Medicina-buenos Aires 

About: Medicina-buenos Aires is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Population & Medicine. Over the lifetime, 7001 publications have been published receiving 36402 citations.

Obesity and metabolic syndrome in children and adolescents

Abstract: Obesity and the metabolic syndrome are closely related to the cases of cardiovascular disease; they are usually regarded as belonging to the adult population but are seen with increasing frequency in children and adolescents. There is evidence that atherosclerotic lesions occur most often in young people with obesity. The factors involved in this pandemic are manifold and range from genetic-biological to cultural changes. The family and the environment in which the child develops play a key role in the adoption of habits related to diet and physical activity. This problem does not respect borders and cultures but all countries are being affected, even more those of middle-income. State and Society as a whole can play a role oriented to modify this environment. The restriction on sales of unhealthy food and the fight against the sedentary lifestyle are urgently needed to be applied. The impact that these disorders will have in terms of cardiovascular disease, has not yet reached its true dimension.

Impact factors: use and abuse

Abstract: The impact factor is only one of three standardized measures created by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), which can be used to measure the way a journal receives citations to its articles over time. The build-up of citations tends to follow a curve like that of Figure 1. Citations to articles published in a given year rise sharply to a peak between two and six years after publication. From this peak citations decline exponentially. The citation curve of any journal can be described by the relative size of the curve (in terms of area under the line), the extent to which the peak of the curve is close to the origin and the rate of decline of the curve. These characteristics form the basis of the ISI indicators impact factor, immediacy index and cited half-life . The impact factor is a measure of the relative size of the citation curve in years 2 and 3. It is calculated by dividing the number of current citations a journal receives to articles published in the two previous years by the number of articles published in those same years. So, for example, the 1999 impact factor is the citations in 1999 to articles published in 1997 and 1998 divided by the number of articles published in 1997 and 1998. The number that results can be thought of as the average number of citations the average article receives per annum in the two years after the publication year. The immediacy index gives a measure of the skewness of the curve, that is, the extent to which the peak of the curve lies near the origin of the graph. It is calculated by dividing the citations a journal receives in the current year by the number of articles it publishes in that year, i.e., the 1999 immediacy index is the average number of citations in 1999 to articles published in 1999. The number that results can be thought of as the initial gradient of the citation curve, a measure of how quickly items in that journal get cited upon publication. The cited half-life is a measure of the rate of decline of the citation curve. It is the number of years that the number of current citations takes to decline to 50% of its initial value; the cited half-life is 6 years in the example given in (Figure 1). It is a measure of how long articles in a journal continue to be cited after publication.

Vacunas terapéuticas antitumorales basadas en células dendríticas

Abstract: In recent years immunotherapy has revolutionized the treatment of patients with advanced cancer. The increased knowledge in the tumor immune-biology has allowed developing rational treatments by manipulation of the immune system with significant clinical impact. This rapid development has significantly changed the prognosis of many tumors without treatment options up to date. Other strategies have explored the use of therapeutic vaccines based on dendritic cells (DC) by inducing antitumor immunity. DC are cells of hematopoietic origin, constitutively expressing molecules capable to present antigens, that are functionally the most potent inducers of the activation and proliferation of antigen specific T lymphocytes. The CD8+ T cells proliferate and acquire cytotoxic capacity after recognizing their specific antigen presented on the surface of DC, although only some types of DC can present antigens internalized from outside the cell to precursors of cytotoxic T lymphocytes (this function is called cross-presentation) requiring translocation mechanisms of complex antigens. The induction of an effective adaptive immune response is considered a good option given its specificity, and prolonged duration of response. The DC, thanks to its particular ability of antigen presentation and lymphocyte stimulation, are able to reverse the poor antitumor immune response experienced by patients with cancer. The DC can be obtained from various sources, using different protocols to generate differentiation and maturation, and are administered by various routes such as subcutaneous, intravenous or intranodal. The wide variety of protocols resulted in heterogeneous clinical responses.