Quick nic: novel smokeless nicotine products and pediatric trends.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: The development and marketing of smokeless nicotine products in recent years have become increasingly popular among adolescents. In addition to well known conventional inhaled nicotine products, noninhaled products, such as nicotine toothpicks, orbs, lozenges, strips, and more, have dangerously captivated a new youth audience. Although smokeless nicotine products may seem to be less threatening than conventional inhaled nicotine products, there are significant risks associated with the use of these products, including addiction and severe health issues. The purpose of this review is to provide up-to-date information about alternative nicotine products currently on the market that may appeal to youth, and the dangers of nicotine use for pediatric populations. RECENT FINDINGS: Smokeless nicotine products appeal to minors with their varying flavors and discrete packaging. These products may lead to nicotine toxicity as well as severe health problems, such as cancer, issues with reproduction, and heart attacks. Nicotine is extremely dangerous for young children; in fact, using nicotine products before the age of 18 years can lead to addiction and is linked to an increased likelihood of experimenting with stronger nicotine products or illicit drugs. The development of inconspicuous nicotine packaging has led to increasing concerns for accidental nicotine exposure and overdose in youth. SUMMARY: Greater knowledge regarding current nicotine products on the market, specifically smokeless nicotine products, will help clinicians be more aware of the dangers associated with these products. Clinicians will be better able to provide their patients and families with proper guidance to avoid nicotine addiction, further drug use, and detrimental health issues. Caregivers and medical professionals must recognize novel and inconspicuous nicotine products commonly used among youth, understand the signs of nicotine abuse and dependence, and take measures to address possible nicotine-related health risks.

The evolution of loan volume and non-performing loans under COVID-19 innovations: The Colombian case.

Financial institutions' scale of total and non-performing loans are important figures signaling economic activity and its risk level. COVID-19 created an external shock with overarching effects on the global economy, impacting the credit activity and debtors' ability to repay their obligations. We study how Colombia's loans and non-performing loans market ratios could react to an external shock (absent of any relief measures) by developing a vector autoregressive model with exogenous variables (VARX) with the Central Bank intervention rate as an exogenous variable. We use impulse response functions to simulate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the market of loans and default levels in Colombia. Our results show that the effects remain significant over long periods.

BiasNet: A Model to Predict Ligand Bias Toward GPCR Signaling.

Signaling bias is a feature of many G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) targeting drugs with potential clinical implications. Whether it is therapeutically advantageous for a drug to be G protein biased or ß-arrestin biased depends on the context of the signaling pathway. Here, we explored GPCR ligands that exhibit biased signaling to gain insights into scaffolds and pharmacophores that lead to bias. More specifically, we considered BiasDB, a database containing information about GPCR biased ligands, and focused our analysis on ligands which show either a G protein or ß-arrestin bias. Five different machine learning models were trained on these ligands using 15 different sets of features. Molecular fragments which were important for training the models were analyzed. Two of these fragments (number of secondary amines and number of aromatic amines) were more prevalent in ß-arrestin biased ligands. After training a random forest model on HierS scaffolds, we found five scaffolds, which demonstrated G protein or ß-arrestin bias. We also conducted t-SNE clustering, observing correspondence between unsupervised and supervised machine learning methods. To increase the applicability of our work, we developed a web implementation of our models, which can predict bias based on user-provided SMILES, drug names, or PubChem CID. Our web implementation is available at: drugdiscovery.utep.edu/biasnet.

Nutritional planning for Nellore heifers post-weaning to conception at 15 months of age: performance and nutritional, metabolic, and reproductive responses.

The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of strategic supplementation in the dry period and dry/rainy transition period on the performance and nutritional, metabolic, and reproductive responses of Nellore heifers grazing Urochloa decumbens. Forty-eight Nellore heifers with age and body weight (BW) of eight months and 235 ± 3.3 kg, respectively, were used. The experimental design was a completely randomized design, with four treatments, all with 12 replications. The evaluated strategies were as follows: low supplementation (LOHI; 0.2% of BW/heifer/day) in the first 90 days and high supplementation (0.6% of BW/heifer/day) in the 90 days thereafter; average supplementation (AVER) with 0.4% of BW/heifer/day for 180 days; high supplementation (HILO; 0.6% of BW/heifer/day) in the first 90 days and low supplementation (0.2% of BW/heifer/day) in the 90 days thereafter; only mineral mix (MM) ad libitum during the 180 days. Data were evaluated using orthogonal contrasts. Supplementation improved the performance of the animals during of dry period (P < 0.05) and dry/rainy transition period (P < 0.05). Supplemented animals had higher longissimus muscle area (LMA) and subcutaneous fat thickness (SFT) at the end of the experiment (P < 0.05). Multiple supplementation increased intake of dry matter (DM), organic matter (OM), and crude protein (CP) in kg/day throughout the experiment. The supplementation increased the digestibility of DM, OM, CP, apNDF, and TDN (P < 0.05). Serum urea nitrogen (SUN), glucose (GLUC), insulin (INS), and progesterone (PROG) were higher in supplemented heifers (P < 0.05). Supplementation reduced the concentrations of non-esterified fatty acids (NEFA) (P < 0.05) and increased conception rate (P < 0.05). In summary, the supplementation strategies adopted in this study improve the performance, metabolic status, and carcass traits of heifers under grazing, allowing an improvement in the conception rate of 15-month-old Nellore heifers.

Diagnóstico por imágenes / Diagnoses through images

Mujer de 64 años, quien ingreso a la fundación Clinica Valle del Lili con un cuadro de aproximadamente un año de evolución consistente en fiebre intermitente de bajo grado, pérdida del estado general, debilidad y episodios nocturnos ocasionales de tos no producida. Como antedecedentes patológicos, la pasiente presentaba HTA crónica desde hace 30 años, manejada con diltiazem (30mg/día), dislipidemia mixta manejada con lovastatina (20mg/día) e infeccion recurrente de vias urinarias de 2 años de evolución, manejada con nitrofutatoina (100mg/día) tomada de manera continua, siendo suspendida de forma ocasional durante algunos meses. Detalles del artículo