👤 Carlotta Sacerdote

The long-term effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection are increasingly recognized, with heterogeneous physical and psychological symptoms that may persist for months, significantly affecting Health Related Quality of Life (HRQoL), functional capacity, and psychosocial well-being. This study explores distinct profiles of HRQoL and psychological symptoms in former COVID-19 inpatients and assesses the impact of clinical variables at admission on long-term outcomes. Patients hospitalised for COVID-19 at Molinette Hospital in Turin were contacted several months post-discharge (between June 2022 and June 2023) to complete a questionnaire assessing long-term HRQoL, sleep quality, depression, anxiety, stress, and fatigue. Clinical data at the time of hospitalisation were also available for each participant. A Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was conducted on these physical and psychological variables, followed by multinomial logistic regression to examine how selected indicators of baseline COVID-19 severity and patient characteristics predicted profile membership. The sample consisted of 601 patients. LPA identified three health-related profiles: This study highlights a wide spectrum of post-COVID-19 conditions, ranging from good to severely compromised physical and mental health. Female gender, presence of comorbidities, and elevated early warning scores at hospital admission are risk factors for worse outcomes, emphasizing the need for comprehensive long-term care. The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11136-026-04206-y. Show less

Fatty acid synthase (FAS) is the major enzyme of lipogenesis. It catalyzes the NADPH-dependent condensation of acetyl-CoA and malonyl-CoA to produce palmitic acid. Transcription of the FAS gene is controlled synergistically by the transcription factors ChREBP (carbohydrate response element-binding protein), which is induced by glucose, and SREBP-1 (sterol response element-binding protein-1), which is stimulated by insulin through the PI3K/Akt signal transduction pathway. We investigated whether the genetic variability of the genes encoding for ChREBP, SREBP and FAS (respectively, MLXIPL, SREBF1 and FASN) is related to breast cancer risk and body-mass index (BMI) by studying 1,294 breast cancer cases and 2,452 controls from the European Prospective Investigation on Cancer (EPIC). We resequenced the FAS gene and combined information of SNPs found by resequencing and SNPs from public databases. Using a tagging approach and selecting 20 SNPs, we covered all the common genetic variation of these genes. In this study we were not able to find any statistically significant association between the SNPs in the FAS, ChREBP and SREPB-1 genes and an increased risk of breast cancer overall and by subgroups of age, menopausal status, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) use or BMI. On the other hand, we found that two SNPs in FASN were associated with BMI. Show less