University of Valencia

About: University of Valencia is a education organization based out in Valencia, Spain. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Neutrino. The organization has 27096 authors who have published 65669 publications receiving 1765689 citations. The organization is also known as: Universitat de València & UV.

Prevalence and Factors Associated With Circadian Blood Pressure Patterns in Hypertensive Patients

Abstract: Ambulatory blood pressure (BP) monitoring has become useful in the diagnosis and management of hypertensive individuals. In addition to 24-hour values, the circadian variation of BP adds prognostic significance in predicting cardiovascular outcome. However, the magnitude of circadian BP patterns in large studies has hardly been noticed. Our aims were to determine the prevalence of circadian BP patterns and to assess clinical conditions associated with the nondipping status in groups of both treated and untreated hypertensive subjects, studied separately. Clinical data and 24-hour ambulatory BP monitoring were obtained from 42,947 hypertensive patients included in the Spanish Society of Hypertension Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring Registry. They were 8384 previously untreated and 34,563 treated hypertensives. Twenty-four-hour ambulatory BP monitoring was performed with an oscillometric device (SpaceLabs 90207). A nondipping pattern was defined when nocturnal systolic BP dip was <10% of daytime systolic BP. The prevalence of nondipping was 41% in the untreated group and 53% in treated patients. In both groups, advanced age, obesity, diabetes mellitus, and overt cardiovascular or renal disease were associated with a blunted nocturnal BP decline (P<0.001). In treated patients, nondipping was associated with the use of a higher number of antihypertensive drugs but not with the time of the day at which antihypertensive drugs were administered. In conclusion, a blunted nocturnal BP dip (the nondipping pattern) is common in hypertensive patients. A clinical pattern of high cardiovascular risk is associated with nondipping, suggesting that the blunted nocturnal BP dip may be merely a marker of high cardiovascular risk.

Reactome graph database: Efficient access to complex pathway data.

Abstract: Reactome is a free, open-source, open-data, curated and peer-reviewed knowledgebase of biomolecular pathways One of its main priorities is to provide easy and efficient access to its high quality curated data At present, biological pathway databases typically store their contents in relational databases This limits access efficiency because there are performance issues associated with queries traversing highly interconnected data The same data in a graph database can be queried more efficiently Here we present the rationale behind the adoption of a graph database (Neo4j) as well as the new ContentService (REST API) that provides access to these data The Neo4j graph database and its query language, Cypher, provide efficient access to the complex Reactome data model, facilitating easy traversal and knowledge discovery The adoption of this technology greatly improved query efficiency, reducing the average query time by 93% The web service built on top of the graph database provides programmatic access to Reactome data by object oriented queries, but also supports more complex queries that take advantage of the new underlying graph-based data storage By adopting graph database technology we are providing a high performance pathway data resource to the community The Reactome graph database use case shows the power of NoSQL database engines for complex biological data types

Mutations in SLC20A2 link familial idiopathic basal ganglia calcification with phosphate homeostasis.

Abstract: Familial idiopathic basal ganglia calcification (IBGC) is a genetic condition with a wide spectrum of neuropsychiatric symptoms, including parkinsonism and dementia. Here, we identified mutations in SLC20A2, encoding the type III sodium-dependent phosphate transporter 2 (PiT2), in IBGC-affected families of varied ancestry, and we observed significantly impaired phosphate transport activity for all assayed PiT2 mutants in Xenopus laevis oocytes. Our results implicate altered phosphate homeostasis in the etiology of IBGC.

Sunrise: instrument, mission, data and first results

Abstract: The SUNRISE balloon-borne solar observatory consists of a 1 m aperture Gregory telescope, a UV filter imager, an imaging vector polarimeter, an image stabilization system, and further infrastructure The first science flight of SUNRISE yielded high-quality data that revealed the structure, dynamics, and evolution of solar convection, oscillations, and magnetic fields at a resolution of around 100 km in the quiet Sun After a brief description of instruments and data, the first qualitative results are presented In contrast to earlier observations, we clearly see granulation at 214 nm Images in Ca II H display narrow, short-lived dark intergranular lanes between the bright edges of granules The very small-scale, mixed-polarity internetwork fields are found to be highly dynamic A significant increase in detectable magnetic flux is found after phase-diversity-related reconstruction of polarization maps, indicating that the polarities are mixed right down to the spatial resolution limit and probably beyond

BDNF regulates spontaneous correlated activity at early developmental stages by increasing synaptogenesis and expression of the K+/Cl- co-transporter KCC2.

Abstract: Spontaneous neural activity is a basic property of the developing brain, which regulates key developmental processes, including migration, neural differentiation and formation and refinement of connections The mechanisms regulating spontaneous activity are not known By using transgenic embryos that overexpress BDNF under the control of the nestin promoter, we show here that BDNF controls the emergence and robustness of spontaneous activity in embryonic hippocampal slices Further, BDNF dramatically increases spontaneous co-active network activity, which is believed to synchronize gene expression and synaptogenesis in vast numbers of neurons In fact, BDNF raises the spontaneous activity of E18 hippocampal neurons to levels that are typical of postnatal slices We also show that BDNF overexpression increases the number of synapses at much earlier stages (E18) than those reported previously Most of these synapses were GABAergic, and GABAergic interneurons showed hypertrophy and a 3-fold increase in GAD expression Interestingly, whereas BDNF does not alter the expression of GABA and glutamate ionotropic receptors, it does raise the expression of the recently cloned K(+)/Cl(-) KCC2 co-transporter, which is responsible for the conversion of GABA responses from depolarizing to inhibitory, through the control of the Cl(-) potential Together, results indicate that both the presynaptic and postsynaptic machineries of GABAergic circuits may be essential targets of BDNF actions to control spontaneous activity The data indicate that BDNF is a potent regulator of spontaneous activity and co-active networks, which is a new level of regulation of neurotrophins Given that BDNF itself is regulated by neuronal activity, we suggest that BDNF acts as a homeostatic factor controlling the emergence, complexity and networking properties of spontaneous networks