The spliceosome as target for anticancer treatment

The spliceosome is a ribonucleoprotein complex involved in RNA splicing, that is, the removal of non-coding introns from precursor messenger RNA. (Alternative) Splicing events may play an essential role in tumourigenesis. The recent discovery that the spliceosome is a target for novel compounds with anticancer activity opens up new therapeutic avenues

Strengths and Weaknesses for Climate Change: Adaptation in Water Governance: A Comparison Across Six European Regions

This chapter comparatively analyses the policy and governance contexts of six European regions that are affected by different hydrological impacts of climate change. The results demonstrate that a major governance strength across regions lies in the organization of management capacities to deal with existing water-related risks. For example, the Dutch context focuses on water safety, Cyprus has a clear policy framework to deal with water scarcity and in the Norwegian city of Bergen, wastewater is well managed. As a consequence of this focus on present-day risks, climate adaptation governance also focuses on historical risks. New or exacerbated risks posed by climate change remain largely untreated, and responsibilities for dealing with climate-related risks remain unspecified, as also becomes clear in the German and Spanish cases. A high degree of governmental fragmentation is identified as another point of weakness. Identified most clearly in the Portuguese case but recognizable in all regional contexts, different subdomains of water management are dealt with under separate policies and are governed by different responsible agencies. Consequently, information about current performance of the water system is scattered and coordinative efforts, which are key to developing adaptation strategies, are hampered

Physical activity for people living with dementia: carer outcomes and side effects from the perspectives of professionals and family carers

Adherence to physical activity is challenging for people living with dementia, and largely dependent on carers' involvement. Carers are likely to support physical activity based on their perceived balance between benefits and potential side effects of such intervention for both patients and themselves. Professionals also have a role in terms of optimising such interventions not only for people with dementia but also their carers.publishe

Giving A Face to Chemotherapy-Induced Alopecia: A Feasibility Study on Drawings by Patients

Objective: Individuals with cancer experience the impact of chemotherapy on hair loss in different ways. The aim of this pilot study was to explore patients' experiences of alopecia through patients' drawings. Methods: Fifteen female patients diagnosed with cancer and treated with chemotherapy were recruited at the oncological day-care unit of a teaching hospital in the Netherlands. Participants completed a semi-structured interview about alopecia. They drew their head and hair before and during chemotherapy and completed the Brief Illness Perception Questionnaire (B-IPQ).Results: The drawings revealed predominantly physical effects, rather than emotions. Emotions were evident in the text that patients wrote under the drawings and in the B-IPQ open question about the perceived consequences of alopecia. The overall impact of alopecia that emerged from the drawings and the B-IPQ corresponded to the information retrieved from the interviews, namely disappointment, insecurity, sadness, and confrontation.Conclusions: Drawings expose cognitive and emotional responses to alopecia that may be relatively unexplored when using traditional assessment methods such as questionnaires or interviews. In future research, the drawing instructions need to be more specifically focused on feelings in order to better capture emotional reactions to hair loss.Experimentele farmacotherapi

Personality Disorders in Older Adults: Emerging Research Issues

Abstract Empirical research focusing on personality disorders (PDs) among older adults is mainly limited to studies on psychometric properties of age-specific personality tests, the age neutrality of specific items/scales, and validation of personality inventories for older adults. We identified only two treatment studies-one on dialectical behavior therapy and one on schema therapy-both with promising results among older patients despite small and heterogeneous populations. More rigorous studies incorporating age-specific adaptations are needed. Furthermore, in contrast to increasing numbers of psychometric studies, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)-5 pays little attention to the characteristics of older adults with PDs. Moreover, the constructs "personality change due to another medical condition" and "late-onset personality disorder" warrant further research among older adults. These needs will become even more pressing given the aging society worldwide

Death by request in The Netherlands: facts, the legal context and effects on physicians, patients and families

In this article I intend to describe an issue of the Dutch euthanasia practice that is not common knowledge. After some general introductory descriptions, by way of formulating a frame of reference, I shall describe the effects of this practice on patients, physicians and families, followed by a more philosophical reflection on the significance of these effects for the assessment of the authenticity of a request and the nature of unbearable suffering, two key concepts in the procedure towards euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide. This article does not focus on the arguments for or against euthanasia and the ethical justification of physician-assisted dying. These arguments have been described extensively in Kimsma and Van Leeuwen (Asking to die. Inside the Dutch debate about euthanasia, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1998)

Identification of osteolineage cell-derived extracellular vesicle cargo implicated in hematopoietic support

Osteolineage cell-derived extracellular vesicles (EVs) play a regulatory role in hematopoiesis and have been shown to promote the ex vivo expansion of human hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs). Here, we demonstrate that EVs from different human osteolineage sources do not have the same HSPC expansion promoting potential. Comparison of stimulatory and non-stimulatory osteolineage EVs by next-generation sequencing and mass spectrometry analyses revealed distinct microRNA and protein signatures identifying EV-derived candidate regulators of ex vivo HSPC expansion. Accordingly, the treatment of umbilical cord blood-derived CD34+ HSPCs with stimulatory EVs-altered HSPC transcriptome, including genes with known roles in cell proliferation. An integrative bioinformatics approach, which connects the HSPC gene expression data with the candidate cargo in stimulatory EVs, delineated the potentially targeted biological functions and pathways during hematopoietic cell expansion and development. In conclusion, our study giv

The teaching of recent and violent conflicts as challenges for history education

This paper has been written with the support of Projects EDU2015-65088P from the DGICYT (Ministry of Education, Spain) and also the Project PICT2012-1594 from the ANPCYT (Argentina) coordinated by the autho

The TA Framework: Designing Real-time Teaching Augmentation for K-12 Classrooms

Recently, the HCI community has seen increased interest in the design of teaching augmentation (TA): tools that extend and complement teachers' pedagogical abilities during ongoing classroom activities. Examples of TA systems are emerging across multiple disciplines, taking various forms: e.g., ambient displays, wearables, or learning analytics dashboards. However, these diverse examples have not been analyzed together to derive more fundamental insights into the design of teaching augmentation. Addressing this opportunity, we broadly synthesize existing cases to propose the TA framework. Our framework specifies a rich design space in five dimensions, to support the design and analysis of teaching augmentation. We contextualize the framework using existing designs cases, to surface underlying design trade-offs: for example, balancing actionability of presented information with teachers' needs for professional autonomy, or balancing unobtrusiveness with informativeness in the design of TA systems. Applying the TA framework, we identify opportunities for future research and design.Comment: to be published in Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 17 pages, 10 figure