Ugeskr Laeger
September 2024
: Breast cancer is diagnosed in 2.3 million women each year and kills 685,000 (~30% of patients) worldwide. The prognosis for many breast cancer subtypes has improved due to treatments targeting the estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR), and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The implementation of Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) protocols has resulted in improved postoperative outcomes in colorectal cancer surgery. The evidence regarding feasibility and impact on outcomes in surgery for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is limited.
Methods: We performed a retrospective observational cohort study, comparing patient trajectories before and after implementing an IBD-specific ERAS protocol at Zealand University Hospital.
We apply the so-called variational Gaussian wavepacket approximation (VGA) for conducting both real- and imaginary-time dynamics to calculate thermal correlation functions. By considering strongly anharmonic systems, such as a quartic potential and a double-well potential at high and low temperatures, it is shown that this method is partially able to account for tunneling. This is contrary to other popular many-body methods, such as ring polymer molecular dynamics and the classical Wigner method, which fail in this respect.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEcosystem restoration can increase the health and resilience of nature and humanity. As a result, the international community is championing habitat restoration as a primary solution to address the dual climate and biodiversity crises. Yet most ecosystem restoration efforts to date have underperformed, failed, or been burdened by high costs that prevent upscaling.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnderstanding how tropical forests respond to abiotic environmental changes is critical for preserving biodiversity, mitigating climate change, and maintaining ecosystem services in the coming century. To evaluate the relative roles of the abiotic environment and human disturbance on Central African tree community composition, we employ tree inventory data, remotely sensed climatic data, and soil nutrient data collected from 30 1-ha plots distributed across a large-scale observational experiment in forests that had been differently impacted by logging and hunting in northern Republic of Congo. We show that the composition of Afrotropical plant communities at this scale responds to human disturbance more than to climate, with particular sensitivities to hunting and distance to the nearest village (a proxy for other human activities, including tree-cutting and gathering).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) shows promise for converting wet biomass waste into biofuel, but the resulting high-strength process water (PW) requires treatment. This study explored enhancing energy recovery by anaerobic digestion using semi-batch reactors. Co-digesting manure with HTL-PW from wheat straw-manure co-HTL yielded methane (43-49% of the chemical oxygen demand, COD) at concentrations up to 17.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTrees structure the Earth's most biodiverse ecosystem, tropical forests. The vast number of tree species presents a formidable challenge to understanding these forests, including their response to environmental change, as very little is known about most tropical tree species. A focus on the common species may circumvent this challenge.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground & Aims: Autoimmune pancreatitis (AIP) is an immune-mediated disease of the pancreas with distinct pathophysiology and manifestations. Our aims were to characterize type 1 AIP in a large pan-European cohort and study the effectiveness of current treatment regimens.
Methods: We retrospectively analyzed adults diagnosed since 2005 with type 1 or not-otherwise-specified AIP in 42 European university hospitals.
Lignocellulose is a renewable but complex material exhibiting high recalcitrance to enzymatic hydrolysis, which is attributed, in part, to the presence of covalent linkages between lignin and polysaccharides in the plant cell wall. Glucuronoyl esterases from carbohydrate esterase family 15 (CE15) have been proposed as an aid in reducing this recalcitrance by cleaving ester bonds found between lignin and glucuronoxylan. In the Bacteroidota phylum, some species organize genes related to carbohydrate metabolism in polysaccharide utilization loci (PULs) which encode all necessary proteins to bind, deconstruct, and respond to a target glycan.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe biogas produced through anaerobic digestion (AD) of renewable feedstocks is one of the promising alternatives to replace fossil-derived energy. Even though lignocellulosic biomass is the most abundant biomass on earth, only a small fraction is being used towards resources recovery, leaving a great potential unexploited. In this study, the combination of state-of-art genomic techniques and engineered systems were used to further advance the knowledge on biogas production from lignocellulosic-rich residues and the microbiome involved in the anaerobic digestion hereof.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFForests are a substantial terrestrial carbon sink, but anthropogenic changes in land use and climate have considerably reduced the scale of this system. Remote-sensing estimates to quantify carbon losses from global forests are characterized by considerable uncertainty and we lack a comprehensive ground-sourced evaluation to benchmark these estimates. Here we combine several ground-sourced and satellite-derived approaches to evaluate the scale of the global forest carbon potential outside agricultural and urban lands.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Aim: Hospitalization often leads to changes in patients' medicine which challenges a safe medication use after discharge. Medicine information helplines (MIHs) can be valuable for patients in overcoming these challenges. This study evaluates patient satisfaction with a newly established Danish hospital-based MIH for discharged patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnderstanding what controls global leaf type variation in trees is crucial for comprehending their role in terrestrial ecosystems, including carbon, water and nutrient dynamics. Yet our understanding of the factors influencing forest leaf types remains incomplete, leaving us uncertain about the global proportions of needle-leaved, broadleaved, evergreen and deciduous trees. To address these gaps, we conducted a global, ground-sourced assessment of forest leaf-type variation by integrating forest inventory data with comprehensive leaf form (broadleaf vs needle-leaf) and habit (evergreen vs deciduous) records.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnthropogenic pressures are causing the widespread loss of wildlife species and populations, with adverse consequences for ecosystem functioning. This phenomenon has been widely but inconsistently referred to as . A cohesive, quantitative framework for defining and evaluating defaunation is necessary for advancing biodiversity conservation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnited European Gastroenterol J
November 2023
Background: Chronic Pancreatitis (CP) causes morphological changes in the pancreatic tissue, leading to complications and pain, which may require endoscopic interventions.
Objective: Our aim was to determine the frequency of endoscopic procedures (EP) in CP patients and to analyse pain and quality of life (QoL) in these patients after their EP.
Methods: This study included 1327 CP patients from the Scandinavian Baltic Pancreatic Club (SBPC) database including four countries and eight centres.
Adult stem cells play key roles in tissue homeostasis and regeneration. Recent evidence suggests that dietary interventions can significantly impact adult stem cell function. Some of these effects depend on ketone bodies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCan biofilms enhance the rates of phosphorus removal in wastewater treatment? In order to narrow the scientific gap on the effect of biofilm thickness on the activity and microbial community of phosphorus-accumulating bacteria, this study investigated biofilms of 30 to 1000 µm thickness in a moving bed biofilm reactor. Measurements on 5 different biofilm carriers showed that biomass-specific phosphorus release and uptake rates increased as a function of biofilm thickness for biofilms thinner than about 110 µm but were lower for thicker biofilms of about 550-1000 µm. The reduced phosphorus uptake and release rates in the thickest biofilms can result from substrate mass transfer limitations whereas the low activity in the thinnest biofilms can be related to a too high turnover rate in the biofilm due to heterotrophic growth.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFManure management is a significant source of global methane emissions, and there is an increased interest in understanding and predicting emissions. The hydrolysis rate of manure organic matter is critical for understanding and predicting methane emissions. We estimated hydrolysis rate constants of crude protein, fibers, and lipids and used the Arrhenius equation to describe its dependency on temperature.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Drug shortages (DSs) have become a well-known challenge in health care, and serious patient safety consequences, such as medication errors and adverse patient outcomes are reported. To meet these challenges, a national task force was established to manage and minimize the impact of critical DSs' on hospitals in Denmark.
Objective: To evaluate the establishment of the National Task Force for Critical Drug Shortages (NTF) in terms of quality, patient safety, and resources from different actor perspectives related to critical DS management in Danish hospitals.
Expert Opin Drug Metab Toxicol
September 2023
Introduction: Drug absorption is often altered and typically diminished in patients with short bowel syndrome (SBS). It is important to understand the patient's gastrointestinal anatomy, the absorptive capacity of the remaining bowel, and the physicochemical and pharmacokinetic properties of the drug to optimize oral pharmacotherapy.
Areas Covered: The primary focus was to provide an updated understanding of the absorption of various drugs in patients with short bowel syndrome.
Porous phase-separated ethylcellulose/hydroxypropylcellulose (EC/HPC) films are used to control drug transport out of pharmaceutical pellets. Water-soluble HPC leaches out and forms a porous structure that controls the drug transport. Industrially, the pellets are coated using a fluidized bed spraying device, and a layered film exhibiting varying porosity and structure after leaching is obtained.
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