Plos One
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Multimorbidity is a major challenge for healthcare systems. However, currently, its magnitude and impact in healthcare expenditures is still mostly unknown. ⋯ Multimorbidity is very common for the Basque population and its prevalence rises in age, and unfavourable socioeconomic environment. The costs of care for chronic patients with several conditions cannot be described as the sum of their individual pathologies in average. They usually increase dramatically according to the number of comorbidities. Given the ageing population, multimorbidity and its consequences should be taken into account in healthcare policy, the organization of care and medical research.
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Heterochromatin is a significant component of the human genome and the genomes of most model organisms. Although heterochromatin is thought to be largely non-coding, it is clear that it plays an important role in chromosome structure and gene regulation. ⋯ In this report, we validate the approach, identify previously unknown satellite sequence copy number polymorphisms in Y chromosomes from different geographic sources, and show that a defect in heterochromatin formation can induce similar copy number polymorphisms in a laboratory strain. These findings provide a simple method to investigate the dynamic nature of repetitive sequences and characterize conditions which might give rise to long-lasting alterations in DNA sequence.
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Fentanyl is widely used off-label in NICU. Our aim was to investigate its cerebral, cardiovascular and pulmonary effects as well as pharmacokinetics in an experimental model for neonates. ⋯ The newborn piglet was shown to be a suitable experimental model for studying fentanyl disposition as well as respiratory and cardiovascular effects in human neonates. Therefore, it could be extremely useful for further investigating the drug behaviour under pathophysiological conditions.
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Maximal central motor drive is known to decrease during prolonged exercise although it remains to be determined whether a supraspinal deficit exists, and if so, when it appears. The purpose of this study was to evaluate corticospinal excitability and muscle voluntary activation before, during and after a 4-h cycling exercise. Ten healthy subjects performed three 80-min bouts on an ergocycle at 45% of their maximal aerobic power. ⋯ Finally, significant decreases in both VATMS and VAFNES (∼ 8%, P<0.05 and ∼ 14%, P<0.001 post-exercise, respectively) were observed. In conclusion, reductions in VAFNES after a prolonged cycling exercise are partly explained by a deficit at the cortical level accompanied by increased corticospinal excitability and unchanged intracortical inhibition. When comparing the present results with the literature, this study highlights that changes at the cortical and/or motoneuronal levels depend not only on the type of exercise (single-joint vs. whole-body) but also on exercise intensity and/or duration.
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Accumulated evidences demonstrated that single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in mRNA 3'-untranslated region (3'-UTR) may impact microRNAs (miRNAs)-mediated expression regulation of oncogenes and tumor suppressors. There is a TNFAIP2 3'-UTR rs8126 T>C genetic variant which has been proved to be associated with head and neck cancer susceptibility. This SNP could disturb binding of miR-184 with TNFAIP2 mRNA and influence TNFAIP2 regulation. However, it is still unclear how this polymorphism is involved in development of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC). Therefore, we hypothesized that the functional TNFAIP2 rs8126 SNP may affect TNFAIP2 expression and, thus, ESCC risk. ⋯ Our data demonstrate that functional TNFAIP2 rs8126 genetic variant is a ESCC susceptibility SNP. These results support the hypothesis that genetic variants interrupting miRNA-mediated gene regulation might be important genetic modifiers of cancer risk.