Foreign body ingestion occurs in not only children but also adults, particularly those with history of neurologic disease, alcohol use, or psychiatric disease. We present the case of a 40-year-old male with schizophrenia who presented to the emergency room with a long history of pharyngeal foreign body sensation which had recently progressed to include trismus, odynophagia, and dyspnea. Flexible laryngoscopy demonstrated fullness of the right posterior pharyngeal wall and computed tomography (CT) showed a linear opaque foreign body extending from the level of the oropharynx to the thyroid ala.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdult T-cell leukemia/lymphoma (ATLL) is a rare malignancy caused by human T-cell leukemia virus-1. ATLL is endemic to Japan, and to date, there are only four case reports of patients from Romania who have developed ATLL. Here, we describe a woman living in Madison, Wisconsin, originally from Romania, who presented with an atypical papulosquamous eruption and was ultimately diagnosed with smoldering ATLL.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDe novo sphingolipid synthesis is required for the exit of glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI)-anchored membrane proteins from the endoplasmic reticulum in yeast. Using a pharmacological approach, we test the generality of this phenomenon by analyzing the transport of GPI-anchored cargo in widely divergent eukaryotic systems represented by African trypanosomes and HeLa cells. Myriocin, which blocks the first step of sphingolipid synthesis (serine + palmitate --> 3-ketodihydrosphingosine), inhibited the growth of cultured bloodstream parasites, and growth was rescued with exogenous 3-ketodihydrosphingosine.
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