Supporting Financial Neutrality in Donation of Organs, Cells, and Tissues.

The avoidance of financial gain in the human body is an international ethical standard that underpins efforts to promote equity in donation and transplantation and to avoid the exploitation of vulnerable populations. The avoidance of financial loss due to donation of organs, tissues, and cells is also now recognized as an ethical imperative that fosters equity in donation and transplantation and supports the well-being of donors and their families. Nevertheless, there has been little progress in achieving financial neutrality in donations in most countries.

Toward Equity in Global Access to SoHO-based Therapies: Recommendations for Action.

Therapies derived from substances of human origin (SoHOs) such as organs, cells, and tissues provide life-saving or life-changing treatment for millions of people worldwide each year. However, many people lack timely access to SoHO-based therapies because of insufficient supplies of these exceptional health resources and/or broader barriers in access to healthcare. Despite well-established governmental commitments to promote health equity in general and equity of access to SoHOs in particular, information about inequities in access to most SoHO-based therapies is scarce.

Prevention of Trafficking in Organs, Tissues, and Cells.

Trafficking in human organs, cells, and tissues has long been a source of concern for health authorities and professionals, and several international ethical guidance documents and national laws have affirmed the prohibition of trade in these substances of human origin (SoHOs). However, despite considerable attention to the issue of organ trafficking, this remains a substantial and widespread problem internationally. In contrast, trafficking in cells, tissues, and medical products derived from SoHOs has received comparatively little attention, and the extent and nature of such trafficking remain largely unknown.

Threatening stimuli elicit a sequential cardiac pattern in arthropods.

In order to cope with the challenges of living in dynamic environments, animals rapidly adjust their behaviors in coordination with different physiological responses. Here, we studied whether threatening visual stimuli evoke different heart rate patterns in arthropods and whether these patterns are related with defensive behaviors. We identified two sequential phases of crab's cardiac response that occur with a similar timescale to that of the motor arrest and later escape response.

A New Behavioral Paradigm for Visual Classical Conditioning in .

Visual learning in animals is a remarkable cognitive ability that plays a crucial role in their survival and adaptation. Therefore, the ability to learn is highly conserved among animals. Despite lacking a centralized nervous system like vertebrates, invertebrates have demonstrated remarkable learning abilities.

Numerical discrimination in Drosophila melanogaster.

Sensitivity to numbers is a crucial cognitive ability. The lack of experimental models amenable to systematic genetic and neural manipulation has precluded discovering neural circuits required for numerical cognition. Here, we demonstrate that Drosophila flies spontaneously prefer sets containing larger numbers of objects.

Developmental transcriptional control of mitochondrial homeostasis is required for activity-dependent synaptic connectivity.

During neuronal circuit formation, local control of axonal organelles ensures proper synaptic connectivity. Whether this process is genetically encoded is unclear and if so, its developmental regulatory mechanisms remain to be identified. We hypothesized that developmental transcription factors regulate critical parameters of organelle homeostasis that contribute to circuit wiring.

Numerosity as a visual property: Evidence from two highly evolutionary distant species.

Most animals, from humans to invertebrates, possess an ability to estimate numbers. This evolutionary advantage facilitates animals' choice of environments with more food sources, more conspecifics to increase mating success, and/or reduced predation risk among others. However, how the brain processes numerical information remains largely unknown.

Prediction of the Evolution to Brain Death in the Neurocritical Patient: SPN Model Showed Better Performance Than Simplified Acute Physiology Score II and Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II.

The detection of brain death (BD) plays a fundamental role in the management of hospital donation. Delayed diagnosis of BD is the main cause of donor loss. A tool for monitoring and prognosis in the neurocritical patient is essential to meet these objectives.

Organ Use Rate: A New Indicator of Donation and Transplantation Efficiency.

The conversion rate has emerged as a good indicator of the effectiveness of the transplantation process by showing the percentage of potential donors who become real donors, but it overestimates the number of organs that are actually used for transplantation in recipients. The incorporation of organ use rate, a new quality indicator that reflects the actual number of organs used for transplantation excluding those that are discarded in the surgical block, provides complementary information of great value when comparing transplantation in different regions. This new variable allows more accurate prediction of the waiting time for the transplantation of a certain organ in patients with nonreversible organic insufficiencies, while providing the national authorities a real response in relation to the percentage of the demand for organs that can be satisfied.

Organ Donation and Primary Central Nervous System Tumors.

Primary central nervous system tumors can be the cause of brain death. Not all of them contraindicate the donation of organs and tissues for transplant. A survey of cases was carried out in our country in which it was observed that the number of brain deaths caused by primary tumors was low, of the order of 2%, with an ẋ (media) of 3 by year, which would increase the potential for donation.

A neurodevelopmental origin of behavioral individuality in the visual system.

The genome versus experience dichotomy has dominated understanding of behavioral individuality. By contrast, the role of nonheritable noise during brain development in behavioral variation is understudied. Using , we demonstrate a link between stochastic variation in brain wiring and behavioral individuality.

[Twenty-five years of duodenal switch. How to switch to the duodenal switch].

Background: the duodenal switch (DS) is a procedure that combines a vertical gastrectomy (VG) plus a biliopancreatic diversion (BPD). Objectives: to report our experience in 950 consecutive DS patients with morbid obesity (MO) performed from 1994 to 2011, with 27 years of follow-up. Environment: mix of teaching and private institution in a regional hospital in Spain.

A simple computer vision pipeline reveals the effects of isolation on social interaction dynamics in Drosophila.

Isolation profoundly influences social behavior in all animals. In humans, isolation has serious effects on health. Drosophila melanogaster is a powerful model to study small-scale, temporally-transient social behavior.

Four decades of bariatric surgery in a community hospital of Spain.

Introduction: Bariatric surgical practice changes in the community setting may be under-reported. We present the developments in a Spanish bariatric surgical practice in the community setting of Alcoy from its origin in 1977 through the present.

Methods: Bariatric surgical techniques employed in a country community setting over the course of nearly four decades were reviewed retrospectively and qualitatively.

A crustacean lobula plate: Morphology, connections, and retinotopic organization.

The lobula plate is part of the lobula complex, the third optic neuropil, in the optic lobes of insects. It has been extensively studied in dipterous insects, where its role in processing flow-field motion information used for controlling optomotor responses was discovered early. Recently, a lobula plate was also found in malacostracan crustaceans.

Development of the National Kidney Transplantation Program in Uruguay.

The first kidney transplantation (KT) in Uruguay was performed in 1969. We report the rates of KT and survival of patients and grafts up to December 2014. The country has a surface of 176,215 km(2) and a population of 3,286,314 inhabitants (18.

Laparoscopic gastric sleeve, subtotal antrectomy and omentoplasty.

Sleeve-forming gastrectomy (SFG) is the operation to make a gastric sleeve (GS). The video presents the subtotal removal of the antrum and the use of sliding self-locking stitch and Aberdeen knots as suture reinforcement with omentoplasty of the GS staple line with the aim of decreasing bleeding and leaks.

Organization of columnar inputs in the third optic ganglion of a highly visual crab.

Motion information provides essential cues for a wide variety of animal behaviors such as mate, prey, or predator detection. In decapod crustaceans and pterygote insects, visual codification of object motion is associated with visual processing in the third optic neuropile, the lobula. In this neuropile, tangential neurons collect motion information from small field columnar neurons and relay it to the midbrain where behavioral responses would be finally shaped.

Behaviorally related neural plasticity in the arthropod optic lobes.

Background: Due to the complexity and variability of natural environments, the ability to adaptively modify behavior is of fundamental biological importance. Motion vision provides essential cues for guiding critical behaviors such as prey, predator, or mate detection. However, when confronted with the repeated sight of a moving object that turns out to be irrelevant, most animals will learn to ignore it.

Regionalization in the eye of the grapsid crab Neohelice granulata (=Chasmagnathus granulatus): variation of resolution and facet diameters.

Crabs have panoramic compound eyes, which can show marked regional specializations of visual acuity. These specializations are thought to be related to the particular features of the animal's ecological environment. Modern knowledge on the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of the crabs' visual system mainly derives from studies performed in the grapsid crab Neohelice granulata (=Chasmagnathus granulatus).

Human NK cells in acute myeloid leukaemia patients: analysis of NK cell-activating receptors and their ligands.

Natural killer (NK) cell activation is strictly regulated to ensure that healthy cells are preserved, but tumour-transformed or virus-infected cells are recognized and eliminated. To carry out this selective killing, NK cells have an ample repertoire of receptors on their surface. Signalling by inhibitory and activating receptors by interaction with their ligands will determine whether the NK cell becomes activated and kills the target cell.

Weight loss reporting: predicted body mass index after bariatric surgery.

BMI and %EBMIL are the most accurate methods for comparing results of patients after bariatric surgery. %EBMIL is based on BMI 25 as a constant end-point for all patients, but BMI 25 is easily achieved by patients with BMI < 50, whereas it is not so feasible for patients with BMI > 50. We were prompted to obtain by statistical methods a mathematical formula able to calculate the final BMI (FBMI) 3 years after the operation, dependent on the initial or preoperative BMI (IBMI) of a multicenter group of morbid obese patients operated with different bariatric techniques.