Publicaties

Mapping the distribution of allergenic plants in urbanized landscapes is of high importance to evaluate its impact on human health. However, data is not always available for the allergy-relevant species such as alder, birch, hazel, especially within cities where systematic inventories are often missing or not readily available. This research presents an approach to produce high-resolution abundance maps of allergenic tree species using existing ...

Dactylogyridae is one of the most studied families of parasitic flatworms with more than 1000 species and 166 genera described to date including ecto- and endoparasites. Dactylogyrid monogeneans were suggested as model organisms for host-parasite macroevolutionary and biogeographical studies due to the scientific and economic importance of some of their host lineages. Consequently, an array of phylogenetic research into different dactylogyrid ...

Little is known about the potential role of indoor plants in shaping the indoor microbiota. Within the ENVIRONAGE birth cohort, we collected settled dust and performed 16S and ITS amplicon sequencing and qPCR measurements to characterize the indoor microbiota, including bacterial and fungal loads and Chao1 richness, Shannon, and Simpson diversity indices. For 155 households, we obtained information on the number of indoor plants. We performed ...

Platelet Endothelial Aggregation Receptor 1 (PEAR1) modulates angiogenesis and platelet contact-induced activation, which play a role in the pathogenesis of colorectal cancer. We therefore tested the association of incident colorectal cancer and genetic and epigenetic variability in PEAR1 among 2532 randomly recruited participants enrolled in the family-based Flemish Study on Environment, Genes and Health Outcomes (51.2% women; mean age 44.8 ...

Aging starts at the beginning of life as evidenced by high variability in telomere length (TL) and mitochondrialDNA content (mtDNAc) at birth. Whether p53 and PGC-1α are connected to these age-related markers in earlylife is unclear. In this study, we hypothesized that these hallmarks of aging are associated at birth.In 613 newborns from the ENVIRONAGE birth cohort, p53 and PGC-1α protein levels were measured in cordplasma, while TL and mtDNAc ...

Background:The Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score has been developed to score the severity of organ dysfunction in critically ill sepsis patients and has been proven to have a high predictive value for intensive care unit (ICU) mortality in severely ill patients. Our goal was to evaluate the prognostic value of the SOFA score as well as trends in SOFA score for ICU mortality in COVID-19 patients. Methods: All consecutive patients ...

Simple Summary Multiple myeloma (MM), characterized by the expansion of plasma cells in the bone marrow, is the second most common hematological malignancy. This incurable cancer is consistently preceded by non-malignant asymptomatic precursor conditions known as monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) and/or smoldering multiple myeloma (SMM). These pre-stages are relatively frequent, but only a select percentage of them will ...

The OECD estimates that greater work absenteeism is one of the main drivers behind the impact of air pollution on gross domestic product loss, but research linking air pollution with work absenteeism is scarce. With air pollution increasingly being linked to poor mental health, and poor mental health having become one of the main reasons for work absenteeism, we examined whether the onset of work incapacity related to mental health conditions is ...

Age-related fibrosis in the left ventricle (LV) has been mainly studied in animals by assessing collagen content. Using second-harmonic generation microscopy and image processing, we evaluated amount, aggregation and spatial distribution of LV collagen in young to old pigs, and middle-age and elder living donors. All collagen features increased when comparing adult and old pigs with young ones, but not when comparing adult with old pigs or ...