Antimycobacterial neolignans isolated from Aristolochia taliscana

Tuberculosis (TB - Mycobacterium tuberculosis) is an ancient infectious disease that has appeared once again as a serious worldwide health problem and now comprises the second leading cause of death resulting from a single infection. The prevalence of multidrug resistance (MDR) TB is increasing and therapeutic options for treatment are not always accessible; in fact, some patients do not respond to the available drugs. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop novel anti-TB agents. The aim of the present study was to screen extracts of Aristolochia taliscana, a plant used in traditional Mexican medicine to treat cough and snake bites, for antimycobacterial activity. The hexanic extract of A. taliscana was tested by microdilution alamar blue assay against Mycobacterium strains and bioguided fractionation led to the isolation of the neolignans licarin A, licarin B and eupomatenoid-7, all of which had antimycobacterial activity. Licarin A was the most active compound, with minimum inhibitory concentrations of 3.12-12.5 μg/mL against the following M. tuberculosis strains: H37Rv, four mono-resistant H37Rv variants and 12 clinical MDR isolates, as well as against five non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) strains. In conclusion, licarin A represents a potentially active anti-TB agent to treat MDR M. tuberculosis and NTM strains.

New insights on river water chemistry by using non-centred simplicial principal component analysis: a case study

The use of perturbation and power transformation operations permits the investigation of linear processes in the simplex as in a vectorial space. When the investigated geochemical processes can be constrained by the use of well-known starting point, the eigenvectors of the covariance matrix of a non-centred principalcomponent analysis allow to model compositional changes compared with a reference point.The results obtained for the chemistry of water collected in River Arno (central-northern Italy) have open new perspectives for considering relative changes of the analysed variables and to hypothesise the relative effect of different acting physical-chemical processes, thus posing the basis for a quantitative modelling

Kriging coordinates: what does that mean?

Kriging is an interpolation technique whose optimality criteria are based on normality assumptions either for observed or for transformed data. This is the case of normal, lognormal and multigaussian kriging.When kriging is applied to transformed scores, optimality of obtained estimators becomes a cumbersome concept: back-transformed optimal interpolations in transformed scores are not optimal in the original sample space, and vice-versa. This lack of compatible criteria of optimality induces a variety of problems in both point and block estimates. For instance, lognormal kriging, widely used to interpolate positivevariables, has no straightforward way to build consistent and optimal confidence intervals for estimates.These problems are ultimately linked to the assumed space structure of the data support: for instance, positive values, when modelled with lognormal distributions, are assumed to be embedded in the whole real space, with the usual real space structure and Lebesgue measure

Compositional hypotheses of subcompositional stability and specific perturbation change and their testing

In standard multivariate statistical analysis common hypotheses of interest concern changes in mean vectors and subvectors. In compositional data analysis it is now well established that compositional change is most readily described in terms of the simplicial operation of perturbation and that subcompositions replace the marginal concept of subvectors. To motivate the statistical developments of this paper we present two challenging compositional problems from food production processes.Against this background the relevance of perturbations and subcompositions can beclearly seen. Moreover we can identify a number of hypotheses of interest involvingthe specification of particular perturbations or differences between perturbations and also hypotheses of subcompositional stability. We identify the two problems as being the counterpart of the analysis of paired comparison or split plot experiments and of separate sample comparative experiments in the jargon of standard multivariate analysis. We then develop appropriate estimation and testing procedures for a complete lattice of relevant compositional hypotheses

New Features of CoDaPack. An Userfriendly Compositional Data Package

The statistical analysis of compositional data is commonly used in geological studies.As is well-known, compositions should be treated using logratios of parts, which aredifficult to use correctly in standard statistical packages. In this paper we describe thenew features of our freeware package, named CoDaPack, which implements most of thebasic statistical methods suitable for compositional data. An example using real data ispresented to illustrate the use of the package

Trastornos del desarrollo con discapacidad motora : proceso asistencial integrado

Publicado en la página web de la Consejería de Igualdad, Salud y Políticas Sociales: www.juntadeandalucia.es/salud (Consejería de Salud / Profesionales / Nuestro Compromiso por la Calidad / Procesos Asistenciales Integrados)

Guía de diseño y mejora continua de procesos asistenciales integrados. 2ª ed

Publicado en la página web de la Consejería de Igualdad, Salud y Políticas Sociales: www.juntadeandalucia.es/salud (Consejería de Salud / Profesionales / Nuestro Compromiso por la Calidad / Procesos Asistenciales Integrados)

Sedación paliativa y sedación terminal : orientaciones para la toma de decisiones en la práctica clínica : documentos de apoyo

Publicado en la página web de la Consejería de Salud y Bienestar Social: www.juntadeandalucia.es/salud (Consejería de Salud y Bienestar Social/ Profesionales / Nuestro Compromiso por la Calidad / Documento de Apoyo al Proceso Asistencial. Sedación Paliativa, Sedación Terminal)

Proceso fiebre en la infancia : proceso asistencial integrado 2ª ed

Publicado en la página web de la Consejería de Igualdad, Salud y Políticas Sociales: www.juntadeandalucia.es/salud (Consejería de Igualdad, Salud y Políticas Sociales/ Profesionales / Nuestro Compromiso por la Calidad / Procesos Asistenciales Integrados)

The allometry of non-employment. What can compositional data analysis tell us about labour market performance across the UK's regions?

The low levels of unemployment recorded in the UK in recent years are widely cited asevidence of the country’s improved economic performance, and the apparent convergence of unemployment rates across the country’s regions used to suggest that the longstanding divide in living standards between the relatively prosperous ‘south’ and the more depressed ‘north’ has been substantially narrowed. Dissenters from theseconclusions have drawn attention to the greatly increased extent of non-employment(around a quarter of the UK’s working age population are not in employment) and themarked regional dimension in its distribution across the country. Amongst these dissenters it is generally agreed that non-employment is concentrated amongst oldermales previously employed in the now very much smaller ‘heavy’ industries (e.g. coal,steel, shipbuilding).This paper uses the tools of compositiona l data analysis to provide a much richer picture of non-employment and one which challenges the conventional analysis wisdom about UK labour market performance as well as the dissenters view of the nature of theproblem. It is shown that, associated with the striking ‘north/south’ divide in nonemployment rates, there is a statistically significant relationship between the size of the non-employment rate and the composition of non-employment. Specifically, it is shown that the share of unemployment in non-employment is negatively correlated with the overall non-employment rate: in regions where the non-employment rate is high the share of unemployment is relatively low. So the unemployment rate is not a very reliable indicator of regional disparities in labour market performance. Even more importantly from a policy viewpoint, a significant positive relationship is found between the size ofthe non-employment rate and the share of those not employed through reason of sicknessor disability and it seems (contrary to the dissenters) that this connection is just as strong for women as it is for men

Cuidados paliativos : proceso asistencial integrado 2ª ed

Publicado en la página web de la Consejería de Igualdad, Salud y Políticas Sociales: www.juntadeandalucia.es/salud (Consejería de Igualdad, Salud y Políticas Sociales/ Profesionales / Nuestro Compromiso por la Calidad / Procesos Asistenciales Integrados)

Compositional ideas in the bayesian analysis of categorical data with application to dose finding clinical trials

Compositional random vectors are fundamental tools in the Bayesian analysis of categorical data.Many of the issues that are discussed with reference to the statistical analysis of compositionaldata have a natural counterpart in the construction of a Bayesian statistical model for categoricaldata.This note builds on the idea of cross-fertilization of the two areas recommended by Aitchison (1986)in his seminal book on compositional data. Particular emphasis is put on the problem of whatparameterization to use

Plan andaluz de Alzheimer 2007-2010

Publicado en la página web de la Consejería de Igualdad, Salud y Políticas Sociales: www.juntadeandalucia.es/salud (Consejería de Igualdad, Salud y Políticas sociales / Ciudadanía / Quiénes Somos / Planes y Estrategias / Plan Andaluz de Alzheimer)

Proceso seguimiento recién nacido de riesgo : proceso asistencial integrado

Publicado en la página web de la Consejería de Salud y Bienestar Social: www.juntadeandalucia.es/salud (Consejería de Salud / Profesionales / Nuestro Compromiso por la Calidad / Procesos Asistenciales Integrados / Atención temprana)