Aging is related to a number of functional and morphological changes leading to progressive decline of the biological functions of an organism. Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS), released by several endogenous and exogenous processes, may cause important oxidative damage to DNA, proteins, and lipids, leading to important cellular dysfunctions. The imbalance between ROS production and antioxidant defenses brings to oxidative stress conditions and, related to accumulation of ROS, aging-associated diseases. The purpose of this review is to provide an overview of the most relevant data reported in literature on the natural compounds, mainly phytochemicals, with antioxidant activity and their potential protective effects on age-related diseases such as metabolic syndrome, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, and chronic inflammation, and possibly lower side effects, when compared to other drugs.

GSK‐3 is a ubiquitously expressed serine/threonine kinase existing as GSK‐3α and GSK‐3β isoforms, both active under basal conditions and inactivated upon phosphorylation by different upstream kinases. Initially discovered as a regulator of glycogen synthesis, GSK‐3 is also involved in several signaling pathways controlling many different key functions. Here, we discuss recent advances regarding (i) GSK‐3 structure, function, regulation, and involvement in several cancers, including hepatocarcinoma, cholangiocarcinoma, breast cancer, prostate cancer, leukemia, and melanoma (active GSK‐3 has been shown to induce apoptosis in some cases or inhibit apoptosis in other cases and to induce cancer progression or inhibit tumor cell proliferation, suggesting that different GSK‐3 modulators may address different specific targets); (ii) GSK‐3 involvement in autophagy modulation, reviewing signaling pathways involved in neurodegenerative and liver diseases; (iii) GSK‐3 role in oxidative stress and autophagic cell death, focusing on liver injury; (iv) GSK‐3 as a possible therapeutic target of natural substances and synthetic inhibitors in many diseases; and (v) GSK‐3 role as modulator of mammalian aging, related to metabolic alterations characterizing senescent cells and age‐related diseases. Studies summarized here underline the GSK‐3 multifaceted role and indicate such kinase as a molecular target in different pathologies, including diseases associated with autophagy dysregulation.

Developing automatic diagnostic tools for the early detection of skin cancer lesions in dermoscopic images can help to reduce melanoma-induced mortality. Image segmentation is a key step in the automated skin lesion diagnosis pipeline. In this paper, a fast and fully-automatic algorithm for skin lesion segmentation in dermoscopic images is presented. Delaunay Triangulation is used to extract a binary mask of the lesion region, without the need of any training stage. A quantitative experimental evaluation has been conducted on a publicly available database, by taking into account six well-known state-of-the-art segmentation methods for comparison. The results of the experimental analysis demonstrate that the proposed approach is highly accurate when dealing with benign lesions, while the segmentation accuracy significantly decreases when melanoma images are processed. This behavior led us to consider geometrical and color features extracted from the binary masks generated by our algorithm for classification, achieving promising results for melanoma detection.

Sézary syndrome (SS) is an incurable leukemic variant of cutaneous T-cell lymphoma and its pathogenesis is still unknown. Diagnosis/prognosis may strongly ameliorate the management of SS individuals. Here, we profiled the expression of 470 microRNAs (miRNAs) in a cohort of 22 SS patients, and we identified 45 miRNAs differentially expressed between SS and controls. Using predictive analysis, a list of 19 miRNAs, including miR-21, miR-214, miR-486, miR-18a, miR-342, miR-31 and let-7 members were also found. Moreover, we defined a signature of 14 miRNAs including again miR-21, potentially able to discriminate patients with unfavorable and favorable outcome. We validated our data for miR-21, miR-214 and miR-486 by qRT-PCR, including an additional set of array-independent SS cases. In addition, we also provide an in vitro evidence for a contribution of miR-214, miR-486 and miR-21 to apoptotic resistance of CTCL cell line.