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Background: Cancer care can negatively impact children's subjective well-being. In this research, well-being refers to patients' self-perception and encompasses their hospital and care delivery assessment. Playful strategies can stimulate treatment compliance and have been used to provide psychosocial support and health education; they can involve gamification, virtual reality, robotics, and healthcare environments. This study aims to identify how playfulness, whenever applicable, can be used as a strategy to improve the subjective well-being of pediatric cancer patients in the Brazilian Unified Health System., Methods: Sixteen volunteers with experience in pediatric oncology participated in the study. They were physicians, psychologists, child life specialists, and design thinking professionals. They engaged in design thinking workshops to propose playful strategies to improve the well-being of pediatric cancer patients in the Brazilian Unified Health System. Data collection consisted of participatory observations. All activities were video recorded and analyzed through Thematic Analysis. The content generated by the volunteers was classified into two categories: impact of cancer care on children's self-perception and children's perceptions of the hospital and the care delivery., Results: Volunteers developed strategies to help children deal with time at the hospital, hospital structure, and care delivery. Such strategies are not limited to using playfulness as a way of "having fun"; they privilege ludic interfaces, such as toys, to support psychosocial care and health education. They aim to address cancer and develop communication across families and staff in a humanized manner, educate families about the disease, and design children-friendly environments. Volunteers also generated strategies to help children cope with perceptions of death, pain, and their bodies. Such strategies aim to support understanding the meaning of life and death, comprehend pain beyond physicality, help re-signify cancer and children's changing bodies, and give patients active voices during the treatment., Conclusions: The paper proposes strategies that can improve the well-being of pediatric cancer patients in the Brazilian Unified Health System. Such strategies connect children's experiences as inpatients and outpatients and may inform the implementation of similar projects in other developing countries., (© 2021. The Author(s).)

Oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPC) are a uniformly distributed population of glial cells that are well known for proliferating and differentiating into mature oligodendrocytes to form the myelin sheet in the central nervous system (CNS). Since monocarboxylate transporter 1 (MCT1) has shown to be expressed by oligodendroglia, the involvement of these cells with the metabolic support to axons has emerged as an important role in the maintenance of neuronal functionality. Hyperglycemia is a metabolic dysfunction highly associated with oxidative stress, a classical feature linked to many disorders such as diabetes mellitus. Despite of being widely investigated in several different cell cultures, including astrocytes and neurons, such condition has been poorly investigated in OPC culture. Thus, the aim of this study was to explore the possible effects of high-glucose exposure in acute and chronic conditions on oligodendroglial development and functionality in vitro. In this sense, we have demonstrated that under high-glucose exposure OPC improved its differentiation rate without affecting its membrane integrity and its morphology. Besides, chronic high-glucose condition also increased glucose uptake and lactate release. On the other hand, our findings also showed that, unlike what happens in other glial cells and neurons, high-glucose exposure did not seem to induce oxidative stress in OPC culture. Therefore, as far as we have investigated in this present study, we suggest that OPC may be able to support neurons and other glial cells during hyperglycemia events.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive and incurable neurodegenerative disorder, with a dramatic socioeconomic impact. The progress of AD is characterized by a severe loss in memory and cognition, leading to behavioral changing, depression and death. During the last decades, only a few anticholinergic drugs were launched in the market, mainly acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEIs), with indications for the treatment of initial and moderate stages of AD. The search for new AChEIs, capable to overcome the limitations observed for rivastigmine and tacrine, led Sugimoto and co-workers to the discovery of donepezil. Besides its high potency, donepezil also exhibited high selectivity for AChE and a very low toxicity. In this review, we discuss the main structural and pharmacological attributes that have made donepezil the first choice medicine for AD, and a versatile structural model for the design of novel AChEIs, in spite of multipotent and multitarget-directed ligands. Many recent data from literature transdue great efforts worldwide to produce modifications in the donepezil structure that could result in new bioactive chemical entities with innovative structural pattern. Furthermore, multi-potent ligands have also been designed by molecular hybridization, affording rivastigmine-, tacrine- and huperzine-donepezil potent and selective AChEIs. In a more recent strategy, structural features of donepezil have been used as a model to design multitarget-directed ligands, aiming at the discovery of new effective drug candidates that could exhibit concomitant pharmacological activities as dual or multi- enzymatic inhibitors as genuine innovative therapeutic alternatives for the treatment of AD.