Search Results (6)

Background: Suicide in older adults represents an insufficiently addressed public health problem, despite the aging population and the increase in mental disorders in this group. The COVID-19 pandemic and associated measures, such as lockdown, could have exacerbated this phenomenon. This study aimed to analyze the impact of the confinement decreed during the state of alarm in Spain on the incidence of deaths by suicide in people over 70 years of age in Extremadura. Methods: An observational and retrospective study was carried out, using data from the Institutes of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences, comparing the figures for 2020 with the years 2019, 2021, along with the average for the period 2015–2019. Statistical analyses included Chi-square tests and calculation of Relative Risk with 95% CI. Results: The results revealed a significant increase in deaths by suicide in the third quarter of 2020 compared to the periods compared, especially among men. Conclusions: It is concluded that confinement may have negatively influenced the mental health of older adults, which underscores the need for specific interventions and attention to regional contextual factors. Full article

Gastrointestinal cancer is one of the greatest challenges for biomedical research, accounting for one-quarter of diagnoses and one-third of deaths nowadays, due to the existence of drug resistance mechanisms that prevent therapeutic efficacy in advanced stages. Nanotechnology has been shown to be an effective strategy for the evasion of this phenomenon, and gene silencing by siRNA makes it possible to decrease the expression of certain genes involved in chemoresistance and tumor progression. Our review analyzed studies published during the last 5 years that combined siRNA gene inhibition and chemotherapy as treatment of different gastrointestinal tumors. This review was carried out by searching PubMed, SCOPUS and WoS databases, where 49 articles were finally selected. The results showed that simultaneous encapsulation of siRNA targeting different genes involved in cancer and chemotherapy were more effective at the preclinical level compared to the administration of both treatments individually. The cytotoxic effect was generated through increased induction of apoptosis derived from the dysregulation of chemoresistance-related pathways, producing a decrease in tumor volume and an increase in survival of mice in in vivo assays. Therefore, the combination of both therapies in the same nanoformulation appears to be an interesting therapeutic strategy for the treatment of gastrointestinal tumors. Full article

The increasing complexity of the space flight program and the increase in the duration of missions require an improvement in psychological monitoring tools for astronauts in orbit. This article summarizes the experience of using quantitative content analysis of communication between the crews and the Mission Control Center (MCC). This method allows us to assess the dynamics of an astronaut’s psycho-emotional state, identify their communicative style, and detect the communication phenomena of board-MCC communication. The method is based on a combination of the coping strategies approach by Lazarus and Folkman as well as B.F. Lomov’s concept about the three functions of communication. We found the influence of workload on the structure and volume of communication, defined the main stable communication styles of crewmembers, and confirmed the presence of the emotional transfer phenomenon. We detected that astronauts successfully solve problems that arise in orbit using the capabilities of their communication style. An ineffective MCC communication style usually leads to psycho-emotional ill-being, manifesting in the emotional transfer phenomenon. The presence of the “third-quarter” phenomenon was not confirmed by materials from six-month space flights. Full article

Currently, in Chile, more than a quarter-million of patients are waiting for an elective surgical intervention. This is a worldwide reality, and it occurs as the demand for healthcare is vastly superior to the clinical resources in public systems. Moreover, this phenomenon has worsened due to the COVID-19 sanitary crisis. In order to reduce the impact of this situation, patients in the waiting lists are ranked according to a priority. However, the existing prioritization strategies are not necessarily systematized, and they usually respond only to clinical criteria, excluding other dimensions such as the personal and social context of patients. In this paper, we present a decision-support system designed for the prioritization of surgical waiting lists based on biopsychosocial criteria. The proposed system features three methodological contributions; first, an ad-hoc medical record form that captures the biopsychosocial condition of the patients; second, a dynamic scoring scheme that recognizes that patients’ conditions evolve differently while waiting for the required elective surgery; and third, a methodology for prioritizing and selecting patients based on the corresponding dynamic scores and additional clinical criteria. The designed decision-support system was implemented in the otorhinolaryngology unit in the Hospital of Talca, Chile, in 2018. When compared to the previous prioritization methodology, the results obtained from the use of the system during 2018 and 2019 show that this new methodology outperforms the previous prioritization method quantitatively and qualitatively. As a matter of fact, the designed system allowed a decrease, from 2017 to 2019, in the average number of days in the waiting list from 462 to 282 days. Full article

By the sixth decade of life, nearly one quarter of the population has substantial muscle atrophy, or sarcopenia. Despite the creation of a standardized definition of sarcopenia by the European Working Group on Sarcopenia in Older People, variability may exist in the diagnostic criteria utilized for clinical sarcopenia research. The primary objectives of this review were to characterize diagnostic criteria used for measurement of sarcopenia in original studies, and to describe associations between sarcopenia and important clinical outcomes. We performed a literature review of the term “sarcopenia” in PubMed. Inclusion criteria were English language, original data, a clear and specific definition for diagnosing sarcopenia, and the analysis of sarcopenia’s effect on a clinical outcome. A total of 283 studies met inclusion criteria. More than half of the included sarcopenia investigations were level IV studies (54.1%), while 43.1% provided level II evidence. Under one third (27.6%) of studies examined sarcopenia with regard to surgical outcomes. In terms of diagnostic criteria for sarcopenia, 264 (93.3%) studies used measures of skeletal muscle mass, with dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) being the most common modality (43.6%). Sarcopenia was found to be a consistent predictor of chronic disease progression, all-cause mortality, poorer functional outcomes, and postoperative complications. In conclusion, there is substantial evidence that sarcopenia impacts both medical and surgical outcomes. However, current research has utilized heterogeneous diagnostic criteria for sarcopenia. Further efforts to standardize the modalities used to diagnose sarcopenia in clinical research and practice will help strengthen our ability to study this important phenomenon. Full article

Although we experience the visual world as a continuous, richly detailed space we often fail to notice large and significant changes. Such change blindness has been demonstrated for local object changes and changes to the visual form of whole images, however it is assumed that total changes from one image to another would be easily detected. Film editing presents such total changes several times a minute yet we rarely seem to be aware of them, a phenomenon we refer to here as edit blindness. This phenomenon has never been empirically demonstrated even though film editors believe they have at their disposal techniques that induce edit blindness, the Continuity Editing Rules. In the present study we tested the relationship between Continuity Editing Rules and edit blindness by instructing participants to detect edits while watching excerpts from feature films. Eye movements were recorded during the task. The results indicate that edits constructed according to the Continuity Editing Rules result in greater edit blindness than edits not adhering to the rules. A quarter of edits joining two viewpoints of the same scene were undetected and this increased to a third when the edit coincided with a sudden onset of motion. Some cuts may be missed due to suppression of the cut transients by coinciding with eyeblinks or saccadic eye movements but the majority seem to be due to inattentional blindness as viewers attend to the depicted narrative. In conclusion, this study presents the first empirical evidence of edit blindness and its relationship to natural attentional behaviour during dynamic scene viewing. Full article