A tale of two cities: A retrospective observational cohort study of the impact of COVID-19 on acute stroke presentation, timing, and outcomes.

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to identify the impact of COVID-19-related "shelter in place" restrictions on stroke metrics in two metropolitan Texas cities, Austin and San Antonio.

Materials And Methods: Data was derived from stroke quality metric registries and compared between two treatment periods: (1) during the state's COVID-19 "shelter in place" restriction period, and (2) the corresponding period during the previous year for Austin and San Antonio, Texas. Primary outcomes include the dichotomized process measures of time last known well (TLKW) to arrival, arrival to brain imaging initiation, and arrival to administration of thrombolytic therapy.

CDDO-Me protects normal lung and breast epithelial cells but not cancer cells from radiation.

Although radiation therapy is commonly used for treatment for many human diseases including cancer, ionizing radiation produces reactive oxygen species that can damage both cancer and healthy cells. Synthetic triterpenoids, including CDDO-Me, act as anti-inflammatory and antioxidant modulators primarily by inducing the transcription factor Nrf2 to activate downstream genes containing antioxidant response elements (AREs). In the present series of experiments, we determined if CDDO-Me can be used as a radioprotector in normal non-cancerous human lung and breast epithelial cells, in comparison to lung and breast cancer cell lines.