Pericardioesophageal fistulae after left atrial ablation: a case series.

Pericardioesophageal fistula is an uncommon, yet serious complication that can occur after left atrial ablation for cardiac arrhythmias. Timing of this complication is variable; however, it has been reported to occur from a week to over a month post-ablation. The incidence of this complication after ablation is <0.

Laparoscopic Transhiatal Esophagectomy With En Bloc Posterior Tracheal Wall Resection.

Esophageal adenoid cystic carcinoma is a rare cancer that is a challenge to treat because the tumor often invades local structures. Complete resection with grossly negative margins is key to disease-free survival. We describe a case in which the esophageal tumor invaded a significant portion of the posterior trachea, making a tracheal resection with primary anastomosis impossible.

Triage of Patients With Rib Fractures : Patient's Age and Number Don't Tell the Whole Story.

Background: Most triage guidelines for blunt chest wall trauma focus on advanced age and multiple fractured ribs to indicate a high-risk patient population that should be admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU). Overly sensitive ICU admission criteria, however, may result in overutilization of resources. We revised our rib fracture triage guideline to de-emphasize age and number of rib fractures, hypothesizing that we could lower ICU admission rates without compromising outcomes.

Chromosome-specific and noisy IFNB1 transcription in individual virus-infected human primary dendritic cells.

The induction of interferon beta (IFNB1) is a key event in the antiviral immune response. We studied the role of transcriptional noise in the regulation of the IFNB1 locus in primary cultures of human dendritic cells (DCs), which are important 'first responders' to viral infection. In single cell assays, IFNB1 mRNA expression in virus-infected DCs showed much greater cell-to-cell variation than that of a housekeeping gene, another induced transcript and viral RNA.