A importância da qualidade de vida na Saúde Oral dos idosos

Projeto de Pós-Graduação/Dissertação apresentado à Universidade Fernando Pessoa como parte dos requisitos para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Medicina Dentária

Cancro oral

Projeto de Pós-Graduação/Dissertação apresentado à Universidade Fernando Pessoa como parte dos requisitos para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Medicina Dentária

Nanopartículas lipídicas na promoção da absorção oral de fármacos

Projeto de Pós-Graduação/Dissertação apresentado à Universidade Fernando Pessoa como parte dos requisitos para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Ciências Farmacêuticas

Qualidade de vida relacionada com a saúde oral

Dissertação apresentada à Universidade Fernando Pessoa como parte dos requisitos para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Psicologia, ramo de Psicologia Clínica e da Saúde

A saúde oral em dentição infantil

Projeto de Pós-Graduação/Dissertação apresentado à Universidade Fernando Pessoa como parte dos requisitos para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Medicina Dentária

A Síndrome progeróide de Hutchinson-Gilford e suas complicações na cavidade oral

Projeto de Pós-Graduação/Dissertação apresentado à Universidade Fernando Pessoa como parte dos requisitos para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Medicina Dentária

Avaliação do perfil de referenciação dos doentes com neoplasia oral para o Instituto Português de Oncologia do Porto no ano de 2013

Projeto de Pós-Graduação/Dissertação apresentado à Universidade Fernando Pessoa como parte dos requisitos para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Medicina Dentária

open source spirituality: turning the world upside down

Sermon preached at Boston University School of Theology during Wednesday Chapel on October 24, 2007

An unrecognized source of PCB contamination in schools and other buildings

An investigation of 24 buildings in the Greater Boston Area revealed that one-third (8 of 24) contained caulking materials with polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) content exceeding 50 ppm by weight, which is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) specified limit above which this material is considered to be PCB bulk product waste. These buildings included schools and other public buildings. In a university building where similar levels of PCB were found in caulking material, PCB levels in indoor air ranged from 111 to 393 ng/m3; and in dust taken from the building ventilation system, < 1 ppm to 81 ppm. In this building, the U.S. EPA mandated requirements for the removal and disposal of the PCB bulk product waste as well as for confirmatory sampling to ensure that the interior and exterior of the building were decontaminated. Although U.S. EPA regulations under the Toxic Substances Control Act stipulate procedures by which PCB-contaminated materials must be handled and disposed, the regulations apparently do not require that materials such as caulking be tested to determine its PCB content. This limited investigation strongly suggests that were this testing done, many buildings would be found to contain high levels of PCBs in the building materials and potentially in the building environment. The presence of PCBs in schools is of particular concern given evidence suggesting that PCBs are developmental toxins.

Assessing the Oral Health Needs of Public Housing Residents

Objectives: “Tooth Smart Healthy Start” is a randomized clinical trial which aims to reduce the incidence of early childhood caries (ECC) in Boston public housing residents as part of the NIH funded Northeast Center for Research to Evaluate and Eliminate Dental Disparities. The purpose of this project was to assess public housing stakeholders' perception of the oral health needs of public housing residents and their interest in replicating “Tooth Smart Healthy Start” in other public housing sites across the nation. Methods: The target population was the 180 attendees of the 2010 meeting of the Health Care for Residents of Public Housing National Conference. A ten question survey which assessed conference attendees' beliefs about oral health and its importance to public housing residents was distributed. Data was analyzed using SAS 9.1. Descriptive statistics were calculated for each variable and results were stratified by participants' roles. Results: Thirty percent of conference attendees completed the survey. The participants consisted of residents, agency representatives, and housing authority personnel. When asked to rank health issues facing public housing residents, oral health was rated as most important (42%) or top three (16%) by residents. The agency representatives and housing authority personnel rated oral health among the top three (33% and 58% respectively) and top five (36% and 25% respectively). When participants ranked the three greatest resident health needs out of eight choices, oral health was the most common response. Majority of the participants expressed interest in replicating the “Tooth Smart Healthy Start” program at their sites. Conclusion: All stakeholder groups identified oral health as one of the greatest health needs of residents in public housing. Furthermore, if shown to reduce ECC, there is significant interest in implementing the program amongst key public housing stakeholders across the nation.

AIRSTREAM: A Neural Network Model of Auditory Scene Analysis and Source Segregation

Multiple sound sources often contain harmonics that overlap and may be degraded by environmental noise. The auditory system is capable of teasing apart these sources into distinct mental objects, or streams. Such an "auditory scene analysis" enables the brain to solve the cocktail party problem. A neural network model of auditory scene analysis, called the AIRSTREAM model, is presented to propose how the brain accomplishes this feat. The model clarifies how the frequency components that correspond to a give acoustic source may be coherently grouped together into distinct streams based on pitch and spatial cues. The model also clarifies how multiple streams may be distinguishes and seperated by the brain. Streams are formed as spectral-pitch resonances that emerge through feedback interactions between frequency-specific spectral representaion of a sound source and its pitch. First, the model transforms a sound into a spatial pattern of frequency-specific activation across a spectral stream layer. The sound has multiple parallel representations at this layer. A sound's spectral representation activates a bottom-up filter that is sensitive to harmonics of the sound's pitch. The filter activates a pitch category which, in turn, activate a top-down expectation that allows one voice or instrument to be tracked through a noisy multiple source environment. Spectral components are suppressed if they do not match harmonics of the top-down expectation that is read-out by the selected pitch, thereby allowing another stream to capture these components, as in the "old-plus-new-heuristic" of Bregman. Multiple simultaneously occuring spectral-pitch resonances can hereby emerge. These resonance and matching mechanisms are specialized versions of Adaptive Resonance Theory, or ART, which clarifies how pitch representations can self-organize durin learning of harmonic bottom-up filters and top-down expectations. The model also clarifies how spatial location cues can help to disambiguate two sources with similar spectral cures. Data are simulated from psychophysical grouping experiments, such as how a tone sweeping upwards in frequency creates a bounce percept by grouping with a downward sweeping tone due to proximity in frequency, even if noise replaces the tones at their interection point. Illusory auditory percepts are also simulated, such as the auditory continuity illusion of a tone continuing through a noise burst even if the tone is not present during the noise, and the scale illusion of Deutsch whereby downward and upward scales presented alternately to the two ears are regrouped based on frequency proximity, leading to a bounce percept. Since related sorts of resonances have been used to quantitatively simulate psychophysical data about speech perception, the model strengthens the hypothesis the ART-like mechanisms are used at multiple levels of the auditory system. Proposals for developing the model to explain more complex streaming data are also provided.

A Neural Network for Synthesizing the Pitch of an Acoustic Source

This article describes a neural network model capable of generating a spatial representation of the pitch of an acoustic source. Pitch is one of several auditory percepts used by humans to separate multiple sound sources in the environment from each other. The model provides a neural instantiation of a type of "harmonic sieve". It is capable of quantitatively simulating a large body of psychoacoustical data, including new data on octave shift perception.

Edmund Burke and the heritage of oral culture

The dissertation proposes that one of the more fruitful ways of interpreting Burke's work is to evaluate him as an oral performer rather than a literary practitioner and it argues that in his voice can be heard the modulations of the genres and conventions of oral composition of eighteenth-century Gaelic Ireland. The first chapter situates Burke in the milieu of the Gaelic landed class of eighteenth-century Ireland. The next chapter examines how the rich oral culture of the Munster Gaelic gentry, where Burke spent his childhood days, was to provide a lasting influence on the form and content of Burke's work. His speeches on the British constitution are read in the context of the historical and literary culture of the Jacobites, specifically the speculum principis, Párliament na mBán. The third chapter surveys the tradition of Anglo-Irish theoretical writings on oratory and discusses how Burke is aligned with this school. The focus is on how Burke's thought and practice, his 'idioms', might be understood as being mediated through the criterion of orality rather than literature. The remaining chapters discuss Burke's politics and performance in the light of Gaelic cultural practices such as the rituals of the courts of poetry, the Warrant Poems or Barántas; the performance of funeral laments and elegies, Caoineadh, the laments for the fallen nobility, Marbhna na daoine uaisle, the satires and the political vision allegories of Munster, Aislingí na Mumhan; to show how they provide us with a remarkable context for discussing Burke's poetical-political performance. In hearing Burke's voice through the body of Gaelic culture our understanding of Burke's position in the wider world of the eighteenth century (and hence his meaning) is profoundly affected.

The utility of survey and administrative data to generate information for research and outcomes-based oral health services development

The aim of this research, which focused on the Irish adult population, was to generate information for policymakers by applying statistical analyses and current technologies to oral health administrative and survey databases. Objectives included identifying socio-demographic influences on oral health and utilisation of dental services, comparing epidemiologically-estimated dental treatment need with treatment provided, and investigating the potential of a dental administrative database to provide information on utilisation of services and the volume and types of treatment provided over time. Information was extracted from the claims databases for the Dental Treatment Benefit Scheme (DTBS) for employed adults and the Dental Treatment Services Scheme (DTSS) for less-well-off adults, the National Surveys of Adult Oral Health, and the 2007 Survey of Lifestyle Attitudes and Nutrition in Ireland. Factors associated with utilisation and retention of natural teeth were analysed using count data models and logistic regression. The chi-square test and the student’s t-test were used to compare epidemiologically-estimated need in a representative sample of adults with treatment provided. Differences were found in dental care utilisation and tooth retention by Socio-Economic Status. An analysis of the five-year utilisation behaviour of a 2003 cohort of DTBS dental attendees revealed that age and being female were positively associated with visiting annually and number of treatments. Number of adults using the DTBS increased, and mean number of treatments per patient decreased, between 1997 and 2008. As a percentage of overall treatments, restorations, dentures, and extractions decreased, while prophylaxis increased. Differences were found between epidemiologically-estimated treatment need and treatment provided for those using the DTBS and DTSS. This research confirms the utility of survey and administrative data to generate knowledge for policymakers. Public administrative databases have not been designed for research purposes, but they have the potential to provide a wealth of knowledge on treatments provided and utilisation patterns.

Genetic analysis of bacteriophages from clinical and environmental samples

Bacteriophages, viruses infecting bacteria, are uniformly present in any location where there are high numbers of bacteria, both in the external environment and the human body. Knowledge of their diversity is limited by the difficulty to culture the host species and by the lack of the universal marker gene present in all viruses. Metagenomics is a powerful tool that can be used to analyse viral communities in their natural environments. The aim of this study was to investigate diverse populations of uncultured viruses from clinical (a sputum of patient with cystic fibrosis, CF) and environmental samples (a sludge from a dairy food wastewater treatment plant) containing rich bacterial populations using genetic and metagenomic analyses. Metagenomic sequencing of viruses obtained from these samples revealed that the majority of the metagenomic reads (97-99%) were novel when compared to the NCBI protein database using BLAST. A large proportion of assembled contigs were assignable as novel phages or uncharacterised prophages, the next largest assignable group being single-stranded eukaryotic virus genomes. Sputum from a cystic fibrosis patient contained DNA typical of phages of bacteria that are traditionally involved in CF lung infections and other bacteria that are part of the normal oral flora. The only eukaryotic virus detected in the CF sputum was Torque Teno virus (TTV). A substantial number of assigned sequences from dairy wastewater could be affiliated with phages of bacteria that are typically found in the soil and aquatic environments, including wastewater. Eukaryotic viral sequences were dominated by plant pathogens from the Geminiviridae and Nanoviridae families, and animal pathogens from the Circoviridae family. Antibiotic resistance genes were detected in both metagenomes suggesting phages could be a source for transmissible antimicrobial resistance. Overall, diversity of viruses in the CF sputum was low, with 89 distinct viral genotypes predicted, and higher (409 genotypes) in the wastewater. Function-based screening of a metagenomic library constructed from DNA extracted from dairy food wastewater viruses revealed candidate promoter sequences that have ability to drive expression of GFP in a promoter-trap vector in Escherichia coli. The majority of the cloned DNA sequences selected by the assay were related to ssDNA circular eukaryotic viruses and phages which formed a minority of the metagenome assembly, and many lacked any significant homology to known database sequences. Natural diversity of bacteriophages in wastewater samples was also examined by PCR amplification of the major capsid protein sequences, conserved within T4-type bacteriophages from Myoviridae family. Phylogenetic analysis of capsid sequences revealed that dairy wastewater contained mainly diverse and uncharacterized phages, while some showed a high level of similarity with phages from geographically distant environments.