Search results for "Common"

Taste loss in the elderly: Possible implications for dietary habits.

2017

Aging may coincide with a declining gustatory function that can affect dietary intake and ultimately have negative health consequences. Taste loss is caused by physiological changes and worsened by events often associated with aging, such as polypharmacy and chronic disease. The most pronounced increase in elderly people's detection threshold has been observed for sour and bitter tastes, but their perception of salty, sweet, and umami tastes also seems to decline with age. It has often been suggested that elderly people who lose their sense of taste may eat less food or choose stronger flavors, but the literature has revealed a more complicated picture: taste loss does not appear to make el…

2020

Aging is the major risk factor for the development of chronic diseases. After decades of research focused on extending lifespan, current efforts seek primarily to promote healthy aging. Recent advances suggest that biological processes linked to aging are more reliable than chronological age to account for an individual’s functional status, i.e. frail or robust. It is becoming increasingly apparent that biological aging may be detectable as a progressive loss of resilience much earlier than the appearance of clinical signs of frailty. In this context, the INSPIRE program was built to identify the mechanisms of accelerated aging and the early biological signs predicting frailty and pathologi…

Improvements to Healthspan Through Environmental Enrichment and Lifestyle Interventions: Where Are We Now?

2020

Environmental enrichment (EE) is an experimental paradigm that is used to explore how a complex, stimulating environment can impact overall health. In laboratory animal experiments, EE housing conditions typically include larger-than-standard cages, abundant bedding, running wheels, mazes, toys, and shelters which are rearranged regularly to further increase stimulation. EE has been shown to improve multiple aspects of health, including but not limited to metabolism, learning and cognition, anxiety and depression, and immunocompetence. Recent advances in lifespan have led some researchers to consider aging as a risk factor for disease. As such, there is a pressing need to understand the pro…

Role of nitric oxide pathway in the conditioned rewarding effects of MDMA in mice.

2017

It is estimated that 2.1 million young adults used MDMA/Ecstasy in the last year in Europe. Vulnerable subjects can develop dependence after MDMA abuse but currently there does not exist an effective treatment for this disorder. The nitric oxide (NO) pathway seems to have an important role on the rewarding effects of different drugs and has been proposed as a new pharmacological treatment for psychostimulant addiction. In the present study, we intend to evaluate whether the blockade of the NO synthesis (NOS) interferes with the rewarding effects of MDMA in the conditioned preference place (CPP) paradigm in young adult male mice. Our results indicated that mice treated with 7-nitroindazole (…

Between reality and the guidelines: A survey on perception, diagnosis and management of hepatic encephalopathy in 201 Italian specialist centres

2017

The relative abundance of hemocyte types in a polyphagous moth larva depends on diet.

2016

7 pages; International audience; Hemocytes are crucial cells of the insect immune system because of their involvement in multiple immune responses including coagulation, phagocytosis and encapsulation. There are various types of hemocytes, each having a particular role in immunity, such that variation in their relative abundance affects the outcome of the immune response. This study aims to characterize these various types of hemocytes in larvae of the grapevine pest insect Eupoecilia ambiguella, and to assess variation in their concentration as a function of larval diet and immune challenge. Four types of hemocytes were found in the hemolymph of 5th instar larvae: granulocytes, oenocytoids…

Obstacles and opportunities in the functional analysis of extracellular vesicle RNA - an ISEV position paper

2017

The release of RNA-containing extracellular vesicles (EV) into the extracellular milieu has been demonstrated in a multitude of different in vitro cell systems and in a variety of body fluids. RNA-containing EV are in the limelight for their capacity to communicate genetically encoded messages to other cells, their suitability as candidate biomarkers for diseases, and their use as therapeutic agents. Although EV-RNA has attracted enormous interest from basic researchers, clinicians, and industry, we currently have limited knowledge on which mechanisms drive and regulate RNA incorporation into EV and on how RNA-encoded messages affect signalling processes in EV-targeted cells. Moreover, EV-R…

The grain market, short-term credit, and economic inequality in the Kingdom of Valencia. The towns of Cocentaina, and Castellón in the Fifteenth-Cent…

2018

Despite the predominance of small peasant farms in the Valencian countryside in the Late Middle Ages, large sections of the peasantry were forced to turn to the market to obtain cereals for consumption and sowing. Insufficient land and lack of liquidity caused by the seasonal cycle of crops made it necessary to use short-term credit, which was recorded in the court of local justice in the legal form of “obligacions”. The aim of this paper is to analyse the economic role of this credit market, identifying varieties of commercialised cereals, seasonality of purchases and payments, price trends and the socio-professional background of buyers (debtors) and sellers (creditors). Thus, we study ho…

Coupling News Sentiment with Web Browsing Data Improves Prediction of Intra-Day Price Dynamics

2015

The new digital revolution of big data is deeply changing our capability of understanding society and forecasting the outcome of many social and economic systems. Unfortunately, information can be very heterogeneous in the importance, relevance, and surprise it conveys, affecting severely the predictive power of semantic and statistical methods. Here we show that the aggregation of web users' behavior can be elicited to overcome this problem in a hard to predict complex system, namely the financial market. Specifically, our in-sample analysis shows that the combined use of sentiment analysis of news and browsing activity of users of Yahoo! Finance greatly helps forecasting intra-day and dai…

Quality enhancement of multispectral images for skin cancer optical diagnostics

2018

Melanoma is the least common but deadliest skin cancer, accounting for only about 1% of all cases, but is the cause of the vast majority of skin cancer death. In some parts of the world, especially among western countries, melanoma is becoming more common every year. The detection of melanoma in early stage can be helpful to cure it. Unfortunately, long ques and high prices for dermatology service can result in the skin cancer diagnosis at its later stage, thus increasing the risk of mortality for the patient. It is important to provide a non-invasive optical device for primary care physicians to help diagnose different skin malformation based on obtained optical images. Such device will be…