Human & Veterinary
Medicine

Adverse reactions to food represent a growing public health concern worldwide, encompassing a heterogeneous spectrum of conditions ranging from non- immune-mediated food intolerances to potentially life-threatening IgE-mediated allergic responses. This review provides a comprehensive and mechanistically oriented analysis of the principal categories of food intolerance including lactose intolerance, fructose malabsorption, and non-celiac gluten sensitivity alongside the immunological pathways underpinning celiac disease and IgE-mediated food allergies. Particular attention is given to the biochemical basis of allergenicity, the role of food processing in modifying allergenic potential, and the clinical spectrum from localized oral allergy syndrome to systemic anaphylaxis. The review also examines the epidemiology of the major regulated allergens under EU Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011, summarizes current diagnostic approaches including skin prick testing, specific IgE assays, and double-blind placebo-controlled food challenges (DBPCFC), and discusses emerging immunotherapeutic strategies such as oral immunotherapy (OIT) and epicutaneous immunotherapy (EPIT). Finally, the review addresses the practical implications of cross-reactivity phenomena, including latex-fruit syndrome and pollen-food allergy syndrome, for clinical management and dietary counselling.

Exercise induces a coordinated neuroendocrine response that is essential for maintaining homeostasis and supporting adaptation in humans. This mini-review examines the role of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and cortisol in the response to exercise stress, with particular emphasis on the non-linear relationship between training load, endocrine responses, recovery, and performance. Cortisol promotes metabolic substrate availability during exercise and contributes to short-term physiological adaptation, but excessive or insufficiently recovered training may alter HPA-axis responsiveness and contribute to maladaptive outcomes. Evidence indicates that acute cortisol responses are strongly dependent on exercise intensity and duration, with responses becoming more pronounced above approximately 60% of maximal oxygen uptake (VO₂max). However, greater endocrine stress does not necessarily translate into greater adaptation, as moderate training doses may provide a more favorable balance between physiological challenge and recovery. Repeated training also modifies HPA-axis behavior, with trained individuals showing altered cortisol responses to standardized exercise and other stressors. Particular attention is given to the distinction between functional overreaching, non-functional overreaching, and overtraining syndrome. Current evidence suggests that resting cortisol concentrations alone have limited diagnostic value because of substantial biological and contextual variability. Dynamic responses to standardized exercise or endocrine stimulation may provide more informative indicators of altered HPA-axis function, although these responses remain heterogeneous. Overall, cortisol should be interpreted as a component of a broader physiological framework rather than as an isolated biomarker of training status or overtraining.

Organic agriculture is increasingly considered within broader sustainability and health frameworks because agricultural management simultaneously affects soil, plants, animals, ecosystems, food production, and human exposure pathways. This review critically examines organic agriculture through a One Health perspective, integrating evidence from agricultural, environmental, veterinary, microbiological, food-safety, and human-health research. Particular attention is given to soil health and the soil microbiome, environmental functioning, animal health and welfare, antimicrobial use and resistance, food safety and pathogen transmission, and human health implications. The available evidence indicates that organic management can support soil biological functioning, microbial diversity, nutrient cycling, biodiversity, and reduced exposure to certain synthetic pesticides. Organic livestock systems may also provide greater opportunities for species-specific behaviour and lower antimicrobial use. However, these characteristics do not consistently translate into superior outcomes across all health domains. Animal welfare remains strongly influenced by management quality; antimicrobial resistance can persist despite reduced antimicrobial use; and practices such as manure recycling, outdoor access, and crop-livestock integration may create additional pathogen-transmission pathways when inadequately managed. Evidence for human health is strongest for reduced exposure to some pesticides, whereas nutritional differences are generally modest and direct long-term clinical benefits remain insufficiently demonstrated. Overall, organic agriculture should be regarded as a management framework with the potential to contribute to One Health objectives rather than as an inherently healthier production system, with outcomes depending strongly on specific practices and environmental conditions.

Histological images of skeletal muscle contain organization at several spatial scales and in several directions, from the edges of individual fibres to the arrangement of fibre bundles, yet texture analysis usually reports single-scale, orientation-averaged descriptors. This study formulates a hierarchical descriptor tensor indexed by descriptor channel, Gaussian scale, orientation and region of interest (ROI), derives its main analytical properties, and applies it to two published haematoxylin and eosin (H&E) cross-sections of normal skeletal muscle, one human and one from the fish Pangasianodon hypophthalmus. Ten channels (directional-derivative statistics, grey-level co-occurrence features and autocorrelation) were evaluated at four scales (1, 2, 4, 8 px) and four orientations, for one ROI (160 entries per image) and four ROIs (640 entries). The theory shows that the directional-energy block is a quadratic form of the regional structure matrix, so that four orientations determine the anisotropy index A and the texture axis exactly, and that pooling regions can only lower A. Against isotropic surrogates with the same radial spectrum, both images were anisotropic (A = 0.208 and 0.387; surrogate 95th percentile 0.008 and 0.011; P ≤ 0.005). The texture axis agreed with the structure-tensor field, with the ordering of directional correlation lengths and, for the fish image, with the long-axis orientation of 207 segmented fibres (difference 1.4°). Four ROIs revealed regional heterogeneity that a single ROI attenuated (13% in the human image). Gradient channels were nearly collinear (Spearman ρ ≥ 0.98), and co-occurrence contrast and correlation, linked by an exact variogram identity, decoupled on tissue. The results establish interpretable, internally consistent readings on real human and veterinary muscle histology; diagnostic value is not claimed.