Dr. Riancho will be rewarded in the XIV National Research Awards due to his research on “Neuroprotective effect of bexarotene in the SOD1G93A mouse model of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)” published in the magazine 'Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience'. On the call has participated in total 16 research works, in which 10 are national projects and the other 6 projects are international from Switzerland, Chile, Italy and US. The awards ceremony will take place on the 1st of December in Córdoba (Spain).

Dr. Riancho is a neurologist at Marques de Valdecilla University Hospital and researcher at IDIVAL. At present, he has been awarded with the grant Wencesalo López Albo to research on the project “Project: Epigenetics and new technologies in dementia: a translational approach and innovation in care” with stays abroad in the Genomics Medicine Center and the Dementias Unit at Santiago de Compostela Hospital and also John Radcliff Hospital and Neuroscience Department at Oxford University. 

Dr. Riancho has started his research works about ALS in 2012, since then, he has several lines of research related with this disease. One of the projects is developing together with Innopharma with the aim to design a new molecule to treat the patients with ALS. Additionally, Dr. Riancho collaborates actively as representative of HUMV in national and international research groups of this disease.

Europapress

El Diario Montañes

Students from the high school Valle de Piélagos de Renedo, IES Valentín Turienzo of Colindres, IES Fuente Fresnedo of Laredo and IES Ría del Carmen of Muriedas have visited the Marques de Valdecilla Research Institute (IDIVAL) due to the celebration of the Science Week.

Students visited some of the research laboratories of IDIVAL and had a talk about the scientific research made at the institute. During the meetings, one of the researchers, Dr. José Ramos Vivas, transmitted the necessity of knowing the day-to-day of the research laboratories. It is the only way to be conscious of day-to-day of the scientific researcher. During these visits students asked questions to the researchers and asked for advice about the different options to take into account at the time to choose a degree, how to get a research scholarship or what anyone needs to be a scientific.

IDIVAL and the University of Cantabria are compromised not only with research in Cantabria but also with the scientific dissemination to the society. The aim of these visits is to make public the work of researchers. 

In our analysis we observed that the students who binge drink obtained worse results in the (executive function test ) TMT B test, which is a task that measures executive functions focusing on attention and mental flexibility. 

This study is the major of these characteristics up to the moment and it has been published in the magazine Plos One. The study includes university students enrolled at Escuelas Universitarias Gimbernat-Cantabria, affiliated with the University of Cantabria.   

The final sample included 206 individuals, with a mean age of 19,55 ± 2,39 years, of which 67,5% were women. Participants were classified as binge drinkers (BD) those who consumed 5 or more alcoholic drinks in the space of two hours (4 for females) in an average month and non binge drinkers (non-BD).

The study evaluated the memory and executive functions using a series of validated cognitive tests and it has been compared binge drinkers and non binge drinkers. Using Student's t-distribution the reserch studied the association between cognitive tests and Binge Drinkers patterns. Multivariate analyses were carried out via multiple linear regression. 47,6% of the students were found to be BD.

Results

48% of the students were binge drinkers with a starting age of alcohol consumption of 15 years. Students who binge drink performed worse in the TMT B, carrying out the test on average six seconds slower than those who do not binge drink.
Research shows that a statistically significant inverse correlation (Pearson's r2 = -0.192; p = 0.007) between TMT B and starting age of alcohol consumption. That is, the earlier the students started to drink alcohol, the longer they took to do the tests, reflecting a lesser degree of cognitive flexibility.

Based on the results obtained by this study and previous studies, it can be interpreted that binge drinking in young people would have a predominant effect upon executive functions, particularly cognitive flexibility. The area of the brain which most specifically correlates with mental flexibility is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex as Dr. Sanchez Juan has said. These data concur with the hypothesis that alcohol would affect those areas that mature later on in human development, as the prefrontal cortex is the last part of the brain to fully develop. Studies carried out on animals indicate that BD implies greater damage to the central nervous system than regular consumption. Likewise, greater neuropsychological repercussions have been described in BD, as compared to regular drinkers.

Accumulative effect

These data suggest that the damage caused by heavy intermittent alcohol consumption could have an accumulative effect at an early age; even during relatively short time periods, as our population had only been consuming alcohol for 4.22 years on average.

This neuropsychological assessment, is the largest sample of these characteristics that has been reported to date and it has been elaborated by cognitive disorder unit of Valdecilla Hospital and the Escuelas Universitarias Gimbernat-Cantabria. Dr. Sanchez-Juan has said these results should be taken as a wake-up call in terms of the permissiveness that some societies show regarding adolescent alcohol consumption.