Publications by authors named "Pinol R"

Article Synopsis
  • Endotherms, or warm-blooded animals, need to maintain their body temperature by warming up in cold environments and cooling down in hot ones.
  • Researchers have discovered a neural pathway that can reverse this typical process, allowing the body to cool down in cold temperatures and heat up in warm conditions.
  • This unusual regulatory mechanism is referred to as thermoregulatory inversion, highlighting new insights into how these animals adapt to different thermal challenges.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Across mammalian species, new mothers undergo considerable behavioral changes to nurture their offspring and meet the caloric demands of milk production. While many neural circuits underlying feeding and parenting behaviors are well characterized, it is unclear how these different circuits interact and adapt during lactation. Here, we characterized the transcriptomic changes in the arcuate nucleus (ARC) and the medial preoptic area (MPOA) of the mouse hypothalamus in response to lactation and hunger.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

From chemistry design to clinical application, several approaches have been developed to overcome platinum drawbacks in antitumoral therapies. An in-depth understanding of intracellular signaling may hold the key to the relationship of both conventional drugs and nanoparticles. Within these strategies, first, nanotechnology has become an essential tool in oncotherapy, improving biopharmaceutical properties and providing new immunomodulatory profiles to conventional drugs mediated by activation of endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: Aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) has been reported to protect against certain cancers. However, patient-related risk factors may moderate protective effects, including excess weight, smoking, risky alcohol use, and diabetes. We explore the cancer-risk relationship between aspirin intake and those four factors.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

To explore the antidiabetic effect of superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs)-PEG-550 and its related metabolic pathways in muscles and kidney. Diabetes was induced in 5-day neonatal rats; after confirming diabetes, treatment with SPIONs-PEG-550 started at different doses for 4 weeks. Routine analysis of glucose, insulin, adipocytokines, urea and creatinine was performed.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The generation of temperature gradients on nanoparticles heated externally by a magnetic field is crucially important in magnetic hyperthermia therapy. But the intrinsic low heating power of magnetic nanoparticles, at the conditions allowed for human use, is a limitation that restricts the general implementation of the technique. A promising alternative is local intracellular hyperthermia, whereby cell death (by apoptosis, necroptosis, or other mechanisms) is attained by small amounts of heat generated at thermosensitive intracellular sites.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Excess weight, smoking and risky drinking are preventable risk factors for colorectal cancer (CRC). However, several studies have reported a protective association between aspirin and the risk of CRC. This article looks deeper into the relationships between risk factors and aspirin use with the risk of developing CRC.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Obesity is a pandemic disease that is rapidly growing into a serious health problem and has economic impact on healthcare systems. This bleak image has elicited creative responses, and nanotechnology is a promising approach in obesity treatment. This study aimed to investigate the anti-obesity effect of superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) on a high-fat-diet rat model of obesity and compared their effect to a traditional anti-obesity drug (orlistat).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Nowadays, nanoparticles (NPs) have evolved as multifunctional systems combining different custom anchorages which opens a wide range of applications in biomedical research. Thus, their pharmacological involvements require more comprehensive analysis and novel nanodrugs should be characterized by both chemically and biological point of view. Within the wide variety of biocompatible nanosystems, iron oxide nanoparticles (IONPs) present mostly of the required features which make them suitable for multifunctional NPs with many biopharmaceutical applications.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study explored associations between risk factors and colorectal cancer in Lleida, Spain, using data from 1083 cancer episodes from 2012 to 2015.
  • It employed multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and k-means clustering to identify patient groups with similar risk factors, revealing that older age and obesity increased mortality risk.
  • Findings indicated MCA and k-means are effective for uncovering links between risk factors and patient characteristics, supporting their use in cancer research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The central nervous system has long been thought to regulate insulin secretion, an essential process in the maintenance of blood glucose levels. However, the anatomical and functional connections between the brain and insulin-producing pancreatic β cells remain undefined. Here, we describe a functional transneuronal circuit connecting the hypothalamus to β cells in mice.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objectives: This study aimed to determine the incidence and trends of cerebrovascular disease (CVD) in the healthcare district of Lleida.

Material And Methods: We performed a population-based prospective cohort study including the entire population of the healthcare district of Lleida (440 000 people). Information was gathered from the minimum basic data set from the emergency department and hospital discharges for the period from January 2010 to December 2014.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Bombesin receptor subtype-3 (BRS3) is an orphan receptor that regulates energy homeostasis. We compared driver mice with constitutive or inducible Cre recombinase activity. The constitutive BRS3-Cre mice show a reporter signal (Cre-dependent tdTomato) in the adult brain because of lineage tracing in the dentate gyrus, striatal patches, and indusium griseum, in addition to sites previously identified in the inducible BRS3-Cre mice (including hypothalamic and amygdala subregions, and parabrachial nucleus).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The preoptic area (POA) is a key brain region for regulation of body temperature (Tb), dictating thermogenic, cardiovascular, and behavioral responses that control Tb. Previously characterized POA neuronal populations all reduced Tb when activated. Using mice, we now identify POA neurons expressing bombesin-like receptor 3 (POA) as a population whose activation increased Tb; inversely, acute inhibition of these neurons reduced Tb.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Previous works have shown that risk factors for some kinds of cancer depend on people's lifestyle (e.g. rural or urban residence).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Wireless actuation at the nanoscale is vital in many contexts, and magnetic fields acting on nanoparticles (NPs) are among the most effective tools when actuation concerns linear forces. However, effective tools to apply torques at the nanoscale are still missing, because NPs where the magnetic moment is strongly coupled to the lattice agglomerate due to their high magnetic moment. Here, we show that gallium-doped ε-iron oxide NPs have small interparticle magnetic interactions and huge lattice-coupling for efficiently applying torques at the nanoscale.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Extracellular adenosine, a danger signal, can cause hypothermia. We generated mice lacking neuronal adenosine A1 receptors (A1AR, encoded by the Adora1 gene) to examine the contribution of these receptors to hypothermia. Intracerebroventricular injection of the selective A1AR agonist (Cl-ENBA, 5'-chloro-5'-deoxy-N6-endo-norbornyladenosine) produced hypothermia, which was reduced in mice with deletion of A1AR in neurons.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Measurement of thermogenesis in individual cells is a remarkable challenge due to the complexity of the biochemical environment (such as pH and ionic strength) and to the rapid and yet not well-understood heat transfer mechanisms throughout the cell. Here, we present a unique system for intracellular temperature mapping in a fluorescence microscope (uncertainty of 0.2 K) using rationally designed luminescent Ln-bearing polymeric micellar probes (Ln = Sm, Eu) incubated in breast cancer MDA-MB468 cells.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Magnetic nanoparticles used in magnetic hyperthermia therapy have been mainly limited to iron oxides like magnetite and maghemite due to biocompatibility issues.
  • ε-FeO, a lesser-known iron oxide, has unique properties such as giant coercivity, but its performance is found to be slightly inferior to that of γ-FeO, particularly in human applications.
  • However, ε-FeO nanoparticles exhibit a preference for heating in lower frequency ranges and could enable switchable magnetic heating, offering potential avenues for future research in this field.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: Bombesin-like receptor 3 (BRS3) is an orphan receptor and Brs3 knockout mice develop obesity with increased food intake and reduced resting metabolic rate and body temperature. The neuronal populations contributing to these effects were examined.

Methods: We studied energy metabolism in mice with Cre-mediated recombination causing 1) loss of BRS3 selectively in SIM1- or MC4R-expressing neurons or 2) selective re-expression of BRS3 from a null background in these neurons.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Aims: Evaluation of the anti-diabetic effect of superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) on Type 2 diabetic rats and compared their effect to metformin treatment.

Main Methods: Diabetic rats were treated with different doses of nanoparticles one time per week for 4 weeks. Fasting blood glucose level was determined for studied groups during the experimental period (30 days).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objectives: This study aimed to determine the incidence and trends of cerebrovascular disease (CVD) in the healthcare district of Lleida.

Material And Methods: We performed a population-based prospective cohort study including the entire population of the healthcare district of Lleida (440 000 people). Information was gathered from the minimum basic data set from the emergency department and hospital discharges for the period from January 2010 to December 2014.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF