Over recent decades, global warming has led to sustained glacier mass reduction and the formation of glacier lakes dammed by potentially unstable moraines. When such dams break, devastating Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs) can occur in high mountain environments with catastrophic effects on populations and infrastructure. To understand the occurrence of GLOFs in space and time, build frequency-magnitude relationships for disaster risk reduction or identify regional links between GLOF frequency and climate warming, comprehensive databases are critically needed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: This multicenter study aimed to evaluate the Malignant Pleural Effusion Risk (MPER) diagnostic accuracy in distinguishing between benign and malign pleural effusion.
Methods: MPER is based on pleural fluid Homocysteine (HCY) and carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) that were measured using three different methods. MPER was calculated by assessing a previously published probabilistic model: Probability (%) = 100× (1 + e-z)-1, where Z = 0.
Debris-flow activity in the Alps is anticipated to undergo pronounced changes in response to a warming climate. Yet, a fundamental challenge in comprehensively assessing changes in process activity is the systematic lack of long-term observational debris-flow records. Here, we reconstruct the longest, continuous time series (1626-2020) of debris flows at Multetta, a supply-limited torrential system in the Eastern Swiss Alps.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe extended period of coexistence between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens in Europe coincided with the emergence of regionally distinctive lithic industries, signalling the onset of the Upper Palaeolithic. The Iberian Peninsula was on the periphery of pioneering Upper Palaeolithic developments, with archaeological remains primarily found in northern territories. We report the discovery of an initial Upper Palaeolithic lithic industry at Cueva Millán in the hinterlands of Iberia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Haematuria is a common complication in prostate cancer patients receiving anticoagulation for venous thromboembolism (VTE). Early identification of at-risk patients might help to reduce its incidence and severity.
Methods: We used data from the RIETE registry to develop a prognostic score for haematuria during the first year of anticoagulation for VTE.
PLoS One
November 2023
The settlement of cold and arid environments by Pleistocene hunter-gatherers has been a heated topic in Paleolithic Archaeology and the Quaternary Sciences for years. In the Iberian Peninsula, a key area for studying human adaptations to such environments is composed by the large interior and upland regions of the northern and southern plateaus (Mesetas) and bordering areas. As, traditionally, these regions have been relatively under-investigated compared to the ecologically more favored coastal areas of the peninsula, our knowledge of the human settlement of the whole Iberian hinterland remains scarce for the Last Glacial.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study sought to determine the survival duration of patients who underwent palliative sedation, comparing those who received prescriptions from referring physicians versus on-call physicians. It included all patients over 18 years old who died in the Palliative Care, Internal Medicine, and Oncology units at the Hospital Universitario of Jerez de la Frontera between 1 January 2019, and 31 December 2019. Various factors were analyzed, including age, gender, oncological or non-oncological disease, type of primary tumor and refractory symptoms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSex-specific factors are implicated in pulmonary embolism (PE) presentation in young patients, as indicated by increased risk in pregnancy. Whether sex differences exist in PE presentation, comorbidities, and symptomatology in older adults, the age group in which most PEs occur, remains unknown. We identified older adults (aged ≥65 years) with PE in a large international PE registry replete with information about relevant clinical characteristics (RIETE registry, 2001-2021).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious attempts to quantify tree abundance at global scale have largely neglected the role of local competition in modulating the influence of climate and soils on tree density. Here, we evaluated whether mean tree size in the world's natural forests alters the effect of global productivity on tree density. In doing so, we gathered a vast set of forest inventories including >3000 sampling plots from 23 well-conserved areas worldwide to encompass (as much as possible) the main forest biomes on Earth.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTree rings form the backbone of high-resolution palaeoclimatology and represent one of the most frequently used proxy to reconstruct climate variability of the Common Era. In the European Alps, reconstructions were often based on tree-ring width (TRW) and maximum latewood density (MXD) series, with a focus on European larch. By contrast, only a very limited number of dendroclimatic studies exists for long-lived, multi-centennial Pinus cembra, despite the widespread occurrence of the species at treeline sites across the European Alps.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF: The influence of smoking habits on mortality, VTE recurrence, and major bleeding in patients receiving anticoagulant therapy for venous thromboembolism (VTE) has not been consistently evaluated. : We used data from the RIETE (Registro Enfermedad TromboEmbólica) registry to compare mortality, VTE recurrence, and major bleeding risk in smoking versus non-smoking patients with acute VTE. : 50,881 patients (43,426 non-smoking and 7455 smoking patients) were included.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Black Death (1347-1352 CE) is the most renowned pandemic in human history, believed by many to have killed half of Europe's population. However, despite advances in ancient DNA research that conclusively identified the pandemic's causative agent (bacterium Yersinia pestis), our knowledge of the Black Death remains limited, based primarily on qualitative remarks in medieval written sources available for some areas of Western Europe. Here, we remedy this situation by applying a pioneering new approach, 'big data palaeoecology', which, starting from palynological data, evaluates the scale of the Black Death's mortality on a regional scale across Europe.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs the south-westernmost region of Europe, the Iberian Peninsula stands as a key area for understanding the process of modern human dispersal into Eurasia. However, the precise timing, ecological setting and cultural context of this process remains controversial concerning its spatiotemporal distribution within the different regions of the peninsula. While traditional models assumed that the whole Iberian hinterland was avoided by modern humans due to ecological factors until the retreat of the Last Glacial Maximum, recent research has demonstrated that hunter-gatherers entered the Iberian interior at least during Solutrean times.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMore tree species can increase the carbon storage capacity of forests (here referred to as the more species hypothesis) through increased tree productivity and tree abundance resulting from complementarity, but they can also be the consequence of increased tree abundance through increased available energy (more individuals hypothesis). To test these two contrasting hypotheses, we analyse the most plausible pathways in the richness-abundance relationship and its stability along global climatic gradients. We show that positive effect of species richness on tree abundance only prevails in eight of the twenty-three forest regions considered in this study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe controls that affect the structure and timing of terminations are still poorly understood. We studied a tufa deposit from the Iberian Peninsula that covers Termination II (T-II) and whose chronology was synchronized to speleothem records. We used the same chronology to synchronize ocean sediments from the North Atlantic to correlate major climate events in a common timescale.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The influence (if any) of the use of psychotropic drugs on outcome in patients receiving anticoagulant therapy for venous thromboembolism (VTE) has not been consistently evaluated.
Methods: We used data from the RIETE (Registro Informatizado Enfermedad TromboEmbólica) database to compare the risk for VTE recurrences, major bleeding, or death during the course of anticoagulant therapy, according to the use of psychotropics at baseline.
Results: Among 49,007 patients with VTE enrolled from February 2009 to September 2019, total 5,230 (11%) were using psychotropics at baseline: antidepressants 3,273 (6.
Although there is published research on the impact of venous thromboembolism (VTE) on quality of life (QoL), this issue has not been thoroughly investigated in patients with cancer-particularly using specific questionnaires. We aimed to examine the impact of acute symptomatic VTE on QoL of patients with malignancies. This was a multicenter, prospective, case-control study conducted in patients with cancer either with (cases) or without (controls) acute symptomatic VTE.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Pleural fluid homocysteine (HCY) can be useful for diagnosis of malignant pleural effusion (MPE). There are no published studies comparing the diagnostic accuracy of HCY with other tumour markers in pleural fluid for diagnosis of MPE. The aim was to compare the accuracy of HCY with that of carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), cancer antigen (CA) 15.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe effects of climate change on forest growth are not homogeneous across tree species distribution ranges because of inter-population variability and spatial heterogeneity. Although latitudinal and thermal gradients in growth patterns have been widely investigated, changes in these patterns along longitudinal gradients due to the different timing and severity of regional droughts are less studied. Here, we investigated these responses in Mediterranean Black pine (Pinus nigra Arn.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnvironmentally transformative human use of land accelerated with the emergence of agriculture, but the extent, trajectory, and implications of these early changes are not well understood. An empirical global assessment of land use from 10,000 years before the present (yr B.P.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Oral antidiabetic inhibitors of the sodium-glucose cotransporter (SGLT2i) reduce cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in DM2. The increase in arterial stiffness can participate in this morbidity and mortality. The aim of this study was to analyse the effect of the administration of dapagliflozin on arterial stiffness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the current context of anthropogenic global warming, one of the purposes of dendrogeomorphic analyses is to provide long and continuous chronologies of mass movements, so as to detect potential trends or shift related to increasing temperatures. However, on documented slopes, the comparison between historical archives and tree-ring records suggests that dendrogeomorphic reconstructions systematically underestimate the natural activity of the process under investigation. In the specific case of snow avalanches, underestimation generally amounts to 50% and the main causes generally given for this difference are related to the magnitude of past events.
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