Isolation of prebiotic carbohydrates by supercritical fluid extraction. Scaling-up and economical feasibility.

Production of prebiotic carbohydrates at competitive prices is a challenge nowadays since the well-established production processes involve many purification steps which are labour intensive and require important amounts of reagents and products thus increasing prebiotic's price. Several processes have been studied in our laboratory involving the use of Supercritical Fluid Technology to fractionate and purify carbohydrate solid mixtures. Research carried out at laboratory scale using theoretical mixtures (lactose/lactulose and galactose/tagatose), commercially available carbohydrate mixtures and carbohydrate mixtures produced by enzymatic transglycosylation and isomerized with complexating reagents demonstrated that purification of prebiotic carbohydrates was technically possible by supercritical fluid extraction. In the present work, the process optimized at laboratory scale to fractionate carbohydrate mixtures produced by enzymatic transglycosylation has been scaled-up to an industrial level and its economic feasibility has been simulated employing AspenONE(®) V7.3 software to obtain consistent data supporting the interest of a potential investment for prebiotics production at large scale using supercritical fluids.

Levetiracetam as an alternative therapy for Tourette syndrome.

Tourette syndrome is a common childhood-onset neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by chronic tics and frequent comorbid conditions such as attention deficit disorder. Most currently used tic-suppressing drugs are frequently associated with serious adverse events. Thus, alternative therapeutic agents with more favorable side-effect profiles are being evaluated. New hypotheses and recent studies involving GABAergic system in the pathophysiology of Tourette syndrome suppose a reason for the evaluation of GABAergic drugs. Levetiracetam is a drug with an atypical GABAergic mechanism of action that might be expected to improve tics. Although trials performed to evaluate the efficacy of levetiracetam in the treatment of Tourette syndrome have provided conflicting results, it may be useful in some patients. The established safe profile of levetiracetam makes this drug an alternative for treatment if intolerance to currently used drugs appears, but additional evaluation with larger and longer duration controlled studies are necessary to assess the real efficacy in patients with Tourette syndrome.

[Evolutionary aspects of affective disorders, critical review and proposal of a new model]. / Aspectos evolucionistas de los trastornos afectivos, revisión crítica y propuesta de un nuevo modelo.

Evolutionary psychopathology incorporates psychiatry into biology via theory of evolution, generating new etiological hypothesis for mental disorders. For evolutionary psychopathology emotions are a response system or a genetically programmed, specialized state of functioning, formed by natural selection, that allows us to adapt to the environment, increasing the ability to cope with threats and opportunities. Emotions exert their function by coordinated physiological, psychological and behavioral changes. Many functions have been suggested for low mood or depression, including communicating a need for help, signaling yielding in a hierarchy conflict, fostering disengagement for commitments to unreachable goals, regulating patterns of investment, parallelism with despair phase of separation from mother situation in monkeys, hibernation, etc. Despite other evolutionary models, our model not only tries to explain depression but mania, hypomania and other affective disorders as well. For us, most affective disorders are pathological states (and not adaptive ones), due to dysfunction of an innate precipitating mechanism (IPM). IPM function is to regulate energy and activity levels according to intensity and duration of light (namely IPM-A). This IPM-A is responsible for vegetative, endocrine and behavioral responses that are present in humans and more ancient phylogenetic animals. More recently in the phylogeny, other mechanisms (IPM-AA) have coupled to this IPM-A. In the human being, the precipitating factors of IPM-AA are predominately social. IPM-AA add new responses (such as mood) to the older responses of IPM-A.

Chlorotrimethylsilane as a reagent for gas chromatographic analysis of fats and oils.

Chlorotrimethylsilane can be used as a reagent to transform triglycerides into volatile fatty esters. The volatile esters can then be analysed by GC. The results are fully comparable to those obtained by alternative methods used worldwide. The new one-step method can transesterify acylglycerides and esterify free fatty acids at the same time. Chlorotrimethylsilane is cheaper than BF3-MeOH and is likely to permit the use of different alcohols.

HIV infection in psychiatric patients: an unlinked anonymous study.

BACKGROUND: Recent surveys suggest that psychiatric patients are at increased risk of being infected with HIV, although very little information is available concerning the seroprevalence of HIV infection among this population outside the US. The aim of this study is to determine the seroprevalence of HIV-I among patients admitted to a psychiatric in-patient unit and to gather linked anonymous risk-factor information. METHOD: An unlinked serosurvey was made, using HIV-1 antibody testing of remnant blood specimens collected for routine medical purposes, of patients consecutively admitted to an acute psychiatric unit in Madrid. RESULTS: Blood was obtained from 390 of the 477 eligible patients (81.8%). The prevalence of HIV was 5.1% (20/390). Patients aged between 18 and 39 accounted for 63.4% of the admissions and 75% of the positive results. Of the 29 patients who presented with injecting drug use, 14 were HIV-infected (48.3%; 95% CI 29.4 67.5). Of the 51 patients for whom any risk behaviour was noted on the admission chart, 18 were HIV-infected (35.3%; 95% CI 22.4 49.9). CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrates that there is a substantial prevalence of HIV infection in psychiatric patients admitted to an acute in-patient unit. History of injecting drug use was strongly associated with seropositivity. Clinicians recognised risk factors for HIV infection in the majority of the HIV-infected cases.

Research in psychopathology in patients with HIV/AIDS and psychiatric services in Spain.

In this article, we review the research carried out in Spain concerning psychiatric aspects of HIV/AIDS in general, and of suicide and suicidal ideation in particular. The paper presents available information concerning this psychopathology in patients with HIV infection, along with a review of the epidemic's dimensions and friends in Spain. Available studies are based on retrospective evaluation of patients referred for psychiatric evaluations. No longitudinal studies have been carried out, nor studies on the prevalence of psychiatric disorders in unreferred samples of HIV-infected patients. This neglected area of research is also a neglected area of care within Spain's mental health system.