Patients with mental disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder, or patients with sequels from head trauma often present deterioration of social cognition such as emotional and communication skills necessary to successfully interact in a social level, including perception of emotions, interpretation of social keys, and the capacity to attribute intentions in a correct manner.
These patients often isolate themselves due to their difficulty in establishing contact with other people and keeping a conversation.
e-Motional Training ® has been designed to rehabilitate these functions based on scientific evidence.
For many infectious diseases, standard and transmission-based precautions are commonly employed by healthcare workers. These involve the use of personal protective equipment (PPE), such as gloves, safety glasses, mask and coverall, against droplet, contact, or airborne transmission.
In the current era of emerging pathogens such as Ebola virus, removal of this type of personal protective equipment is crucial to reduce contamination of healthcare workers. During the removal of PPE, the skin and clothing of healthcare workers can become contaminated, even when there are no lapses in the removal technique.
Proper training and equipment as well as an abundance of caution are necessary, given the lack of experience healthcare and clean-up workers have in dealing with this kind of infectious diseases, such as Ebola.
In order to solve or reduce these problems, a device has been created to facilitate the opening and removal operation of personal protective equipment.
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is considered an autoimmune and inflammatory disease. It is the most common form of chronic inflammatory joint disease, and affects 1-2% of the general population. The diagnosis of RA is based on specific parameters such as the number of joints affected or the duration of symptoms. However, the early clinical presentation of RA is indistinguishable from others forms of arthritis.
While there has been progress in the discovery of molecular and serological markers related to RA in recent years, there is still an on-going need for improved methods in early detection, accurate diagnosis, classification, study of the progression and/or prognosis of RA and related autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. For that purpose, an in vitro method to detect a new biomarker for the screening, diagnosis, and/or monitoring of early or very early detection of RA has been created.
Traditional methods to detect microorganisms, including growth and culture of different specimens under favorable conditions —as well as a subsequent ocular, microscopic identification and/or identification by means of chemical or biochemical analysis of results—, generally require several days of careful laboratory work. In the last few decades, alternative methods for microorganism detection were developed to obtain results in the shortest possible time. One of them includes the use of microcalorimetry.
Current procedures to detect microorganisms take at least 48 hours and do not use microcalorimetry. By using this technique, it is possible to detect the growth profile of bacteria in less than 24 hours, allowing an early start of the treatment.
Nowadays, the most widespread biomaterial for clinical applications as bone void filler and bone tissue regeneration is hydroxyapatite (HA). Current sources of this biomaterial are either synthetic or coming from a human or bovine origin. However, these materials suffer from several drawbacks regarding performance and biosafety […].
BIOFAST was designed to repair and regenerate bone tissue based on a ceramic material obtained from shark teeth. It is a cheap and abundant raw material that contains fluorine and other cell growth stimulating elements. Its unique chemical composition makes it an innovative fluorapatite biomaterial with superior characteristics that can replace current hydroxyapatite materials at a very competitive price.
Fine needle aspiration (FNA) is a medical procedure whose purpose is obtaining cellular samples from a specific area of the body, using images obtained by Computerized Axial Tomography (CAT) techniques as guidance. As a first approach, the FNA team generally uses centered lines of CAT for guidance in order to mark the desired area prior to the puncture and, as a second approach, an external radio-opaque metallic marker, such as a needle or a clip. However, these markers are the only external reference and give limited information regarding the best way to access the tissue of study. The access should be very precise to avoid several associated risks, such as puncturing other organs, repetition of CAT images (which implies exposing the patient to higher levels of radiation), and the need for more punctures to obtain a valid tissue sample. In order to avoid such risks, a new external radio-opaque marker with ten standardized points of reference in the form of a rack has been designed. The rack is manufactured in silicone to avoid allergic reactions.
The 1,25-dihydroxy vitamin D (1,25D) exerts its biological effects through binding to a specific intracellular receptor (Vitamin D Receptor, VDR) present in target cells. Numerous studies have demonstrated that 1,25D plays a major role in maintaining calcium/phosphate homeostasis. In addition, it regulates other physiological and pathological processes, including cell proliferation and differentiation. Nevertheless, its use in therapy is limited because of its hypercalcemic side effects. Given that Vitamin D inhibits proliferation and increases cell differentiation, the use of non-hypercalcemic Vitamin D analogues could be a therapeutic alternative in cancer and hyperproliferative disorders such as psoriasis, for which there is no oral treatment.
This technology describes the synthesis of new compounds with a certain affinity for the Vitamin D receptor, and are active similarly to 1,25D, with the advantage of presenting a lower level of hypercalcemia or zero hypercalcemia.
Based on previous in vitro and in vivo tests, the best candidate of this family of compounds, PG-136, is a potent anti-proliferative drug without hypercalcemic activity. Besides, PG-136 shows anti-tumoral activity in human breast cancer cells and mouse xenograft tumor models.
A new species of Streptococcus has been isolated from healthy mouths of patients, CECT 9174, which has demonstrated significant bactericidal activity. CECT 9174, or bioactive compounds derived from the strain, within the probiotics and/or prebiotics composition or as part of different pharmaceutical compositions, could be used in the treatment of infections in the oral cavity, such as caries and periodontal disease.
In the last years, there were big steps in the treatment of Head and Neck Cancer (HNC), but local relapse rates are still very high. For this reason, multicentric research is needed to overcome them, focused on quantifying tumour response of HNC patients by functional images like Positron Emission Tomography (PET)/Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Multimodality imaging offers much more information about tumour behaviour than the individual datasets on their own (malignancy, oxygenation or tumour density).
A software has been developed that allows the correction of the distortion caused by diffusion through the usage of reverse gradients and thus the program allows the combination of the images obtained with MRI and PET.
Therefore, this software enables the identification of the metabolically most active areas in the tumour and those with a higher level of oxygenation. These two parameters are useful to identify the tumour areas in which radiotherapy is less effective and adjust the radiotherapy plan to concentrate it on such areas.
