Frailty and cardiac surgery: to operate or not?

Purpose Of Review: With an aging cardiac surgery population, prefrail and frail patients are becoming more common. Anesthesiologists will be faced with the decision of how best to provide care to frail patients. Identification, management, and outcomes in frail patients will be discussed in this review.

Protection levels of N95-level respirator substitutes proposed during the COVID-19 pandemic: safety concerns and quantitative evaluation procedures.

Objective: The COVID-19 pandemic has precipitated widespread shortages of filtering facepiece respirators (FFRs) and the creation and sharing of proposed substitutes (novel designs, repurposed materials) with limited testing against regulatory standards. We aimed to categorically test the efficacy and fit of potential N95 respirator substitutes using protocols that can be replicated in university laboratories.

Setting: Academic medical centre with occupational health-supervised fit testing along with laboratory studies.

Genetic analysis of 10 pedigrees with inherited retinal degeneration by exome sequencing and phenotype-genotype association.

Our purpose was to identify causative mutations and characterize the phenotype associated with the genotype in 10 unrelated families with autosomal recessive retinal degeneration. Ophthalmic evaluation and DNA isolation were carried out in 10 pedigrees with inherited retinal degenerations (IRD). Exomes of probands from eight pedigrees were captured using Nimblegen V2/V3 or Agilent V5+UTR kits, and sequencing was performed on Illumina HiSeq.

Exome analysis identified a novel mutation in the RBP4 gene in a consanguineous pedigree with retinal dystrophy and developmental abnormalities.

Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP) is a common form of retinal degeneration characterized by photoreceptor degeneration and retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) atrophy causing loss of visual field and acuities. Exome sequencing identified a novel homozygous splice site variant (c.111+1G>A) in the gene encoding retinol binding protein 4 (RBP4).

Evaluation of serum levels of interleukin-6 and interleukin-10 in patients undergoing laparoscopic versus conventional cholecystectomy.

Objective: To correlate serum preoperative and postoperative interleukin-6 and interleukin-10 levels in patients undergoing laparotomy versus laparoscopic cholecystectomy.

Methods: From a total of 20 patients, 18 were included in the study, nine underwent cholecystectomy by laparoscopy and the other nine by laparotomy. Serum concentrations of IL-6 and IL-10 were measured in both groups.

Ipsilateral eye cortical maps are uniquely sensitive to binocular plasticity.

In the cerebral cortex, neuronal circuits are first laid down by intrinsic mechanisms and then refined by experience. In the canonical model, this refinement is driven by activity-dependent competition between inputs for some limited cortical resource. Here we examine this idea in the mouse visual cortex at the peak of the critical period for experience-dependent plasticity.