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The maturation of the auditory-language brain network begins before birth, driven by gene-environment interactions. We investigated the association between familial and environmental factors and the foetal development of this network, as well as the predictive value of this association for postnatal language outcomes. Using prenatal resting-state fMRI, we examined 25 foetuses to identify functional connectivity within the auditory-language network. Postnatal language was assessed longitudinally between 1 and 3 years using the Bayley-III scale. Familial risk for language disorders and prenatal speech exposure were quantified using a newly developed questionnaire. First, hierarchical clustering on foetal functional connectivity confirmed that an auditory-language network can be identified in the foetal brain. In this network, foetuses with higher speech exposure exhibited increased connectivity between left-hemisphere regions and decreased connectivity between homologous right-hemisphere regions. Higher familial risk was linked to reduced connectivity within the left language network. Regression analyses revealed that prenatal functional connectivity between insula, caudate nucleus, and rolandic operculum significantly predicted postnatal language. These findings underscore the critical role of genetic and environmental influences in functionally shaping the foetal auditory-language network, with lasting impacts on early language development. By integrating prenatal brain connectivity, familial risk, and speech exposure, this study provides new insights into prenatal language neurodevelopment, highlighting its importance for future language capabilities.

In Europe there is an increasing emphasis on the quality control of honey, especially on maximum limits of veterinary drug residues (particularly antibiotics) permitted in it. Streptomycin is an aminoglycoside antibiotic used in apiculture to protect bees against a variety of brood diseases. Romanian authorities have included it in the National Monitoring Program for honey manufacturers. In this study, an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) screening test was validated as a detection method of streptomycin residues in honey. The ELISA experimental results were compared to those obtained by using an HPLC method. The values generated by the two methods were very close to each other. This fact certifies that ELISA method can be successfully used for quantitative detection of the amount of streptomycin in honey samples. Following validation, three types of honey (polyfloral, lime and acacia) were analyzed for streptomycin content after exposure to 4, 22, 30, 40 or 70°C for 20 weeks. The results show that streptomycin mass fraction decreased with time and with the increase of temperature in all honey samples. The data collected were used to fit a second-order multiple linear regression model for predicting the degradation of streptomycin in honey samples as a function of temperature and storage period. Values of the calculated statistical indicators confirm a good predictive capability of mathematical and statistical models.

Este artículo recoge la investigación que pretende estudiar el impacto del arte en la construcción de la identidad de los individuos y, concretamente, de aquellos que se ubican en colectivos en riesgo de exclusión social. Para alcanzar este objetivo se sigue una investigación etnográfica mediante la entrevista semiestructurada en profundidad a artistas que pertenecen a diferentes colectivos en riesgo de exclusión social. Después de realizar esta investigación, se han podido comprobar los beneficios que realmente aporta el arte y la educación artística. Beneficios que, además, se ven acentuados en el caso de las personas que forman parte de algún colectivo en riesgo de exclusión social, ya que el arte les supone un medio de expresión, de autoconocimiento, autodeterminación y empoderamiento, un mecanismo de reivindicación y, en definitiva, un arma política y social. Además, se ha visto como la relación con el arte les otorga reconocimiento y amplía los vínculos socio-afectivos a través de la flexibilidad y la comprensión de diferentes puntos de vista y la asociación en diferentes grupos de pertenencia. También permite que personas vulnerables a la exclusión social acaben formando parte de la sociedad que le reconoce su talento y valora su obra por encima de sus características personales. Por lo tanto, se hace patente la importancia de que la educación artística forme parte del currículo de Educación Primaria como herramienta que favorece la inclusión educativa y social.

Progression through dissemination to tumor-surrounding tissues and metastasis development is a hallmark of cancer that requires continuous cell-to-cell interactions and tissue remodeling. In fact, metastization can be regarded as a tissue disease orchestrated by cancer cells, leading to neoplastic colonization of new organs. Collagen is a major component of the extracellular matrix (ECM), and increasing evidence suggests that it has an important role in cancer progression and metastasis. Desmoplasia and collagen biomarkers have been associated with relapse and death in cancer patients. Despite the increasing interest in ECM and in the desmoplastic process in tumor microenvironment as prognostic factors and therapeutic targets in cancer, further research is required for a better understanding of these aspects of cancer biology. In this review, published evidence correlating collagen with cancer prognosis is retrieved and analyzed, and the role of collagen and its fragments in cancer pathophysiology is discussed.

Dyslexia is a neurobiological disorder characterised by reading difficulties, yet its underlying causes remain unclear. Neuroimaging and behavioural studies found anomalous responses in tasks requiring phonological processing, motion perception, and implicit learning, and showed gray and white matter abnormalities in several brain regions of dyslexics compared to controls, indicating that dyslexia is a heterogeneous condition and promoting a multifactorial approach. In order to evaluate whether the combination of behavioural and multimodal MRI can have greater sensitivity in identifying neurocognitive traits of dyslexia compared to monocomponential approaches, in 19 dyslexic and 19 control subjects we acquired behavioural cognitive assessments, multiple (phonological, visual motion, rhythmic) mismatch-response functional MRI tasks, structural diffusion-weighted and T1-weighted images. To examine between-group differences in the multimodal neurocognitive measures, we applied univariate and multivariate approaches. Results showed that dyslexics performed worse than controls in behavioural phonological tasks. Neuroimaging analyses revealed that individuals with dyslexia present reduced cerebellar responses to mismatching rhythmic stimuli, as well as structural disorganization in several white matter tracts and cortical regions previously implicated in dyslexia. Most importantly, in line with the view of dyslexia as a multifactorial phenomenon, a machine learning model trained with features from all three MRI modalities (functional, diffusion, and T1-weighted) discriminated between dyslexics and controls with greater accuracy than models including just one modality. The individual classification scores in the multimodal machine learning model correlated with behavioural reading accuracy. These results confirm that dyslexia should be approached as a composite condition characterised by multiple distinctive cognitive and brain features.

Female breast cancer emerged as the leading cancer type in terms of incidence globally in 2020. Although mortality due to breast cancer has improved during the past three decades in many countries, this trend has reversed in women less than 40 years since the past decade. From the biological standpoint, there is consensus among experts regarding the clinically relevant definition of breast cancer in young women (BCYW), with an age cut-off of 40 years. The idea that breast cancer is an aging disease has apparently broken in the case of BCYW due to the young onset and an overall poor outcome of BCYW patients. In general, younger patients exhibit a worse prognosis than older pre- and postmenopausal patients due to the aggressive nature of cancer subtypes, a high percentage of cases with advanced stages at diagnosis, and a high risk of relapse and death in younger patients. Because of clinically and biologically unique features of BCYW, it is suspected to represent a distinct biologic entity. It is unclear why BCYW is more aggressive and has an inferior prognosis with factors that contribute to increased incidence. However, unique developmental features, adiposity and immune components of the mammary gland, hormonal interplay and crosstalk with growth factors, and a host of intrinsic and extrinsic risk factors and cellular regulatory interactions are considered to be the major contributing factors. In the present article, we discuss the status of BCYW oncobiology, therapeutic interventions and considerations, current limitations in fully understanding the basis and underlying cause(s) of BCYW, understudied areas of BCYW research, and postulated advances in the coming years for the field.

In Europe there is an increasing emphasis on the quality control of honey, especially on maximum limits of veterinary drug residues (particularly antibiotics) permitted in it. Streptomycin is an aminoglycoside antibiotic used in apiculture to protect bees against a variety of brood diseases. Romanian authorities have included it in the National Monitoring Program for honey manufacturers. In this study, an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) screening test was validated as a detection method of streptomycin residues in honey. The ELISA experimental results were compared to those obtained by using an HPLC method. The values generated by the two methods were very close to each other. This fact certifies that ELISA method can be successfully used for quantitative detection of the amount of streptomycin in honey samples. Following validation, three types of honey (polyfloral, lime and acacia) were analyzed for streptomycin content after exposure to 4, 22, 30, 40 or 70°C for 20 weeks. The results show that streptomycin mass fraction decreased with time and with the increase of temperature in all honey samples. The data collected were used to fit a second-order multiple linear regression model for predicting the degradation of streptomycin in honey samples as a function of temperature and storage period. Values of the calculated statistical indicators confirm a good predictive capability of mathematical and statistical models.

The receptor activator of the nuclear factor-κB ligand (RANKL)/RANK signaling pathway was identified in the late 1990s and is the key mediator of bone remodeling. Targeting RANKL with the antibody denosumab is part of the standard of care for bone loss diseases, including bone metastases (BM). Over the last decade, evidence has implicated RANKL/RANK pathway in hormone and HER2-driven breast carcinogenesis and in the acquisition of molecular and phenotypic traits associated with breast cancer (BCa) aggressiveness and poor prognosis. This marked a new era in the research of the therapeutic use of RANKL inhibition in BCa. RANKL/RANK pathway is also an important immune mediator, with anti-RANKL therapy recently linked to improved response to immunotherapy in melanoma, non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), and renal cell carcinoma (RCC). This review summarizes and discusses the pre-clinical and clinical evidence of the relevance of the RANKL/RANK pathway in cancer biology and therapeutics, focusing on bone metastatic disease, BCa onset and progression, and immune modulation.

Background Breast and prostate cancers are typical examples of hormone-dependent cancers, showing remarkable similarities at the hormone-related signaling pathways level, and exhibiting a high tropism to bone. While the identification of genes playing a specific role in each cancer type brings invaluable insights for gene therapy research by targeting disease-specific cell functions not accounted so far, identifying a common gene signature to breast and prostate cancers could unravel new targets to tackle shared hormone-dependent disease features, like bone relapse. This would potentially allow the development of new targeted therapies directed to genes regulating both cancer types, with a consequent positive impact in cancer management and health economics. Results We address the challenge of extracting gene signatures from transcriptomic data of prostate adenocarcinoma (PRAD) and breast invasive carcinoma (BRCA) samples, particularly estrogen positive (ER+), and androgen positive (AR+) triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), using sparse logistic regression. The introduction of gene network information based on the distances between BRCA and PRAD correlation matrices is investigated, through the proposed twin networks recovery ( twiner ) penalty, as a strategy to ensure similarly correlated gene features in two diseases to be less penalized during the feature selection procedure. Conclusions Our analysis led to the identification of genes that show a similar correlation pattern in BRCA and PRAD transcriptomic data, and are selected as key players in the classification of breast and prostate samples into ER+ BRCA/AR+ TNBC/PRAD tumor and normal tissues, and also associated with survival time distributions. The results obtained are supported by the literature and are expected to unveil the similarities between the diseases, disclose common disease biomarkers, and help in the definition of new strategies for more effective therapies.

Bone metastases ultimately result from a complex interaction between cancer cells and bone microenvironment. However, prior to the colonization of the bone, cancer cells must succeed through a series of steps that will allow them to detach from the primary tumor, enter into circulation, recognize and adhere to specific endothelium, and overcome dormancy. We now know that as important as the metastatic cascade, tumor cells prime the secondary organ microenvironment prior to their arrival, reflecting the existence of specific metastasis-initiating cells in the primary tumor and circulating osteotropic factors. The deep comprehension of the molecular mechanisms of bone metastases may allow the future development of specific anti-tumoral therapies, but so far the approved and effective therapies for bone metastatic disease are mostly based in bone-targeted agents, like bisphosphonates, denosumab and, for prostate cancer, radium-223. Bisphosphonates and denosumab have proven to be effective in blocking bone resorption and decreasing morbidity; furthermore, in the adjuvant setting, these agents can decrease bone relapse after breast cancer surgery in postmenopausal women. In this review, we will present and discuss some examples of applied knowledge from the bench to the bed side in the field of bone metastasis.