in the accessibility to health care. Privatization has taken place slowly, but continuously over the last 29 years. The traditional civil society organizations in the field of health care used to be characterized by a narrow set of activities, with vertical structures, and were frequently focused on a single-disease approach and collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry. Such practices produced limited results, hence improved forms of activism emerged. In this research, we illustrate their development using the example of three case studies of collective agency. The first case study is looking at the policy analysis and the activist group started by the Organization for Workers' Initiative and Democratization (OWID); the second one focuses on the informal group of medical students called U3 formed at the Andrija Štampar School of Public Health with the aim of developing critical thinking; and the third case study considers the Karika Association, started as an attempt to rethink health care in the community. The main research methods employed included process tracing analysis and research data comparison aimed at showing the differences between the traditional and the new forms of healthcare activism, in addition to the secondary sources of information such as scientific and professional literature. The results show that the new forms of collective agency in the healthcare area include various groups of citizens not necessarily connected with a specific disease, that they have a horizontal structure and are focused on the healthcare system in general. In conclusion, they represent the beginning of a paradigmatic shift in activism from a single-disease approach towards comprehensive health care that has the potential to deal with the growing issue of commercialization, commodification and inequalities in today's healthcare systems