Recent Submissions

Surveillance of invasive pneumococcal disease in Spain exploring the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic (2019-2023) 

Objectives: Dynamic trends of invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) including the evolution of prevalent serotypes are very useful to evaluate the impact of current and future pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCVs) and the rise of non-vaccine serotypes. In this study, we include epidemiological patte...

Clonal chromosomal mosaicism and loss of chromosome Y in elderly men increase vulnerability for SARS-CoV-2 

The pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19) had an estimated overall case fatality ratio of 1.38% (pre-vaccination), being 53% higher in males and increasing exponentially with age. Among 9578 individuals diagnosed with COVID-19 in the SCOURGE study...

Respiratory Syncytial Virus Vaccination Recommendations for Adults Aged 60 Years and Older: The NeumoExperts Prevention Group Position Paper 

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a major cause of respiratory tract infections in adults, particularly older adults and those with underlying medical conditions. Vaccination has emerged as a potential key strategy to prevent RSV-related morbidity and mortality. This Neumoexperts Prevention (NEP...

Clinical outcomes of hospitalised patients with COVID-19 and chronic inflammatory and autoimmune rheumatic diseases: a multicentric matched cohort study 

Objectives: The impact of inflammatory rheumatic diseases on COVID-19 severity is poorly known. Here, we compare the outcomes of a cohort of patients with rheumatic diseases with a matched control cohort to identify potential risk factors for severe illness. Methods: In this comparative cohort stud...

Identification of Clinical Variants beyond the Exome in Inborn Errors of Metabolism. 

Inborn errors of metabolism (IEM) constitute a huge group of rare diseases affecting 1 in every 1000 newborns. Next-generation sequencing has transformed the diagnosis of IEM, leading to its proposed use as a second-tier technology for confirming cases detected by clinical/biochemical studies or ne...

Switching to Glycerol Phenylbutyrate in 48 Patients with Urea Cycle Disorders: Clinical Experience in Spain. 

Background and objectives: Glycerol phenylbutyrate (GPB) has demonstrated safety and efficacy in patients with urea cycle disorders (UCDs) by means of its clinical trial program, but there are limited data in clinical practice. In order to analyze the efficacy and safety of GPB in clinical practice...

Thirty-second sit-to-stand test as an alternative for estimating peak oxygen uptake and 6-min walking distance in women with breast cancer: a cross-sectional study. 

To determine whether the 30-s sit-to-stand (30STS) test can be a valid tool for estimating and stratifying peak oxygen uptake (VO2peak) and 6-min walking distance (6MWD) in women with breast cancer. This cross-sectional study uses data from the ONCORE randomized controlled trial, including 120 wome...

Striatal synaptic bioenergetic and autophagic decline in premotor experimental parkinsonism. 

Synaptic impairment might precede neuronal degeneration in Parkinson's disease. However, the intimate mechanisms altering synaptic function by the accumulation of presynaptic α-synuclein in striatal dopaminergic terminals before dopaminergic death occurs, have not been elucidated. Our aim is to unr...

CKD: The burden of disease invisible to research funders. 

The uptake of the current concept of chronic kidney disease (CKD) by the public, physicians and health authorities is low. Physicians still mix up CKD with chronic kidney insufficiency or failure. In a recent manuscript, only 23% of participants in a cohort of persons with CKD had been diagnosed by...

Early Clinical Experience with Trifluridine/Tipiracil for Refractory Metastatic Colorectal Cancer: The ROS Study 

Trifluridine/tipiracil is currently approved for metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) refractory to available therapies. However, there is no consensus on factors that predict treatment outcomes in daily practice. We assessed the early clinical experience with trifluridine/tipiracil in Spain and pot...

SimPET-An open online platform for the Monte Carlo simulation of realistic brain PET data. Validation for 18 F-FDG scans. 

SimPET (www.sim-pet.org) is a free cloud-based platform for the generation of realistic brain positron emission tomography (PET) data. In this work, we introduce the key features of the platform. In addition, we validate the platform by performing a comparison between simulated healthy brain FDG-PE...

Alpha-protein kinase 3 (ALPK3) truncating variants are a cause of autosomal dominant hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. 

The aim of this study was to determine the frequency of heterozygous truncating ALPK3 variants (ALPK3tv) in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) and confirm their pathogenicity using burden testing in independent cohorts and family co-segregation studies. In a discovery cohort of 770 ind...

Incidence, Treatment, and Outcome Trends of Necrotizing Enterocolitis in Preterm Infants: A Multicenter Cohort Study. 

Background: Data regarding the incidence and mortality of necrotizing enterocolitis trends are scarce in the literature. Recently, some preventive strategies have been confirmed (probiotics) or increased (breastfeeding rate). This study aims to describe the trends of necrotizing enterocolitis incid...

ZNF577 Methylation Levels in Leukocytes From Women With Breast Cancer Is Modulated by Adiposity, Menopausal State, and the Mediterranean Diet 

The methylation levels of ZNF577 in breast tumors has been previously identified as a possible epigenetic mark of breast cancer associated with obesity. The aim of the current study was to investigate differences in methylation levels of ZNF577 depending on obesity, menopausal state and dietary pat...

Novel SFRP2 DNA Methylation Profile Following Neoadjuvant Therapy in Colorectal Cancer Patients with Different Grades of BMI. 

The relationship between body weight and different cancers is now well-recognized and among such cancers, colorectal cancer (CRC) is reported most frequently. Our group recently published findings, through an epigenome-wide association study, suggesting that body mass index (BMI) could act as a rel...

Reduced Plasma Orexin-A Concentrations are Associated with Cognitive Deficits in Anorexia Nervosa. 

Orexins/hypocretins are neuropeptides implicated in numerous processes, including food intake and cognition. The role of these peptides in the psychopathology of anorexia nervosa (AN) remains poorly understood. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the associations between plasma orexin-A (O...

Evaluation of 12 GWAS-drawn SNPs as biomarkers of rheumatoid arthritis response to TNF inhibitors. A potential SNP association with response to etanercept. 

Research in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is increasingly focused on the discovery of biomarkers that could enable personalized treatments. The genetic biomarkers associated with the response to TNF inhibitors (TNFi) are among the most studied. They include 12 SNPs exhibiting promising results in the t...

Association between serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D and global DNA methylation in visceral adipose tissue from colorectal cancer patients 

Background: Visceral adipose tissue (VAT) has been identified as the essential fat depot for pathogenetic theories that associateobesity and colon cancer. LINE-1 hypomethylation has been mostly detected in tumor colon tissue, but less is known about the epigenetic pattern in surrounding tissues. Th...

Validation study of genetic biomarkers of response to TNF inhibitors in rheumatoid arthritis. 

Genetic biomarkers are sought to personalize treatment of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), given their variable response to TNF inhibitors (TNFi). However, no genetic biomaker is yet sufficiently validated. Here, we report a validation study of 18 previously reported genetic biomarkers, inc...