La stratégie thérapeutique anti-VEGF améliore le pronostic visuel de la dégénérescence maculaire liée à l'âge exsudative [Intravitreal anti-VEGF injections improve the visual prognosis of wet age related macular degeneration].

Age related macular degeneration (AMD) is an ocular disease with high prevalence among elderly persons. Two different forms exist: dry AMD, usually slowly progressive, and neovascular AMD (wet form) more aggressive. Photodynamic therapy is used to treat the wet form and anti VEGF treatments recently became available and offer a real change in the prognostic of wet AMD. Two products are registered and used in Switzerland (Macugen and Lucentis), a third "off labels product", Avastin is also currently used in clinical practice. Nevertheless, both the duration of treatment and the number of injection requested to stabilise the disease were not defined in the studies. Ongoing studies are mainly evaluating combined treatments and long acting form of the drug.

The international competitiveness of cava : success of a particular firm or the district?

[spa] En primer lugar el autor se pregunta qué es lo que exactamente significa la palabra éxito aplicada al caso de la evolución reciente de la industria catalana del cava. La comparación de las trayectorias seguidas por la industria italiana del spumante y la del más reputado vino espumoso del mundo, el champagne, muestran una trayectoria muy positiva del volumen de producción y de las exportaciones. En segundo lugar el papel se pregunta por el agente responsable de este éxito. ¿Se debe a una empresa en particular o, por el contrario, al distrito en su conjunto, atendiendo que nos hallamos ante un sector muy concentrado geográficamente en torno a Sant Sadurní d’Anoia? La concentración de las exportaciones en más de dos tercios en manos de una sola empresa justificaría atribuir a dicha empresa el éxito. Sin embargo el análisis histórico de la formación del distrito industrial del cava en la zona del Penedés muestra como los productores se han podido beneficiar de las economías externas marshallianas inherentes a este tipo de concentraciones. El papel muestra que el éxito de la empresa exportadora líder se explica por la existencia de este tipo de ventajas invisibles derivadas de la concentración.

Patterns of alcohol consumption in the Seychelles Islands (Indian Ocean).

Self-reported drinking habits were examined in a random sample of 1067 persons aged 25-64 years in the Seychelles, a country in epidemiological transition where consumption of home-brewed, mostly unregistered beverages has been traditionally high. Alcohol consumption was calculated from respondents reporting at least one drink per week ('regular drinkers'). Among men, 51.1% were regular drinkers and had average intake of 112.1 ml alcohol a day. Among women, 5.9% were regular drinkers and had 49.7 ml alcohol a day. Frequency of drinking, but not amount per drinker, was slightly less in the 25-34-year than older-age categories. Home-brews (mostly palm toddy and fermented sugar cane juice) were consumed by 52% of regular drinkers and accounted for 54% of the total alcohol intake reported by all regular drinkers. Based on the reported consumption by regular drinkers only, the average annual alcohol consumption amounted respectively to 20.7 litres and 1.2 litres per man and woman aged 25-64 years, or, using extrapolation, 13.2 litres and 0.8 litres per man and woman respectively of the total population. These values may underestimate the true figures by half, since reported beer consumption accounted for 53% of beer sales. Socio-economic status was associated strongly and inversely with home-brew consumption, but slightly and positively with consumption of commercially marketed beverages. Alcohol intake was associated with smoking, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, carbohydrate-deficient transferrin and blood pressure, but not with age and body mass index. In conclusion, these data show high alcohol consumption in the Seychelles with an important gender difference, a large proportion of alcohol derived from home-brews, and opposite tendencies for the relationships between socio-economic status and home-made or commercially marketed beverages.

CD3 delta establishes a functional link between the T cell receptor and CD8.

T cells expressing T cell receptor (TCR) complexes that lack CD3 delta, either due to deletion of the CD3 delta gene, or by replacement of the connecting peptide of the TCR alpha chain, exhibit severely impaired positive selection and TCR-mediated activation of CD8 single-positive T cells. Because the same defects have been observed in mice expressing no CD8 beta or tailless CD8 beta, we examined whether CD3 delta serves to couple TCR.CD3 with CD8. To this end we used T cell hybridomas and transgenic mice expressing the T1 TCR, which recognizes a photoreactive derivative of the PbCS 252-260 peptide in the context of H-2K(d). We report that, in thymocytes and hybridomas expressing the T1 TCR.CD3 complex, CD8 alpha beta associates with the TCR. This association was not observed on T1 hybridomas expressing only CD8 alpha alpha or a CD3 delta(-) variant of the T1 TCR. CD3 delta was selectively co-immunoprecipitated with anti-CD8 antibodies, indicating an avid association of CD8 with CD3 delta. Because CD8 alpha beta is a raft constituent, due to this association a fraction of TCR.CD3 is raft-associated. Cross-linking of these TCR-CD8 adducts results in extensive TCR aggregate formation and intracellular calcium mobilization. Thus, CD3 delta couples TCR.CD3 with raft-associated CD8, which is required for effective activation and positive selection of CD8(+) T cells.

Navigator-gated free-breathing 3D balanced FFE projection renal MRA: Comparison with contrast-enhanced breath-hold 3D MRA in a swine model.

A cardiac-triggered, free-breathing, 3D balanced FFE projection renal MR angiography (MRA) technique with a 2D pencil beam aortic labeling pulse for selective aortic spin tagging was developed. For respiratory motion artifact suppression during free breathing, a prospective real-time navigator was implemented for renal MRA. Images obtained with the new approach were compared with standard contrast-enhanced (CE) 3D breath-hold MRA in seven swine. Signal properties and vessel visualization were analyzed. With the presented technique, high-resolution, high-contrast renal projection MRA with superior vessel length visualization (including a greater visible number of distal branches of the renal arteries) compared to standard breath-hold CE-MRA was obtained. The present results warrant clinical studies in patients with renal artery disease.

Large-scale clustering through functional embedding

We present a new framework for large-scale data clustering. The main idea is to modify functional dimensionality reduction techniques to directly optimize over discrete labels using stochastic gradient descent. Compared to methods like spectral clustering our approach solves a single optimization problem, rather than an ad-hoc two-stage optimization approach, does not require a matrix inversion, can easily encode prior knowledge in the set of implementable functions, and does not have an ?out-of-sample? problem. Experimental results on both artificial and real-world datasets show the usefulness of our approach.

Polyphenol-rich foods in the Mediterranean diet are associated with better cognitive function in elderly subjects at high cardiovascular risk

Brain oxidative processes play a major role in age-related cognitive decline, thus consumption of antioxidant-rich foods might help preserve cognition. Our aim was to assess whether consumption of antioxidant-rich foods in the Mediterranean diet relates to cognitive function in the elderly. In asymptomatic subjects at high cardiovascular risk (n = 447; 52% women; age 5580 y) enrolled in the PREDIMED study, a primary prevention dietary-intervention trial, we assessed food intake and cardiovascular risk profile, determined apolipoprotein E genotype, and used neuropsychological tests to evaluate cognitive function.We also measured urinary polyphenols as an objective biomarker of intake. Associations between energy-adjusted food consumption, urinary polyphenols, and cognitive scores were assessed by multiple linear regression models adjusted for potential confounders. Consumption of some foods was independently related to better cognitive function. The specific associations [regression coefficients (95% confidence intervals)] were: total olive oil with immediate verbal memory [0.755 (0.1511.358)]; virgin olive oil and coffee with delayed verbal memory [0.163 (0.0100.316) and 0.294 (0.0550.534), respectively];walnuts with working memory [1.191 (0.0612.322)]; and wine with Mini-Mental State Examination scores [0.252 (0.0060.496)]. Urinary polyphenols were associated with better scores in immediate verbal memory [1.208 (0.2362.180)]. Increased consumption of antioxidant-rich foods in general and of polyphenols in particular is associated with better cognitive performance in elderly subjects at high cardiovascular risk. The results reinforce the notion that Mediterranean diet components might counteract age-related cognitive decline.

Proton NMR of (15)N-choline metabolites enhanced by dynamic nuclear polarization.

Chemical shifts of protons can report on metabolic transformations such as the conversion of choline to phosphocholine. To follow such processes in vivo, magnetization can be enhanced by dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP). We have hyperpolarized in this manner nitrogen-15 spins in (15)N-labeled choline up to 3.3% by irradiating the 94 GHz electron spin resonance of admixed TEMPO nitroxide radicals in a magnetic field of 3.35 T during ca. 3 h at 1.2 K. The sample was subsequently transferred to a high-resolution magnet, and the enhanced polarization was converted from (15)N to methyl- and methylene protons, using the small (2,3)J((1)H,(15)N) couplings in choline. The room-temperature lifetime of nitrogen polarization in choline, T(1)((15)N) approximately 200 s, could be considerably increased by partial deuteration of the molecule. This procedure enables studies of choline metabolites in vitro and in vivo using DNP-enhanced proton NMR.

A pipeline approach with spatial information for segmenting multiple sclerosis lesions on brain magnetic resonance imaging

Background: Conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques are highly sensitive to detect multiple sclerosis (MS) plaques, enabling a quantitative assessment of inflammatory activity and lesion load. In quantitative analyses of focal lesions, manual or semi-automated segmentations have been widely used to compute the total number of lesions and the total lesion volume. These techniques, however, are both challenging and time-consuming, being also prone to intra-observer and inter-observer variability.Aim: To develop an automated approach to segment brain tissues and MS lesions from brain MRI images. The goal is to reduce the user interaction and to provide an objective tool that eliminates the inter- and intra-observer variability.Methods: Based on the recent methods developed by Souplet et al. and de Boer et al., we propose a novel pipeline which includes the following steps: bias correction, skull stripping, atlas registration, tissue classification, and lesion segmentation. After the initial pre-processing steps, a MRI scan is automatically segmented into 4 classes: white matter (WM), grey matter (GM), cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and partial volume. An expectation maximisation method which fits a multivariate Gaussian mixture model to T1-w, T2-w and PD-w images is used for this purpose. Based on the obtained tissue masks and using the estimated GM mean and variance, we apply an intensity threshold to the FLAIR image, which provides the lesion segmentation. With the aim of improving this initial result, spatial information coming from the neighbouring tissue labels is used to refine the final lesion segmentation.Results:The experimental evaluation was performed using real data sets of 1.5T and the corresponding ground truth annotations provided by expert radiologists. The following values were obtained: 64% of true positive (TP) fraction, 80% of false positive (FP) fraction, and an average surface distance of 7.89 mm. The results of our approach were quantitatively compared to our implementations of the works of Souplet et al. and de Boer et al., obtaining higher TP and lower FP values.Conclusion: Promising MS lesion segmentation results have been obtained in terms of TP. However, the high number of FP which is still a well-known problem of all the automated MS lesion segmentation approaches has to be improved in order to use them for the standard clinical practice. Our future work will focus on tackling this issue.

A review of atlas-based segmentation for magnetic resonance brain images.

Normal and abnormal brains can be segmented by registering the target image with an atlas. Here, an atlas is defined as the combination of an intensity image (template) and its segmented image (the atlas labels). After registering the atlas template and the target image, the atlas labels are propagated to the target image. We define this process as atlas-based segmentation. In recent years, researchers have investigated registration algorithms to match atlases to query subjects and also strategies for atlas construction. In this paper we present a review of the automated approaches for atlas-based segmentation of magnetic resonance brain images. We aim to point out the strengths and weaknesses of atlas-based methods and suggest new research directions. We use two different criteria to present the methods. First, we refer to the algorithms according to their atlas-based strategy: label propagation, multi-atlas methods, and probabilistic techniques. Subsequently, we classify the methods according to their medical target: the brain and its internal structures, tissue segmentation in healthy subjects, tissue segmentation in fetus, neonates and elderly subjects, and segmentation of damaged brains. A quantitative comparison of the results reported in the literature is also presented.

The QUASAR reproducibility study, Part II: Results from a multi-center Arterial Spin Labeling test-retest study.

Arterial Spin Labeling (ASL) is a method to measure perfusion using magnetically labeled blood water as an endogenous tracer. Being fully non-invasive, this technique is attractive for longitudinal studies of cerebral blood flow in healthy and diseased individuals, or as a surrogate marker of metabolism. So far, ASL has been restricted mostly to specialist centers due to a generally low SNR of the method and potential issues with user-dependent analysis needed to obtain quantitative measurement of cerebral blood flow (CBF). Here, we evaluated a particular implementation of ASL (called Quantitative STAR labeling of Arterial Regions or QUASAR), a method providing user independent quantification of CBF in a large test-retest study across sites from around the world, dubbed "The QUASAR reproducibility study". Altogether, 28 sites located in Asia, Europe and North America participated and a total of 284 healthy volunteers were scanned. Minimal operator dependence was assured by using an automatic planning tool and its accuracy and potential usefulness in multi-center trials was evaluated as well. Accurate repositioning between sessions was achieved with the automatic planning tool showing mean displacements of 1.87+/-0.95 mm and rotations of 1.56+/-0.66 degrees . Mean gray matter CBF was 47.4+/-7.5 [ml/100 g/min] with a between-subject standard variation SD(b)=5.5 [ml/100 g/min] and a within-subject standard deviation SD(w)=4.7 [ml/100 g/min]. The corresponding repeatability was 13.0 [ml/100 g/min] and was found to be within the range of previous studies.

Influence of label information on dark chocolate acceptability

The aim of the present work was to study how the information on product labels influences consumer expectations and their acceptance and purchase intention of dark chocolate. Six samples of dark choco- late, varying in brand (premium and store brand) and in type of product (regular dark chocolate, single cocoa origin dark chocolate and high percentage of cocoa dark chocolate), were evaluated by 109 con- sumers who scored their liking and purchase intention under three conditions: blind (only tasting the products), expected (observing product label information) and informed (tasting the products together with provision of the label information). In the expected condition, consumer liking was mainly affected by the brand. In the blind condition, differences in liking were due to the type of product; the samples with a high percentage of cocoa were those less preferred by consumers. Under the informed condition, liking of dark chocolates varied depending on both brand and type of product. Premium brand chocolates generated high consumer expectations of chocolate acceptability, which were fulfilled by the sensory characteristics of the products. Store brand chocolates created lower expectations, but when they were tasted they were as acceptable as premium chocolates. Claims of a high percentage of cocoa and single cocoa origin on labels did not generate higher expectations than regular dark chocolates.

Viticulture under climate change : understanding vulnerability and adaptive capacity of wineries and growers. A case study in El Penedès region, Catalonia

Climate change may pose challenges and opportunities to viticulture, and much research has focused in studying the likely impacts on grapes and wine production in different regions worldwide. This study assesses the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of the viticulture sector under changing climate conditions, based on a case study in El Penedès region, Catalonia. Farm assets, livelihood strategies, farmer-market interactions and climate changes perceptions are analysed through semi-structured interviews with different types of wineries and growers. Both types of actors are equally exposed to biophysical stressors but unevenly affected by socioeconomic changes. While wineries are vulnerable because of the current economic crisis and the lack of diversification of their work, which may affect their income or production, growers are mainly affected by the low prices of their products and the lack of fix contracts. These socioeconomic stressors strongly condition their capacity to adapt to climate change, meaning that growers prioritize their immediate income problems, rather than future socioeconomic or climate threats. Therefore, growers undertake reactive adaptation to climate changing conditions, mainly based on ancient knowledge, whilst wineries combine both reactive and anticipatory adaptation practices. These circumstances should be addressed in order to allow better anticipatory adaptation to be implemented, thus avoiding future climate threats.

El vi també alegra els gens antiedat

Un nou estudi a 'Science' descriu l'engranatge genètic que fa que el consum de resveratrol incideixi en la regeneració cel·lular

Detection of smuggled cocaine in cargo using MDCT.

OBJECTIVE: Smuggling dissolved drugs, especially cocaine, in bottled liquids is an ongoing problem at borders. Common fluoroscopy of packages at the border cannot detect contaminated liquids. The objective of our study was to develop an MDCT screening method to detect cocaine-containing vessels that are hidden between uncontaminated ones in a shipment. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Studies were performed on three wine bottles containing cocaine solutions that were confiscated at the Swiss border. Reference values were obtained by scans of different sorts of commercially available wine and aqueous solutions of dissolved sugar. All bottles were scanned using MDCT, and data evaluation was performed by measuring the mean peak of Hounsfield units. To verify the method, simulated testing was performed. RESULTS: Using measurements of the mean peak of Hounsfield units enables the detection of dissolved cocaine in wine bottles in a noninvasive and rapid fashion. Increasing opacity corresponds well with the concentration of dissolved cocaine. Simulated testing showed that it is possible to distinguish between cocaine-contaminated and uncontaminated wine bottles. CONCLUSION: The described method is an efficacious screening method to detect cocaine-contaminated bottles that are hidden between untreated bottles in cargo. The noninvasive examination of cargo allows a questionable delivery to be tracked without arousing the suspicion of the smugglers.