Search

Iron molecule is of great importance in the synthesis of hemoglobin which is essential for oxygen transport. Iron levels are quantified by accurately high sensitivity tests, such as serum ferritin (SF). However, common studies to quantify SF are long and strenuous (~ 5 h), for example enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). In this paper, blood serum samples were analyzed by Raman spectroscopy (RS), and a computational analysis of spectra is proposed to detect differences in SF as an alternative procedure. Serum samples were obtained from 22 patients, 9 who were clinically diagnosed with anemia and 13 controls. Patients with anemia had low levels of SF (< 30 ng/ml), and a control group had levels between 30 and 500 ng/ml. The spectra obtained were conditioned with a baseline correction and smoothing, then evaluated by principal component analysis (PCA), and a predictive model was estimated by lineal discrimination analysis (LDA). The results showed a clear differentiation of the study groups by PCA, also 99.69% sensitivity and 100% specificity by LDA. This study suggest that Raman spectroscopy is a fast (~ 5 min) and a powerful tool capable to qualitative differentiate ferritin concentrations.

Purpose: Doxorubicin and trabectedin are considered active drugs in soft tissue sarcoma (STS). The combination of both drugs was hypothesized to be advantageous and safe on the basis of preclinical evidence and a previous phase I trial, respectively. The aim of this study was to compare the clinical outcome of trabectedin plus doxorubicin with doxorubicin as first-line treatment of advanced STS patients., Patients and Methods: In this open-label randomized phase II trial, the main end point was progression-free survival (PFS). Trabectedin 1.1 mg/m(2) in a 3-hour infusion plus doxorubicin 60 mg/m(2) as the experimental arm and doxorubicin 75 mg/m(2) as the control arm were administered for up to six cycles. Translational research was planned to correlate the expression of apoptotic and DNA repair genes with clinical outcome., Results: In 115 randomly assigned patients, the median PFS was 5.5 months in the control arm and 5.7 months in the experimental arm (hazard ratio, 1.16; 95% CI, 0.79 to 1.71; P = .45) in the intent-to-treat analysis. The trial was stopped for futility after the interim analysis, because the results in the experimental arm showed the risk reduction for the main end point to be < 9.64%. The proportion of patients with grade 3 or 4 thrombocytopenia, asthenia, and liver toxicity was significantly higher in the experimental arm. FAS and p53 were shown to be prognostic factors for PFS (7.0 months if FAS+ and p53-; 3.4 months if FAS+/p53+ or FAS-/p53-; and 0.7 months if FAS- and p53+; P < .001) and for overall survival., Conclusion: Trabectedin plus doxorubicin did not show superiority over doxorubicin alone as first-line treatment of advanced STS. The prognostic role of apoptotic key genes, FAS and p53, was shown to be robust enough to continue this research line., (© 2016 by American Society of Clinical Oncology.)

Background: Experimental undernutrition in animals, during the critical brain development period, produces retardation of brain growth as well as a number of different morphologic and functional abnormalities in neurons, mainly in the dendritic synaptic apparatus. These alterations are the cause of the poor neurointegrative development that occurs in experimental malnutrition. Severe malnutrition during early postnatal life in humans is known to produce similar neurointegrative disorders as well as mental retardation, but there are very few studies describing the morphology of the dendritic apparatus in infants suffering from this condition., Objective: To study the dendritic spine density and morphology in dendrites from cortical neurons in infants dying from severe malnutrition., Methodology: Brain sections from the somestesic, motor, and occipital cortical areas of 13 infants who died of severe malnutrition and 7 eutrophic infants who died of other causes were studied by means of the rapid Golgi method. Apical dendritic spines from neurons of the fifth cortical layer were studied and counted in all sections., Results: Apical dendrites were significantly shorter in malnourished infants than in the control group (581.54 +/- 54.32 microm in severe malnutrition vs 846.3 microm in normal infants). The number of dendritic spines per dendrite was also significantly diminished (185.3 +/- 36.1 in malnourished vs 374.3 +/- 41.6 in eutrophic infants). There were marked morphologic abnormalities in the dendritic spines of infants dying of severe malnutrition that were classified as dysplastic., Conclusions: Short apical dendrites, fewer spines, and dendritic spine abnormalities occur in severe infant malnutrition. These anatomic anomalies might be related to the neuropsychological deficits that occur in these children.