Prevalencia y factores asociados a desnutrición entre pacientes ingresados en un hospital de media-larga estancia

OBJECTIVES To determine the prevalence of hyponutrition at admission at a mid- to long-term stay hospital. To analyze the possible factors associated to hyponutrition; the possible relationship with mortality at one month, and the treatments for hyponutrition performed. MATERIALS AND METHOD Descriptive study from the laboratory data obtained in 140 patients. For diagnosing hyponutrition, a tool based on albumin, total cholesterol, and lymphocytes levels was used. Demographical (age and gender) and clinical data (presence of pressure soars, nasogastric tube, dementia, neoplasm, previous admission to the ICU, and main diagnosis) were gathered at admission as well as the mortality at the first month. The treatments used for hyponutrition were reviewed. RESULTS patients' age was 77.1 years and 63% were females. 17.1% of the patients presented normal nutritional status, 50.7% met the criteria for mild hyponutrition, 26.4% of moderate hyponutrition, and 5.7% of severe hyponutrition. We found no association between hyponutrition and gender, nasogastric tube, soars, dementia or neoplasm, but we did so with age (P = 0.033). We found a relationship between moderate-severe hyponutrition and pressure soars (P = 0.036). We found an association between hyponutrition and mortality at one month (OR = 1.357, 95% CI 1.121 to 1.643; P = 0.02). 35.6% of the patients with moderate-severe hyponutrition received therapy for this condition (28.9% with protein supplements and 6.7% with enteral diet). CONCLUSIONS hyponutrition affects most of the patients admitted to a mid to long-term stay hospitals and is associated with higher mortality. One third of hyponutrition patients receive nutritional therapy.

Amoebae as a tool to isolate new bacterial species, to discover new virulence factors and to study the host-pathogen interactions.

Amoebae are unicellular protozoan present worldwide in several environments mainly feeding on bacteria. Some of them, the amoebae-resistant bacteria (ARBs), have evolved mechanisms to survive and replicate inside amoebal species. These mainly include legionella, mycobacteria and Chlamydia-related bacteria. Amoebae can provide a replicative niche, can act as reservoir for bacteria whereas the cystic form can protect the internalized bacteria. Moreover, the amoebae represent a Trojan horse for ARBs to infect animals. The long interaction between amoebae and bacteria has likely selected for bacterial virulence traits leading to the adaptation towards an intracellular lifestyle, and some ARBs have acquired the ability to infect mammals. This review intends to highlight the important uses of amoebae in several fields in microbiology by describing the main tools developed using amoebal cells. First, amoebae such as Acanthamoeba are used to isolate and discover new intracellular bacterial species by two main techniques: the amoebal co-culture and the amoebal enrichment. In the second part, taking Waddlia chondrophila as example, we summarize some important recent applications of amoebae to discover new bacterial virulence factors, in particular thanks to the amoebal plaque assay. Finally, the genetically tractable Dictyostelium discoideum is used as a model organism to study host-pathogen interactions, in particular with the development of several approaches to manipulate its genome that allowed the creation of a wide range of mutated strains largely shared within the Dictyostelium community.

Prediction of postpartum depression using multilayer perceptrons and pruning.

OBJECTIVE. The main goal of this paper is to obtain a classification model based on feed-forward multilayer perceptrons in order to improve postpartum depression prediction during the 32 weeks after childbirth with a high sensitivity and specificity and to develop a tool to be integrated in a decision support system for clinicians. MATERIALS AND METHODS. Multilayer perceptrons were trained on data from 1397 women who had just given birth, from seven Spanish general hospitals, including clinical, environmental and genetic variables. A prospective cohort study was made just after delivery, at 8 weeks and at 32 weeks after delivery. The models were evaluated with the geometric mean of accuracies using a hold-out strategy. RESULTS. Multilayer perceptrons showed good performance (high sensitivity and specificity) as predictive models for postpartum depression. CONCLUSIONS. The use of these models in a decision support system can be clinically evaluated in future work. The analysis of the models by pruning leads to a qualitative interpretation of the influence of each variable in the interest of clinical protocols.

Anàlisi del flux de materials del sector de la fusta a Catalunya per l’any 2005

Anàlisi del flux de manterials que travessen el sector de la fusta a Catalunya durant l’any 2005 calculant els balanços de matèria i els indicadors derivats, de cara a avaluar la gestió dels boscos a Catalunya

Validation of a new tool to assess health-related quality of life in psoriasis: the PSO-LIFE questionnaire.

BACKGROUND Several questionnaires have been used to measure health related quality of life (HRQoL) in patients with psoriasis, few have been adapted for use in Spain; none of them was developed specifically for the Spanish population. The purpose of the study was to validate and assess the sensitivity to change of a new questionnaire to measure HRQOL in patients with psoriasis (PSO-LIFE). METHODS Observational, prospective, multicenter study performed in centers around Spain. Patients with active or inactive psoriasis completed the PSO-LIFE together with other Dermatology Quality of Life Index (DLQI) and Psoriasis Disability Index (PDI). A control group of patients with urticaria or atopic dermatitis was also included. Internal consistency and test-retest reliability of the PSO-LIFE were assessed by calculating Cronbach's alpha and Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC). Validity was assessed by examining factorial structure, the capacity to discriminate between groups, and correlations with other measures. Sensitivity to change was measured using effect sizes. RESULTS The final sample included for analysis consisted of 304 patients and 56 controls. Mean (SD) age of psoriasis patients was 45.3 (14.5) years compared to 38.8 (14) years for controls (p < 0.01). Cronbach's alpha for the PSO-LIFE was 0.95 and test-retest reliability using the ICC was 0.98. Factor analysis showed the questionnaire to be unidimensional. Mean (SD) PSO-LIFE scores differed between patients with psoriasis and controls (64.9 [22.5] vs 69.4 [17.3]; p < 0.05), between those with active and inactive disease (57.4 [20.4] vs 76.4 [20.6]; p < 0.01), and between those with visible and non-visible lesions (63.0 [21.9] vs. 74.8 [23.9]; p < 0.01). The correlation between PSO-LIFE and PASI scores was moderate (r = -0.43) while correlations with DLQI and PDI dimensions ranged from moderate to high (between 0.4 and 0.8). Effect size on the PSO-LIFE in patients reporting 'much improved' health status at study completion was 1.01 (large effect size). CONCLUSIONS The present results provide substantial support for the reliability, validity, and responsiveness of the PSO-LIFE questionnaire in the population for which it was designed.

Aplicatiu de gestió de magatzem amb dispositiu mòbils de Materials Brecor

Disseny d’un projecte que controli la gestió d’ubicacions del magatzem d’una empresa del sector de materials de construcció, concretament de “Materials Brecor”, una empresa líder de la zona compresa entre la costa brava sud i el maresme nord. L’Objectiu principal és concebre un projecte que permeti controlar en temps real tant l’entrada com la sortida de mercaderies, a més a més de poder consultar la ubicació de cadascuna d’elles dins el magatzem. Aconseguint millorar els temps de resposta en el moment de localitzar l’article demanat i la seva posterior expedició al client

Els Materials de construcció de la bòbila romana d’Ermedàs

Estudi i descripció dels materials de construcció d’un centre terrisser concret, la bòbila d’Ermedàs situada a la comarca del Pla de l’Estany. Mitjançant aquests materials pretén acostar-se a les formes socials, històriques, econòmiques i tècniques que es donaven a la bòbila i als seus entorns, i també comprendre el marc natural, geogràfic, polític i històric d’aquesta zona

Impactia: automating the study of the scientific production

Introduction The Andalusian Public Health System Virtual Library (Biblioteca Virtual del Sistema Sanitario Público de Andalucía, BV-SSPA) was set up in June 2006. It consists of a regional government action with the aim of democratizing the health professional access to quality scientific information, regardless of the professional workplace. Andalusia is a region with more than 8 million inhabitants, with 100,000 health professionals for 41 hospitals, 1,500 primary healthcare centres, and 28 centres for non-medical attention purposes (research, management, and educational centres). Objectives The Department of Development, Research and Investigation (R+D+i) of the Andalusian Regional Government has, among its duties, the task of evaluating the hospitals and centres of the Andalusian Public Health System (SSPA) in order to distribute its funding. Among the criteria used is the evaluation of the scientific output, which is measured using bibliometry. It is well-known that the bibliometry has a series of limitations and problems that should be taken into account, especially when it is used for non-information sciences, such us career, funding, etc. A few years ago, the bibliometric reports were done separately in each centre, but without using preset and well-defined criteria, elements which are basic when we need to compare the results of the reports. It was possible to find some hospitals which were including Meeting Abstracts in their figures, while others do not, and the same was happening with Erratum and many other differences. Therefore, the main problem that the Department of R+D+i had to deal with, when they were evaluating the health system, was that bibliometric data was not accurate and reports were not comparable. With the aim of having an unified criteria for the whole system, the Department of R+D+i ordered the BV-SSPA to do the year analysis of the scientific output of the system, using some well defined criteria and indicators, among whichstands out the Impact Factor. Materials and Methods As the Impact Factor is the bibliometric indicator that the virtual library is asked to consider, it is necessary to use the database Web of Science (WoS), since it is its owner and editor. The WoS includes the databases Science Citation Index (SCI), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. To gather all the documents, SCI and SSCI are used; to obtain the Impact Factor and quartils, it is used the Journal Citation Reports, JCR. Unlike other bibliographic databases, such us MEDLINE, the bibliometric database WoS includes the address of all the authors. In order to retrieve all the scientific output of the SSPA, we have done general searches, which are afterwards processed by a tool developed by our library. We have done nine different searches using the field ‘address’; eight of them including ‘Spain’ and each one of the eight Andalusian Regions, and the other one combining ‘Spain’ with all those cities where there are health centres, since we have detected that there are some authors that do not use the region in their signatures. These are some of the search strategies: AD=Malaga and AD=Spain AD=Sevill* and AD=Spain AD=SPAIN AND (AD=GUADIX OR AD=BAZA OR AD=MOTRIL) Further more, the field ‘year’ is used to determine the period. To exploit the data, the BV-SSPA has developed a tool called Impactia. It is a web application which uses a database to store the information of the documents generated by the SSPA. Impactia allows the user to automatically process the retrieved documents, assigning them to their correspondent centres. In order to do the classification of documents automaticaly, it was necessary to detect the huge variability of names of the centres that the authors use in their signatures. Therefore, Impactia knows that if an author signs as “Hospital Universitario Virgen Macarena”, “HVM” or “Hosp. Virgin Macarena”, he belongs to the same centre. The figure attached shows the variability found for the Empresa Publica Hospital de Poniente. Besides the documents from WoS, Impactia includes the documents indexed in Scopus and in other databases, where we do bibliographic searches using similar strategies to the later ones. Aware that in the health centres and hospitals there is a lot of grey literature that is not gathered in databases, Impactia allows the centres to feed the application with these documents, so that all the SSPA scientific output is gathered and organised in a centralized place. The ones responsible of localizing this gray literature are the librarians of each one of the centres. They can also do statements to the documents and indicators that are collected and calculated by Impactia. The bulk upload of documents from WoS and Scopus into Impactia is monthly done. One of the main issues that we found during the development of Impactia was the need of dealing with duplicated documents obtained from different sources. Taking into account that sometimes titles might be written differently, with slashes, comas, and so on, Impactia detects the duplicates using the field ‘DOI’ if it is available or comparing the fields: page start, page end and ISSN. Therefore it is possible to guarantee the absence of duplicates. Results The data gathered in Impactia becomes available to the administrative teams and hospitals managers, through an easy web page that allows them to know at any moment, and with just one click, the detailed information of the scientific output of their hospitals, including useful graphs such as percentage of document types, journals where their scientists usually publish, annual comparatives, bibliometric indicators and so on. They can also compare the different centres of the SSPA. Impactia allows the user to download the data from the application, so that he can work with this information or include them in their centres’ reports. This application saves the health system many working hours. It was previously done manually by forty one librarians, while now it is done by only one person in the BV-SSPA during two days a month. To sum up, the benefits of Impactia are: It has shown its effectiveness in the automatic classification, treatment and analysis of the data. It has become an essential tool for all managers to evaluate quickly and easily the scientific production of their centers. It optimizes the human resources of the SSPA, saving time and money. It is the reference point for the Department of R+D+i to do the scientific health staff evaluation.

Projecte d'ampliació d'una nau destinada a l'exposició i venda de materials de construcció

El peticionari és el propietari d’una nau industrial aïllada del terme municipal de Cassà de la Selva destinada a la venda i exposició de materials per a la construcció. A causa de la creixent demanda en el sector es vol ampliar la superfície de la nau, amb la intenció d’augmentar la zona comercial. El disseny i càlcul de l’ampliació de la nau aïllada inclou moviment de terres, fonaments, estructura, tancaments, coberta, paviments, obra de paleta, fusteria, i pintura. També s’inclourà el disseny i càlcul de les instal·lacions (aigua, baixa tensió, il·luminació, climatització, ventilació, contra incendis, plaques solars, sanejament) de l’ampliació

Modelització de la contribució del formigó traccionat entre fissures en estructures reforçades amb armadures de materials compostos amb matriu polimèrica (FRP).

El present treball s’emmarca dins el camp de les estructures de formigó, i mésconcretament, a les que es troben reforçades amb armadures de materials compostos amb matriu polimèrica, és a dir FRP “Fiber Reinforced Polymer”

Gestió d'un magatzem recanvis industrial

El treball final de carrera tracta l'estudi i disseny de la gestió d'un magatzem, en particular enfocat a un magatzem de recanvis d'una empresa de caire industrial, que a banda d'utilitzar els materials per a realitzar el manteniment dels equips productius també els necessita per a la construcció d'automatismes per a la automatització del procés productiu. L'estudi esta enfocat a una posterior parametrització e implementació mitjançant SAP R/3, ja que aquest ERP és una de les eines més potents que existeixen al mercat mundial per la gestió de magatzems, amb el valor afegit d'integrar el sistema de emmagatzematge amb la resta de àrees funcionals de l'empresa.

Microdiàlisis cerebral aplicada a l'estudi del metabolisme energètic i a la resposta neuroinflamatòria dels pacients amb traumatisme cranioencefàlic

La tècnica de la microdiàlisis cerebral (MDC) és un instrument que proporciona informació rellevant en la monitorització del metabolisme cerebral en els pacients neurocrítics. El lactat i l’índex lactat-piruvat (ILP) són dos marcadors utilitzats per a la detecció de la hipòxia cerebral en pacients que han patit un traumatisme cranioencefàlic (TCE). Aquests dos marcadors poden estar anormalment elevats en circumstàncies que no cursen amb hipòxia tissular. Per una altra banda la recent aparició dels catèters de MDC amb porus de major mida denominats d’”alta resolució”, permet ampliar el rang de molècules que es poden detectar en el dialitzat. Objectius: 1) descriure les característiques del metabolisme energètic cerebral que s’observa en la fase aguda dels pacients que han patit un TCE en base als dos indicadors del metabolisme anaeròbic: lactat i ILP, i 2) determinar la recuperació relativa (RR) de les molècules implicades en la resposta neuroinflamatòria: de IL-1β, IL- 6, IL-8 i IL-10. Material i mètodes: Es van seleccionar 46 pacients d’una cohort de pacients amb TCE moderat o greu ingressats a la Unitat de Cures Intensives de l’Hospital Universitari de la Vall d’Hebron i monitoritzats amb MDC. Es van analitzar els nivells de lactat i ILP i es va correlacionar amb els nivells de PtiO2. Es van realitzar experiments in vitro per estudiar la recuperació de les membranes de 100 KDa per tal de poder interpretar posteriorment els nivells reals de les molècules estudiades en l’espai extracel•lular del teixit cerebral. Resultats: La concordança entre el lactat i l’índex LP per a determinar episodis de disfunció metabòlica va ser dèbil (índex de kappa = 0,36, IC 95%: 0,34-0,39). Més del 80% dels casos en què el lactat i l’índex LP es trobaven incrementats, els valors de la PtiO2 es van trobar dins els rangs de normalitat (PtiO2&15mmHg). La recuperació de les citoquines a través de la membrana de microdiàlisis va ser menor de l’esperat tenint en compte la mida dels porus de la membrana. Conclusions: el lactat i l’índex LP elevats va ser una troballa freqüent després d’un TCE i no es va relacionar, en la majoria de casos, amb episodis d’hipòxia tissular. Per un altra part la mida del porus de la membrana no és l’únic paràmetre indicador de la RR de macromolècules.