The results establish that films based on plasticized cassava starch reinforced with clay nanoparticles can be considered as an interesting biodegradable alternative packaging material. Nevertheless, further research is necessary to improve their mechanical and barrier properties since see more adequate tensile strength and extensibility are generally required for a packaging film to withstand external stress and maintain its integrity as well as barrier properties during applications in food packaging. These

issues should be focused in future studies. A direction of the investigation will be the development of complementary approaches to give further insight into the molecular structure of biodegradable films based on cassava starch. Moreover, the elaboration of biodegradable films by extrusion is the main point to explore in a next future, representing an evolution of this research, since a twin screw extruder, equipment conventionally used in flexible packaging industries, yields films with better mechanical and barrier Ibrutinib molecular weight properties due to the complete delamination

of clay nanoparticles. Finally, as a natural biopolymer, besides its biodegradable character, starch would be a promising alternative for the development of new food packaging materials because of its attractive combination of availability and price, supporting the continuity of this study. This research was supported by FAPESP (The State of São Paulo Research Foundation) and CAPES (Brazilian Committee for Postgraduate Courses in Higher Education). Authors would like to thank Profa. Dra. Miriam Dupas Hubinger (Process Engineering Laboratory, State University of Campinas, Brazil) for her help with DSC analysis. “
“Gastrointestinal hemorrhage is the commonest cause of acute hospital admission to gastroenterology and therefore has a large impact on the acute medical admission workload. Changes in management have been shown in randomized controlled trials to improve outcome from gastrointestinal

hemorrhage, but the largest observational studies of mortality trends following upper gastrointestinal hemorrhage report Lepirudin no improvement in overall mortality over the last 2 decades.1, 2 and 3 This failure to demonstrate an improvement suggests either that clinical guidelines4 and 5 derived from the results of randomized controlled trials are not generalizable to the clinical population, that they are not being implemented appropriately, or that the patients have changed at the same time as the treatments. This latter explanation, with increasing age and comorbidity confounding the effects of therapy, has been proposed as the likely explanation.6 and 7 However, this has not been proven because to reliably measure the effect of changes in age and comorbidity on mortality necessitates larger studies than have been published.