Unraveling the Hispanic Health Paradox

In 2019, Hispanics in the US had a life expectancy advantage of 3.0 years and 7.1 years over non-Hispanic Whites and non-Hispanic Blacks, respectively, despite having real-household income values 26 percentage points lower than Non-Hispanic White households. Hispanics appear to have equal or even better health outcomes relative to non-Hispanic Whites across various health measures. This is known as the Hispanic health paradox. This paper underscores the importance of disaggregating Hispanics by ancestry and age profile when discussing the paradox across key health outcomes. It also provides an overview of the leading explanations, such as the salmon bias and the healthy immigrant effect. Further, it highlights the role of healthcare access and usage in this discussion. Ignoring these sources of bias have important consequences for how morbidity and mortality among Hispanics are measured within widely used national datasets

Estudios sobre Agricultura y conocimiento tradicional en México

La agricultura es una de las actividades importantes para las comunidades rurales en México. Diversas situaciones impactan directamente a los campesinos y sus sistemas agrícolas. Por ejemplo, los productores con agricultura de temporal, son los menos favorecidos con determinadas políticas internacionales como el Tratado de Libre Comercio (TLC), cuyo potencial productivo se ha reducido a niveles de 1.2 por ciento. En las últimas dos décadas se ha dado fuerte impulso a los cultivos comerciales como hortalizas, frutas y flores ocasionando impactos a los productores rurales (Escalante et al. 2007 y 2008). Los campesinos en México se han enfrentado a diferentes situaciones complejas como los impactos de la modernización del sector agropecuario, los proyectos de desarrollo, la expansión de la industria y las áreas urbanas sobre las rurales y los procesos de mundialización de la economía (González 2007). Ante la situación que atraviesa el sector agrícola, es de vital importancia reconsiderar los sistemas agrícolas tradicionales que practican los campesinos. Los estudio sobre agricultura tradicional mexicana han demostrado la diversidad de sistemas que los campesinos han practicado durante cientos de años. Algunos estudios evidencian la historia del control del agua, la tecnología de riego, el manejo de las plantas, la intensificación del uso del suelo, las formas de organización sociopolítica, el mercado y los tipos de asentamientos humanos (Donkin 1979; Palerm 1980; Palerm y Wolf 1980; Doolittle 2004). Otros estudio más específicos se relacionan con el control de procesos erosivos del suelo, el manejo del suelo, la biodiversidad, el conocimiento ecológico tradicional, las estrategias y manejo de agua de riego y de humedales (González 1992; Maimone et al. 2006; Ocampo y Escobedo 2006; Miranda et al. 2009; Pérez 2014). Por consiguiente, el objetivo de este trabajo es presentar cinco estudios de caso que abordan el estudio de la agricultura y el conocimiento tradicional en México, indicando las diferentes temáticas en cuanto al uso y manejo de la agricultura, los suelos, las plantas y la fauna

Dissecting the Roles of Social Capital in Farmer-to-Farmer Extension: A Review

Various types of relationships within a farmer-to-farmer (F2F) extension system can influence farmers’ access to advancement opportunities, resources, capacity building, and social and professional networks. Using a social capital theoretical lens, this review elucidates the nature of these relationships and networks to better understand how bonding, bridging, and linking social capital may be leveraged in positive and negative ways and how relationship dynamics relate to farmers’ power, opportunities, and gender equity. This research demonstrates that all three types of social capital are instrumental but play different and often complementary roles in F2F extension. While bonding social capital is crucial for social cohesion, too few connections to outside actors and networks may cause farmer communities to become wary and unreceptive to innovation and change. On the other hand, outside linkages without sufficient bonding social capital to build trust may lead to inequitable distribution of desirable resources and power. Our most fundamental recommendation is to use social capital conceptualizations – specifically bonding, bridging, and linking – in the design, implementation, and evaluation of F2F extension systems. Participatory mapping of social capital, using a social equity lens, could help farmer groups identify where social capital is plentiful and where it is scarce. Building awareness among diverse farmer communities about social capital dynamics, especially linked to gender, may encourage shifts in attitudes and decision-making to reduce barriers and help marginalized farmers build social capital. Finally, we recommend making host communities and farmer groups attractive to outside interests, investments, and networks, to promote development and innovation

Sacrococcygeal giant hemangiopericytoma: a rare presentation and management

Hemangiopericytoma is a tumor derivated from the mesenchymal cells that surround the capillary of blood vessels. It has a several anatomic localization and clinic scenarios, it´s presentation with a media in the 6th decade; an early diagnostic and treatment represents a better clinic scenario for the patient. The next article presents a case report of a 51 years old man with a tumor localized in the sacrococcygeal space, with big dimensions that limited his daily activities without other symptomatology, image studies with no evidence of distant progression. Surgical resection was performed, removing mass depending from mayor and minor gluteus, achieving an immediate reconstruction with a satisfactory aesthetic and functional result. The authors presented this rare case due to the lack of published information and how it can be treated to achieve good results

Theoretical study of large conformational transitions in DNA: the B↔A conformational change in water and ethanol/water

We explore here the possibility of determining theoretically the free energy change associated with large conformational transitions in DNA, like the solvent-induced B⇔A conformational change. We find that a combination of targeted molecular dynamics (tMD) and the weighted histogram analysis method (WHAM) can be used to trace this transition in both water and ethanol/water mixture. The pathway of the transition in the A→B direction mirrors the B→A pathway, and is dominated by two processes that occur somewhat independently: local changes in sugar puckering and global rearrangements (particularly twist and roll) in the structure. The B→A transition is found to be a quasi-harmonic process, which follows closely the first spontaneous deformation mode of B-DNA, showing that a physiologically-relevant deformation is in coded in the flexibility pattern of DNA

Lipid profile, cardiovascular disease and mortality in a Mediterranean high-risk population: The ESCARVAL-RISK study.

The potential impact of targeting different components of an adverse lipid profile in populations with multiple cardiovascular risk factors is not completely clear. This study aims to assess the association between different components of the standard lipid profile with all-cause mortality and hospitalization due to cardiovascular events in a high-risk population. This prospective registry included high risk adults over 30 years old free of cardiovascular disease (2008-2012). Diagnosis of hypertension, dyslipidemia or diabetes mellitus was inclusion criterion. Lipid biomarkers were evaluated. Primary endpoints were all-cause mortality and hospital admission due to coronary heart disease or stroke. We estimated adjusted rate ratios (aRR), absolute risk differences and population attributable risk associated with adverse lipid profiles. 51,462 subjects were included with a mean age of 62.6 years (47.6% men). During an average follow-up of 3.2 years, 919 deaths, 1666 hospitalizations for coronary heart disease and 1510 hospitalizations for stroke were recorded. The parameters that showed an increased rate for total mortality, coronary heart disease and stroke hospitalization were, respectively, low HDL-Cholesterol: aRR 1.25, 1.29 and 1.23; high Total/HDL-Cholesterol: aRR 1.22, 1.38 and 1.25; and high Triglycerides/HDL-Cholesterol: aRR 1.21, 1.30, 1.09. The parameters that showed highest population attributable risk (%) were, respectively, low HDL-Cholesterol: 7.70, 11.42, 8.40; high Total/HDL-Cholesterol: 6.55, 12.47, 8.73; and high Triglycerides/HDL-Cholesterol: 8.94, 15.09, 6.92. In a population with cardiovascular risk factors, HDL-cholesterol, Total/HDL-cholesterol and triglycerides/HDL-cholesterol ratios were associated with a higher population attributable risk for cardiovascular disease compared to other common biomarkers.S

Bipolar multiplex families have an increased burden of common risk variants for psychiatric disorders

Multiplex families with a high prevalence of a psychiatric disorder are often examined to identify rare genetic variants with large effect sizes. In the present study, we analysed whether the risk for bipolar disorder (BD) in BD multiplex families is influenced by common genetic variants. Furthermore, we investigated whether this risk is conferred mainly by BD-specific risk variants or by variants also associated with the susceptibility to schizophrenia or major depression. In total, 395 individuals from 33 Andalusian BD multiplex families (166 BD, 78 major depressive disorder, 151 unaffected) as well as 438 subjects from an independent, BD case/control cohort (161 unrelated BD, 277 unrelated controls) were analysed. Polygenic risk scores (PRS) for BD, schizophrenia (SCZ), and major depression were calculated and compared between the cohorts. Both the familial BD cases and unaffected family members had higher PRS for all three psychiatric disorders than the independent controls, with BD and SCZ being significant after correction for multiple testing, suggesting a high baseline risk for several psychiatric disorders in the families. Moreover, familial BD cases showed significantly higher BD PRS than unaffected family members and unrelated BD cases. A plausible hypothesis is that, in multiplex families with a general increase in risk for psychiatric disease, BD development is attributable to a high burden of common variants that confer a specific risk for BD. The present analyses demonstrated that common genetic risk variants for psychiatric disorders are likely to contribute to the high incidence of affective psychiatric disorders in the multiplex families. However, the PRS explained only part of the observed phenotypic variance, and rare variants might have also contributed to disease development

The Nutrition in Early Life and Asthma (NELA) birth cohortstudy: Rationale, design, and methods

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. © 2021 The Authors. Paediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.Background: Primary prevention strategies for asthma are lacking. Its inception probably starts in utero and/or during the early postnatal period as the developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) paradigm suggests. Objectives: The main objective of Nutrition in Early Life and Asthma (NELA) cohort study is to unravel whether the following factors contribute causally to the developmental origins of asthma: (1) maternal obesity/adiposity and foetal growth; (2) maternal and child nutrition; (3) outdoor air pollution; (4) endocrine disruptors; and (5) maternal psychological stress. Maternal and offspring biological samples are used to assess changes in offspring microbiome, immune system, epigenome and volatilome as potential mechanisms influencing disease susceptibility. Population: Randomly selected pregnant women from three health areas of Murcia, a south-eastern Mediterranean region of Spain, who fulfilled the inclusion criteria were invited to participate at the time of the follow-up visit for routine foetal anatomy scan at 19–22 weeks of gestation, at the Maternal-Fetal Medicine Unit of the “Virgen de la Arrixaca” University Clinical Hospital over a 36-month period, from March 2015 to April 2018. Design: Prospective, population-based, maternal-child, birth cohort study. Methods: Questionnaires on exposures and outcome variables were administered to mothers at 20–24 gestation week; 32–36 gestation week; and delivery. Children wer

Lipid profile, cardiovascular disease and mortality in a Mediterranean high-risk population: the ESCARVAL-RISK study

The potential impact of targeting different components of an adverse lipid profile in populations with multiple cardiovascular risk factors is not completely clear. This study aims to assess the association between different components of the standard lipid profile with all cause mortality and hospitalization due to cardiovascular events in a high-risk population. Methods This prospective registry included high risk adults over 30 years old free of cardiovascular disease (2008±2012). Diagnosis of hypertension, dyslipidemia or diabetes mellitus was inclusion criterion. Lipid biomarkers were evaluated. Primary endpoints were all-cause mortality and hospital admission due to coronary heart disease or stroke. We estimated adjusted rate ratios (aRR), absolute risk differences and population attributable risk associated with adverse lipid profiles. Results 51,462 subjects were included with a mean age of 62.6 years (47.6% men). During an average follow-up of 3.2 years, 919 deaths, 1666 hospitalizations for coronary heart disease and 1510 hospitalizations for stroke were recorded. The parameters that showed an increased rate for total mortality, coronary heart disease and stroke hospitalization were, respectively, low HDL-Cholesterol: aRR 1.25, 1.29 and 1.23; high Total/HDL-Cholesterol: aRR 1.22, 1.38 and 1.25; and high Triglycerides/HDL-Cholesterol: aRR 1.21, 1.30, 1.09. The parameters that showed highest population attributable risk (%) were, respectively, low HDL-Cholesterol: 7.70, 11.42, 8.40; high Total/HDL-Cholesterol: 6.55, 12.47, 8.73; and high Triglycerides/ HDL-Cholesterol: 8.94, 15.09, 6.92. Conclusions In a population with cardiovascular risk factors, HDL-cholesterol, Total/HDL-cholesterol and triglycerides/HDL-cholesterol ratios were associated with a higher population attributable risk for cardiovascular disease compared to other common biomarkers

Correction: Lipid profile, cardiovascular disease and mortality in a Mediterranean high-risk population: The ESCARVAL-RISK study.

The potential impact of targeting different components of an adverse lipid profile in populations with multiple cardiovascular risk factors is not completely clear. This study aims to assess the association between different components of the standard lipid profile with all-cause mortality and hospitalization due to cardiovascular events in a high-risk populatio