Carlos Gustavo Garcia

Considerando a saúde mental como fator de primordial importância para o ser humano, este trabalho tem como objetivo realizar um estudo bibliométrico, a partir de uma amostra de 50 documentos científicos de maior relevância, segundo Scopus, que abordam os benefícios da Arteterapia. A metodologia envolve análise qualitativa de conteúdo e construção de mapas mentais, sintetizando os resultados extraídos da literatura selecionada. Através das análises, é possível reconhecer o que vem sendo produzido mundialmente sobre Arteterapia e constatar a liderança dos EUA entre os países que mais investem na produção científica nessa área. Os resultados da pesquisa apontam a melhoria da depressão e da comunicação, a promoção do autoconhecimento e da autoestima e o bem-estar espiritual, como alguns dos benefícios proporcionados pela Arteterapia.

This research, motivated by the Evidence Based Practices, has as research question: “music and music therapy truly work for promoting health?”. A narrative review was conducted with systematic reviews published in Cochrane’s virtual library. From 66 entries, ten met the inclusion criteria. In short, results show that music was the object of systematic reviews in the health field in multiple contexts, such as coronary disease, anxiety, pre-operative settings, cancer, autism spectrum disorder, dementia, and others. Mostly, they measured psychological and physiological features. The reviews account that there are outcomes and benefits from using music, but these are not universals and depend on each pathology or context. Esta pesquisa, motivada pelas Práticas Baseadas em Evidências, tem como pergunta orientadora “música e musicoterapia realmente funcionam na promoção da saúde?”. Para tanto, foi realizada uma revisão narrativa de revisões sistemáticas publicadas biblioteca virtual da Cochrane. Do total de 66 registros, dez estavam acordes com os critérios de inclusão estabelecidos. De forma breve, os resultados apontam que a música foi objeto de revisões sistemáticas na saúde em múltiplos contextos, como doença coronária, ansiedade, pré-operatório, câncer, transtorno do espectro autista, demência, entre outros, medindo principalmente fatores psicológicos e fisiológicos. As revisões apontam que sim há desfechos e benefícios do uso da música, porém estes não são universais e dependem de cada patologia ou contexto.

Introduction: Encephalon malignant neoplasia (EMN) is a harmful type of cancer and its most aggressive phenotypes lead to the demise of patients in 12-18 months despite the use of state-of-the-art therapies, which remain inefficient and expensive for patients, families and health systems. Objectives: The aim of this work was to analyze the expenditures of the Brazilian Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS), the national public health system, on EMN patients compared to all neoplasia patients over a span of ten years (2008 to 2017). Methodology and resources: Monthly data were collected from the SUS data base DATASUS from 2008 to 2017 and analyzed with regard to EMN and general neoplasia for the following categories: value of total expenditures; number of hospitalizations; mean value of hospitalizations; mean of monthly permanence time and death rate. Results: More than 0.3% of SUS costs were directed to EMN patients, although they represented 0.1% of total hospitalizations. The mean value of hospitalization of EMN patients was almost 80% that of general neoplasia patients and hospitalization time was twice that of general neoplasia patients. Moreover, EMN patients had a death rate almost four times higher than that of general neoplasia patients. Discussion and conclusion: EMN therapies remained expensive and lacked efficacy in the time period under analysis, with a disproportionate share of SUS expenditure being dedicated to these patients. Improving the effectiveness of treatment requires drug repurposing and adjuvant chemotherapy—in addition to radiotherapy and the use of monoclonal antibodies.Keywords: Encephalon malignant neoplasia; Cancer treatment costs; SUS.

Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common and aggressive malignant primary brain tumor and still lacks effective therapeutic strategies. It has already been shown that old drugs like sulfasalazine (SAS) and valproic acid (VPA) present antitumoral activities in glioma cell lines. SAS has also been associated with a decrease of intracellular glutathione (GSH) levels through a potent inhibition of xc- glutamate/cystine exchanger leading to an antioxidant deprotection. In the same way, VPA was recently identified as a histone deacetylase (HDAT) inhibitor capable of activating tumor suppression genes. As both drugs are widely used in clinical practice and their profile of adverse effects is well known, the aim of our study was to investigate the effects of the combined treatment with SAS and VPA in GBM cell lines. We observed that both drugs were able to reduce cell viability in a dose-dependent manner and the combined treatment potentiated these effects. Combined treatment also increased cell death and inhibited proliferation of GBM cells, while having no effect on human and rat cultured astrocytes. Also, we observed high protein expression of the catalytic subunit of xc- in all the examined GBM cell lines, and treatment with SAS blocked its activity and decreased intracellular GSH levels. Noteworthy, SAS but not VPA was also able to reduce the [¹⁴C]-ascorbate uptake. Together, these data indicate that SAS and VPA exhibit a substantial effect on GBM cell’s death related to an intracellular oxidative response imbalance, making this combination of drugs a promising therapeutic strategy.

The retina is a specialized tissue of the central nervous system (CNS) and it is the only part of the CNS that can be visualized non-invasively. During vertebrate development, the retina originates together with the optic nerve as outgrowths of the developing brain, and in this respect, the avian retina is a very convenient model for neurochemical studies of the CNS. In this study, a HPLC-UV method was developed and validated for the determination of ascorbic acid (AA) in the chicken embryo retina. AA has an important role in the retina because of its antioxidant properties. The developed method showed very good figures of merit (recovery = 91 ± 2%; repeatability and intermediate precision better than 1.67% and 2.53% and a limit of quantification of 0.03 mg L⁻¹). Retinas of two embryo ages (12 days and 18 days) showed AA concentrations of 0.0107 ± 0.0010 and 0.0055 ± 0.0005 μg of AA per μg of protein, respectively, and the statistical comparison of results confirmed the decrease of the AA level. These results seem to correlate well with oxidative stress protection, but this fact is still under investigation. As far as we are aware, this is the first study that demonstrates the HPLC-UV determination of ascorbic acid in the chicken embryo retina and its variation along embryo development.