Publications by authors named "Petrova D"

Introduction And Aims: Women residing in lower socioeconomic status (SES) areas have lower breast cancer survival but it is not clear how differences in the quality of care received contribute to these disparities. We compared adherence to clinical practice guidelines (CPG) for the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer and subsequent breast cancer survival between women residing in lower versus higher SES areas.

Methods: We conducted a multicentre population-based study of all new cases of invasive breast cancer in women diagnosed 2010-2014 in six Spanish provinces with population-based cancer registries (n=3206).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Green algae of the genus have attracted the attention of scientists due to their rich biochemical composition and potential for application in phytomedicine. The present study investigated the influence of light on the bioactive capacity of extracts from the Bulgarian strain of the green microalgae sp. BGV.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: People's beliefs about cancer can affect the actions they take to prevent and detect the disease. We investigated socio-economic inequalities in beliefs about cancer and its causes in the general population.

Methods: We analyzed data from the representative probabilistic Spanish Oncobarometer survey (N = 4769, 2020) and the non-probabilistic weight-corrected Spanish Cancer Awareness Survey (N = 1029, 2022).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Cutaneous malignant melanoma (CMM) represents a global public health problem. Epidemiological studies about CMM trends tend to focus on single indicators or lack information about tumor characteristics that can help gain a more thorough understanding of CMM epidemiology.

Objectives: To fill this gap, we studied CMM trends in incidence, mortality, and survival over three decades and considering sex, age, and tumor characteristics.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - The study examines the potential role of lipids as biomarkers for diagnosing anxiety and depression, which are major contributors to mental health issues and disability, despite the lack of existing biochemical tests for these conditions.
  • - Researchers analyzed blood plasma lipid levels in a group of 604 urban individuals and compared them to 32 patients with clinical depression, finding significant correlations between lipid levels and the severity of depressive symptoms.
  • - The findings suggest that lipid alterations seen in clinically depressed patients can also be observed in the general population, leading to the creation of a predictive model with high accuracy for identifying individuals with severe depressive symptoms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

More than 110,000 Europeans died as a result of the record-breaking temperatures of 2022 and 2023. A new generation of impact-based early warning systems, using epidemiological models to transform weather forecasts into health forecasts for targeted population subgroups, is an essential adaptation strategy to increase resilience against climate change. Here, we assessed the skill of an operational continental heat-cold-health forecasting system.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Simple graphical displays such as icon arrays and tree diagrams have been proposed for communicating health risks and supporting informed decisions. The UK's National Health Service (NHS) uses tree diagrams to communicate the chances of different cervical cancer screening results, but their effectiveness has not been compared to icon arrays. We conducted a well-powered longitudinal experiment involving 3,100 UK women eligible for cervical screening (25-64 years) to examine the effectiveness of icon arrays to communicate possible cervical screening results, relative to the UK NHS's tree diagram and to a numerical-only format.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - The study focuses on correcting mutations in the CASR gene, which is crucial for regulating calcium levels in the body, specifically targeting mutations linked to a severe condition called neonatal primary hyperparathyroidism.
  • - Researchers generated a CRISPR/Cas9 edited human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC) line that successfully restored one of the mutations while preserving another, showing normal characteristics such as cell structure and growth potential.
  • - The newly created hiPSC line will be used as a valuable resource for understanding calcium regulation disorders and exploring personalized medicine approaches to treat these conditions in the future.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study investigated the links between saturated and unsaturated fatty acids and cardiovascular disease (CVD), focusing on conditions like coronary heart disease (CHD) and stroke in a large group of participants.
  • Results showed that higher levels of saturated fatty acids were linked to increased CVD risks, with specific subtypes having varying effects on CHD and stroke.
  • Conversely, higher concentrations of certain polyunsaturated fatty acids (both n-3 and n-6 types) were associated with lower risks of CHD and stroke, suggesting dietary fats play a significant role in cardiovascular health.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background And Objective: Reducing patient decision delay - the time elapsed between symptom onset and the moment the patient decides to seek medical attention - can help improve acute coronary syndrome survival. Patient decision delay is typically investigated in retrospective studies of acute coronary syndrome survivors that are prone to several biases. To offer an alternative approach, the goal of this research was to investigate anticipated patient decision delay in the general population in response to different symptom clusters.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to compare traditional and novel body shape indexes (like ABSI and HI) regarding their associations with inflammation markers, particularly C-reactive protein (CRP), using data from the EPIC and UK Biobank cohorts.
  • Participants included nearly 444,000 individuals, with the analysis involving various body shape phenotypes derived from measurements such as height and weight.
  • Results indicated that traditional measures like BMI and waist circumference were positively linked to CRP levels, while some body phenotypes showed varying associations by sex, highlighting the complexity of body shape and inflammation relationships.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Explanations for the genesis and propagation of cholera pandemics since 1817 have remained elusive. Evolutionary pathogen change is presumed to have been a dominant factor behind the 7th "El Tor" pandemic, but little is known to support this hypothesis for preceding pandemics. The role of anomalous climate in facilitating strain replacements has never been assessed.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Researchers developed a two-step method to grow high-quality MoS nanoflakes using low-pressure chemical vapor deposition on sapphire substrates.
  • The process involved synthesizing a MoS layer and then re-evaporating it at a higher temperature to create mono- or few-layer nanoflakes, confirmed by atomic force microscopy and transmission electron microscopy.
  • The study highlighted the unique properties of MoS nanoflakes, including their response to polarized light, suggesting potential uses in advanced photodetectors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Epigenetic cytosine methylation covers most of genomic CpG dinucleotides in human cells. In addition to common deamination-mediated mutagenesis at CpG sites, an alternative deamination-independent pathway associated with DNA polymerase activity was previously described. This mutagenesis is characterized by the TCG→TTG mutational signature and is believed to arise from dAMP misincorporation opposite 5-methylcytosine (mC) or its oxidized derivative 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (hmC) by B-family replicative DNA polymerases with disrupted proofreading 3→5'-exonuclease activity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The phytohormones cytokinins are essential mediators of developmental and environmental signaling, primarily during cell division and endophytic interactions, among other processes. Considering the limited understanding of the regulatory mechanisms that affect the growth and bioactivity of the medicinal plant Nepeta nuda (Lamiaceae), our study aimed to explore how cytokinins influence the plant's metabolic status. Exogenous administration of active cytokinin forms on in vitro N.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Clickable nucleosides, most often 5-ethynyl-2'-deoxyuridine (EtU), are widely used in studies of DNA replication in living cells and in DNA functionalization for bionanotechology applications. Although clickable dNTPs are easily incorporated by DNA polymerases into the growing chain, afterwards they might become targets for DNA repair systems or interfere with faithful nucleotide insertion. Little is known about the possibility and mechanisms of these post-synthetic events.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Personalised prevention aims to delay or avoid disease occurrence, progression, and recurrence of disease through the adoption of targeted interventions that consider the individual biological, including genetic data, environmental and behavioural characteristics, as well as the socio-cultural context. This protocol summarises the main features of a rapid scoping review to show the research landscape on biomarkers or a combination of biomarkers that may help to better identify subgroups of individuals with different risks of developing specific diseases in which specific preventive strategies could have an impact on clinical outcomes. This review is part of the "Personalised Prevention Roadmap for the future HEalThcare" (PROPHET) project, which seeks to highlight the gaps in current personalised preventive approaches, in order to develop a Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda for the European Union.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background And Objectives: Inverse associations between caffeine intake and Parkinson disease (PD) have been frequently implicated in human studies. However, no studies have quantified biomarkers of caffeine intake years before PD onset and investigated whether and which caffeine metabolites are related to PD.

Methods: Associations between self-reported total coffee consumption and future PD risk were examined in the EPIC4PD study, a prospective population-based cohort including 6 European countries.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Normocalcemic primary hyperparathyroidism (nPHPT) is a condition characterized by persistently high levels of parathyroid hormone (PTH) and normal serum calcium levels in the absence of other causes for secondary hyperparathyroidism. The aim of the present study was to assess the clinical presentation and the biochemical characteristics in patients with nPHPT and to compare them with those in patients with hypercalcemic PHPT (hPHPT).

Materials And Methods: The study included 316 patients (277 women and 39 men, average age 58.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Diatoms are a group of unicellular eukaryotes that are essential primary producers in aquatic ecosystems. The dynamic nature of their habitat necessitates a quick and specific response to various stresses. However, the molecular mechanisms of their physiological adaptations are still underexplored.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Dicarbonyl compounds are highly reactive precursors of advanced glycation end products (AGE), produced endogenously, present in certain foods and formed during food processing. AGE contribute to the development of adverse metabolic outcomes, but health effects of dietary dicarbonyls are largely unexplored. We investigated associations between three dietary dicarbonyl compounds, methylglyoxal (MGO), glyoxal (GO) and 3-deoxyglucosone (3-DG), and body weight changes in European adults.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Contact mechanics, spanning nanometer to tectonic scales, faces long-standing challenges arising from multiscale random roughness, which hinders experimental validation of theories. Understanding multi-asperity rough contacts is vital for addressing catastrophic consequences of these contacts failing such as earthquakes and for diverse technological applications. To visualize such contacts, we introduce a super-resolution microscopy method utilizing spontaneous millisecond ON/OFF fluorescence blinking of contact-sensitive molecular rotor molecules immobilized on a glass coverslip.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Adsorption of organic phase-change materials (PCMs) by the porous matrix of microfibrillar cellulose (MFC) is a simple and versatile way to prepare shape-stable phase-change composites, which are promising as sustainable thermoregulating additives to construction materials. However, due to MFC inherent morphology, the resulting composites have relatively low poured density that complicates their introduction in sufficient amounts, for instance, into mortar mixes. Unlike MFC, fungal mycelium has, by an order, less fibrils thickness and, thus, possesses significantly higher poured density.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Griseb. is a Balkan endemic species listed in The Red Data Book of Bulgaria with the conservation status "endangered". Successful micropropagation was achieved on MS medium supplemented with 1.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1D) is an autoimmune disease caused by the destruction of insulin-producing β-cells in the pancreas by cytotoxic T-cells. To date, there are no drugs that can prevent the development of T1D. Insulin replacement therapy is the standard care for patients with T1D.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF