329 research outputs found
Economic factors affecting obesity: an application in Italy
No full textThe World Health Organization has stated that obesity is spreading around the world like a “global epidemic”. In 2004 the percentage of obese people in the Italian population was 9%, but the trend s increasing in recent years. Focusing on this country, the purpose of the paper is to analyze the socio-economic variables affecting obesity by means of a survey conducted in a consumer sample. Our analysis is based on a survey conducted in Italy, and the sample was composed of 999 consumers. We used a binary logit model and the dependent variable is body mass index (BMI), expressed in a dichotomic way (seriously overweight and obese, value 1, and normal weight, value 0). The results show that the condition of the seriously overweight and obese increases with age, especially in people over 65 of age. Also gender is correlated with the pathology: being seriously overweight and obese is far more likely for men than for women. An inverse relation was shown between obesity and education, and between obesity and the level of food knowledge. The results highlight that disadvantaged social categories are more susceptible to the problem of overweight and obesity. A policy implication of the analysis, to limit the spread of obesity, could lie in programs aimed at improving health and food awareness and focused on these minority groups.economics of obesity, BMI and consumer, logit model, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Health Economics and Policy,
Author response
No full textDetecting pathogens and mounting immune responses upon infection is crucial for animal health. However, these responses come at a high metabolic price (McKean and Lazzaro, 2011, Kominsky et al., 2010), and avoiding pathogens before infection may be advantageous. The bacterial endotoxins lipopolysaccharides (LPS) are important immune system infection cues (Abbas et al., 2014), but it remains unknown whether animals possess sensory mechanisms to detect them prior to infection. Here we show that Drosophila melanogaster display strong aversive responses to LPS and that gustatory neurons expressing Gr66a bitter receptors mediate avoidance of LPS in feeding and egg laying assays. We found the expression of the chemosensory cation channel dTRPA1 in these cells to be necessary and sufficient for LPS avoidance. Furthermore, LPS stimulates Drosophila neurons in a TRPA1-dependent manner and activates exogenous dTRPA1 channels in human cells. Our findings demonstrate that flies detect bacterial endotoxins via a gustatory pathway through TRPA1 activation as conserved molecular mechanism.sponsorship: Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie Alessia Soldano Luis Franco Guangda Liu Natalia Mora Emre Yaksi Bassem A Hassanr Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek G.0702.12 Alessia Soldano Yeranddy A Alpizar Brett Boonen Alejandro Lopez-Requena Natalia Mora Thomas Voets Rudi Vennekens Bassem A Hassan Karel Talaverar Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek G.0077.15 Alessia Soldano Yeranddy A Alpizar Brett Boonen Alejandro Lopez-Requena Natalia Mora Thomas Voets Rudi Vennekens Bassem A Hassan Karel Talaverar Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek G.0680.10 Alessia Soldano Yeranddy A Alpizar Brett Boonen Alejandro Lopez-Requena Natalia Mora Thomas Voets Rudi Vennekens Bassem A Hassan Karel Talaverar Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek G.0681.10 Alessia Soldano Yeranddy A Alpizar Brett Boonen Alejandro Lopez-Requena Natalia Mora Thomas Voets Rudi Vennekens Bassem A Hassan Karel Talaverar Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek G.0503.12 Alessia Soldano Yeranddy A Alpizar Brett Boonen Alejandro Lopez-Requena Natalia Mora Thomas Voets Rudi Vennekens Bassem A Hassan Karel Talaverar Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek G.0654.15 Alessia Soldano Yeranddy A Alpizar Brett Boonen Alejandro Lopez-Requena Natalia Mora Thomas Voets Rudi Vennekens Bassem A Hassan Karel Talaverar Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek G.0761.10N Alessia Soldano Yeranddy A Alpizar Brett Boonen Alejandro Lopez-Requena Natalia Mora Thomas Voets Rudi Vennekens Bassem A Hassan Karel Talaverar Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek G.0596.12 Alessia Soldano Yeranddy A Alpizar Brett Boonen Alejandro Lopez-Requena Natalia Mora Thomas Voets Rudi Vennekens Bassem A Hassan Karel Talaverar Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek G.0565.07 Alessia Soldano Yeranddy A Alpizar Brett Boonen Alejandro Lopez-Requena Natalia Mora Thomas Voets Rudi Vennekens Bassem A Hassan Karel Talaverar KU Leuven GOA/14/011 Alessia Soldano Yeranddy A Alpizar Brett Boonen Luis Franco Alejandro Lopez-Requena Guangda Liu Natalia Mora Emre Yaksi Thomas Voets Rudi Vennekens Bassem A Hassan Karel Talaverar European Commission IUAP P7/13 Alessia Soldano Yeranddy A Alpizar Brett Boonen Luis Franco Alejandro Lopez-Requena Guangda Liu Natalia Mora Emre Yaksi Thomas Voets Rudi Vennekensr KU Leuven OT/12/091 Alessia Soldano Yeranddy A Alpizar Brett Boonen Luis Franco Alejandro Lopez-Requena Guangda Liu Natalia Mora Emre Yaksi Thomas Voets Rudi Vennekens Bassem A Hassan Karel Talaverar KU Leuven PF-TRPLe Alessia Soldano Yeranddy A Alpizar Brett Boonen Luis Franco Alejandro Lopez-Requena Guangda Liu Natalia Mora Emre Yaksi Thomas Voets Rudi Vennekens Bassem A Hassan Karel Talavera (Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie, Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek|G.0702.12, Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek|G.0077.15, Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek|G.0680.10, Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek|G.0681.10, Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek|G.0503.12, Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek|G.0654.15, Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek|G.0761.10N, Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek|G.0596.12, KU Leuven|GOA/14/011, KU Leuven|OT/12/091, European Commission|IUAP P7/13, KU Leuven PF-TRPLe)status: Publishe
Neurodegenerative diseases caused by protein aggregation: a phenomenon at the borderline between molecular evolution and ageing.
No full text
I diritti inviolabili e gli inderogabili doveri di solidarietà sociale
No full textQuesto saggio nasce dall’esperienza di professionisti e insegnanti, che, nell’ambito del progetto per la diffusione della cultura della legalità nelle scuole medie superiori, hanno incontrato gli studenti, trattando con loro argomenti dagli stessi ragazzi selezionati.
Parlare di legalità ai giovani non è semplice; è anzi una sfida ed esige umiltà e disponibilità a procedere per saltum, affrontando anche argomenti non previsti, che dai ragazzi sono però sollecitati.
Parlare ai ragazzi significa anche per noi adulti comprendere il loro linguaggio.
Soltanto così riusciremo a spiegarci e renderli Persona.
E i ragazzi comprenderanno che ITACA non è soltanto la meta, ma il percorso.
La varietà degli argomenti trattati può servire da stimolo a quella delicata indagine, critica e ricostruttiva, che, chi è chiamato a parlare di legalità, deve svolgere
Protein Aggregation
No full textProtein aggregation occurs in vivo as a result of improper folding or misfolding. Diverse diseases arise from protein misfolding and are now grouped under the term "protein conformational diseases", including most of the neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, the prion encephalopathies and Huntington's disease, as well as cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia and other less common conditions. The hallmark event in these diseases is a change in the secondary and/or tertiary structure of a normal, functional protein, leading to the formation of protein aggregates with various supramolecular organizations. In most cases the aggregates are organized in structurally well-defined fibrils forming amyloid deposits. The crucial feature of the amyloidogenic proteins is their structural instability induced either by mutations, post-translational modifications, or local conditions, such as pH, temperature, and co-solutes. The conformational change may promote the disease either by gain of a toxic activity or by the lack of biological function of the natively folded protein. As different molecular mechanisms are involved in the formation of the various forms of protein aggregates, the laboratory diagnostic approach remains frequently elusive
Effect of micromixer design on lipid nanocarriers manufacturing for the delivery of proteins and nucleic acids
No full textLipid-based nanocarriers have emerged as helpful tools to deliver sensible biomolecules such as proteins and oligonucleotides. To have a fast and robust microfluidic-based nanoparticle synthesis method, the setup of versatile equipment should allow for the rapid transfer to scale costeffectively while ensuring tunable, precise and reproducible nanoparticle attributes. The present work aims to assess the effect of different micromixer geometries on the manufacturing of lipid nanocarriers taking into account the influence on the mixing efficiency by changing the fluid–fluid
interface and indeed the mass transfer. Since the geometry of the adopted micromixer varies from those already published, a Design of Experiment (DoE) was necessary to identify the operating (total flow, flow rate ratio) and formulation (lipid concentration, lipid molar ratios) parameters affecting the nanocarrier quality. The suitable application of the platform was investigated by producing neutral, stealth and cationic liposomes, using DaunoXome®, Myocet®, Onivyde® and Onpattro® as the benchmark. The effect of condensing lipid (DOTAP, 3–10–20 mol%), coating lipids (DSPE-PEG550
and DSPE-PEG2000), as well as structural lipids (DSPC, eggPC) was pointed out. A very satisfactory encapsulation efficiency, always higher than 70%, was successfully obtained for model biomolecules (myoglobin, short and long nucleic acids)
Social Network to analyse the relationship between ‘victim-author’ and ‘motivation’ of violence against women in Italy.
No full textThe paper aims to analyse the phenomenon of Violence against women in the Italian context during 2020. It proposes to study the relationship between ‘victim-author’ and ‘motivation’ in femicides committed in domestic environment. By means of the properties of the Social Network Analysis on bimodal data, the study detected main actors and motivations that generated the homicides with female victims. At the same time, the structural relationships allowed to investigate the existence of motivations that better characterized the action of the various actors. The bipartite graph visualization and centrality scores calculated have demonstrated the effectiveness of the methodology for the pursued objectives
Multi-site harmonization of MRI data uncovers machine-learning discrimination capability in barely separable populations: An example from the ABIDE dataset
No full textMachine Learning (ML) techniques have been widely used in Neuroimaging studies of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) both to identify possible brain alterations related to this condition and to evaluate the predictive power of brain imaging modalities. The collection and public sharing of large imaging samples has favored an even greater diffusion of the use of ML-based analyses. However, multi-center data collections may suffer the batch effect, which, especially in case of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) studies, should be curated to avoid confounding effects for ML classifiers and masking biases. This is particularly important in the study of barely separable populations according to MRI data, such as subjects with ASD compared to controls with typical development (TD). Here, we show how the implementation of a harmo- nization protocol on brain structural features unlocks the case-control ML separation capability in the analysis of a multi-center MRI dataset. This effect is demonstrated on the ABIDE data collection, involving subjects encompassing a wide age range. After data harmonization, the overall ASD vs. TD discrimination capability by a Random Forest (RF) classifier improves from a very low performance (AUC = 0.58 ± 0.04) to a still low, but reasonably significant AUC = 0.67 ± 0.03. The performances of the RF classifier have been evaluated also in the age-specific subgroups of children, adolescents and adults, obtaining AUC = 0.62 ± 0.02, AUC = 0.65 ± 0.03 and AUC = 0.69 ± 0.06, respectively. Specific and consistent patterns of anatomical differences related to the ASD condition have been identified for the three different age subgroups
- …
