Publications by authors named "Miguel Munoz"

Background: Human adamantinomatous craniopharyngioma (ACP) is a brain tumor that originates at the base of the skull and shows aggressive local behavior, invading sensitive structures such as the optic pathways and hypothalamus. The conventional treatment of the tumor has been surgery and radiotherapy with the consequent development of serious sequelae. It is well known that Substance P (SP) peptide and Neurokinin-1 receptor (NK-1R) are involved in inflammation and cancer progression and its blockage with NK-1R antagonists has been shown to effectively counteract tumor development in preclinical trials.

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Aims: European Systematic Coronary Risk Assessment 2 for Older Persons (SCORE2-OP) model has shown modest performance when externally validated in selected cohorts. We aim to investigate its predictive performance and clinical utility for 10-years cardiovascular (CV) risk in an unbiased and representative cohort of older people of a low CV risk country. Furthermore, we explore whether other clinical or echocardiographic features could improve its performance.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Recent analyses suggest that the brain operates at a critical point of instability, using data from many neurons but often overlook detailed timing in brain activity measurements.
  • - A new framework is introduced to better analyze brain activity, focusing on different frequency bands and using spatiotemporal patterns for a more detailed understanding.
  • - When applied to a study comparing healthy individuals and those with Parkinson's disease, this framework reveals important differences in brain activity patterns and criticality, showcasing its potential benefits in neuroresearch.
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The high tunability of deep eutectic solvents (DESs) stems from the ease of changing their precursors and relative compositions. However, measuring the physicochemical properties across large composition and temperature ranges, necessary to properly design target-specific DESs, is tedious and error-prone and represents a bottleneck in the advancement and scalability of DES-based applications. As such, active learning (AL) methodologies based on Gaussian processes (GPs) were developed in this work to minimize the experimental effort necessary to characterize DESs.

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Article Synopsis
  • * The development of electrified processes utilizing captured CO aims to eliminate traditional methods of gas compression and storage, addressing both environmental and economic concerns.
  • * This review examines the tuning of ILs and DESs for reactive capture and conversion, focusing on their mechanisms for CO chemisorption and electroreduction, as well as their bulk and interfacial properties related to the process.
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Embodiment is a complex concept related to the subjective perception of an object as it belongs to its own body. In general, this construct has been evaluated by means of questionnaires, but validation studies in other cultures and limitations related with barriers of language received little attention. The purpose of the present investigation was twofold: to validate the factorial structure of embodiment questionnaire (EQ) and to construct a pictographic scale (PAE) to measure embodiment without relapse verbal representations.

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Background: Standard lymphadenectomy for pancreatoduodenectomy is defined for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma and adopted for patients with non-pancreatic periampullary cancer (NPPC), ampullary adenocarcinoma (AAC), distal cholangiocarcinoma (dCCA), or duodenal adenocarcinoma (DAC). This study aimed to compare the patterns of lymph node metastases among the different NPPCs in a large series and in a systematic review to guide the discussion on surgical lymphadenectomy and pathology assessment.

Methods: This retrospective cohort study included patients after pancreatoduodenectomy for NPPC with at least one lymph node metastasis (2010-2021) from 24 centers in nine countries.

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Bananas (Musa spp.) are a target crop for provitamin A carotenoids (pVACs) biofortification programs aiming at reducing the negative impact on health caused by vitamin A deficiency in vulnerable populations. However, studies to understand the effect of ripening methods and stages and the genotype on carotenoid content and bioaccessibility in the banana germplasm are scarce.

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Developing unconventional electrolytes such as ionic liquids (ILs) and deep eutectic solvents (DESs) has led to remarkable advances in electrochemical energy storage and conversion devices. However, the understanding of the electrode-electrolyte interfaces of these electrolytes, specifically the liquid structure and the charge/electron transfer mechanism and rates, is lacking due to the complexity of molecular interactions, the difficulty in studying the buried interfaces with nanometer-scale resolution, and the distribution of the time scales for the various interfacial events. This Feature Article outlines the standing questions in the field, summarizes some of the exciting approaches and results, and discusses our contributions to probing the electrified interfaces by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS), and neutron reflectivity (NR).

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During the last decades, macroecology has identified broad-scale patterns of abundances and diversity of microbial communities and put forward some potential explanations for them. However, these advances are not paralleled by a full understanding of the dynamical processes behind them. In particular, abundance fluctuations of different species are found to be correlated, both across time and across communities in metagenomic samples.

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The substance P (SP)/neurokinin-1 receptor (NK-1R) system is involved in cancer progression. NK-1R, activated by SP, promotes tumor cell proliferation and migration, angiogenesis, the Warburg effect, and the prevention of apoptosis. Tumor cells overexpress NK-1R, which influences their viability.

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The Wilson-Cowan model constitutes a paradigmatic approach to understanding the collective dynamics of networks of excitatory and inhibitory units. It has been profusely used in the literature to analyze the possible phases of neural networks at a mean-field level, e.g.

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In recent years, numerous approaches have been developed to comprehend the molecular alterations underlying thyroid cancer (TC) oncogenesis and explore novel therapeutic strategies for TC. It is now well established that the neurokinin-1 receptor (NK-1R) is overexpressed in cancer cells and that NK-1R is essential for the viability of cancer cells. The binding of substance P (SP) to NK-1R in neoplastic cells plays a pivotal role in cancer progression by promoting neoplastic cell growth, protecting tumor cells from apoptosis, triggering invasion and metastasis through the enhanced migration of cancer cells, and stimulating endothelial cell proliferation for tumor angiogenesis.

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Multiple ecological forces act together to shape the composition of microbial communities. Phyloecology approaches-which combine phylogenetic relationships between species with community ecology-have the potential to disentangle such forces but are often hard to connect with quantitative predictions from theoretical models. On the other hand, macroecology, which focuses on statistical patterns of abundance and diversity, provides natural connections with theoretical models but often neglects interspecific correlations and interactions.

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Purpose: The present study aimed to identify, through a critical review of the literature, the success factors associated with the splinting of fixed prostheses on adjacent implants of the posterior sectors in partially edentulous patients compared with those not splinted.

Study Selection: A MEDLINE strategy was implemented based on a research question to systematically search and extract information from databases (PubMed and Scopus) using MeSH terms/keywords identified for each domain. Systematic reviews, clinical and in vitro studies were selected and classified according to eligibility criteria based on the research question and level of evidence using the PRISMA flowchart.

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High-level information processing in the mammalian cortex requires both segregated processing in specialized circuits and integration across multiple circuits. One possible way to implement these seemingly opposing demands is by flexibly switching between states with different levels of synchrony. However, the mechanisms behind the control of complex synchronization patterns in neuronal networks remain elusive.

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Depinning of elastic systems advancing on disordered media can usually be described by the quenched Edwards-Wilkinson equation (qEW). However, additional ingredients such as anharmonicity and forces that cannot be derived from a potential energy may generate a different scaling behavior at depinning. The most experimentally relevant is the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) term, proportional to the square of the slope at each site, which drives the critical behavior into the so-called quenched KPZ (qKPZ) universality class.

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Osteosarcoma is a bone tumor predominantly affecting children and adolescents with high malignant potential. It is a cause of serious public health challenges due to its high morbidity rates and metastatic potential. Metastasis in osteosarcoma may manifest either during treatment of the primary tumor, shortly after treatment, or a long time after the end of the treatment.

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Clinical Pathways are care plans that are applied to clinical processes with a predictable course, with the intention of protocolizing these processes and reducing the variability in their management. Our objective was to develop a clinical pathway for I metabolic therapy in its application to differentiated thyroid cancer. A work team was organized consisting of doctors (Endocrinology and Nuclear Medicine), nursing staff (Hospitalization Unit and Nuclear Medicine), Radiophysics and the Clinical Management and Continuity of Care Support Service.

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The brain is in a state of perpetual reverberant neural activity, even in the absence of specific tasks or stimuli. Shedding light on the origin and functional significance of such a dynamical state is essential to understanding how the brain transmits, processes, and stores information. An inspiring, albeit controversial, conjecture proposes that some statistical characteristics of empirically observed neuronal activity can be understood by assuming that brain networks operate in a dynamical regime with features, including the emergence of scale invariance, resembling those seen typically near phase transitions.

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Here we study standard and higher-order birth-death processes on fully connected networks, within the perspective of large-deviation theory [also referred to as the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (WKB) method in some contexts]. We obtain a general expression for the leading and next-to-leading terms of the stationary probability distribution of the fraction of "active" sites as a function of parameters and network size N. We reproduce several results from the literature and, in particular, we derive all the moments of the stationary distribution for the q-susceptible-infected-susceptible (q-SIS) model, i.

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The rupture of atherosclerotic plaques in coronary and carotid arteries is the primary cause of fatal cardiovascular events. However, the rupture mechanics of the heterogeneous, highly collagenous plaque tissue, and how this is related to the tissue's fibrous structure, are not known yet. Existing pipelines to study plaque mechanics are limited to obtaining only gross mechanical characteristics of the plaque tissue, based on the assumption of structural homogeneity of the tissue.

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Background: Primary graft dysfunction is a common postoperative complication, lacking consensus regarding diagnostic criteria. Olthoff criteria are the most used, based on blood parameters in the first 7 postoperative days. This lack of consensus and late diagnosis evidence the need of early parameters.

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Background: Sotrovimab is a neutralizing monoclonal antibody (mAb) that seems to remain active against recent severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variants. The evidence on its use in kidney transplant (KT) recipients, however, is limited.

Methods: We performed a multicenter, retrospective cohort study of 82 KT patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection {coronavirus disease 2019 [COVID-19]} treated with sotrovimab.

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