Total endovascular arch repair: Initial experience in Bologna.

Objectives: In the last few years, fenestrated, branched, or scalloped custom grafts have become available for aortic arch repair. Open surgery is the gold standard, but arch thoracic endovascular aortic repair (TEVAR) is indicated for high-risk patients. We focused on total endovascular aortic arch replacement with a zone 0 or zone 1 landing zone to describe its short- and long-term outcomes.

Reoperative aortic root surgery: single-center long-term outcomes and literature review.

Background And Objective: Reoperative aortic root surgery has become more and more common over the years and is considered high-risk, with significantly worse outcomes compared to first-procedure root surgery. At our institution, this kind of surgery is frequently performed. The aim of the present review is to describe currently available literature on reoperative surgery on the aortic root in terms of patients' population, indications for surgery and outcomes and to present our center's experience on the matter.

Staging TEVAR after FET - an exception or the rule?

Purpose: Frozen elephant trunk (FET) was born as an ideal one-step procedure to treat complex arch and descending thoracic aorta pathology. It was then proved that it frequently needs reintervention, which can often be performed by thoracic endovascular aortic repair (TEVAR) extension since FET provides a safe proximal landing zone. We hereby describe our experience in TEVAR extension after FET, its main indications, technique, and outcomes.

Frozen elephant trunk in acute aortic dissection: a literature review.

Background: Acute aortic dissection is a life-threatening condition that requires urgent surgical treatment. The frozen elephant trunk (FET) technique, including the Thoraflex hybrid prosthesis, has emerged as an effective strategy for treating complex aortic pathologies. With the widespread application of the FET technique, it continues to evolve, aiming to simplify procedures and reduce complications.

Frozen elephant trunk technique using hybrid grafts: 15-year outcomes from a single-centre experience.

Objectives: The purpose of the study is to compare the short- and long-term outcomes of the frozen elephant trunk (FET) technique based on 2 different hybrid grafts implanted from January 2007 to July 2022.

Methods: The study includes patients who underwent an elective or emergency FET procedure. Short-term, long-term mortality and freedom from thoracic endovascular aortic repair (TEVAR) were the primary end points.

Distal stent graft-induced new entry (dSINE) after frozen elephant trunk: a scoping review.

Background: The introduction of hybrid total arch replacement with the frozen elephant trunk (FET) technique has improved the field of aortic surgery by allowing single-stage treatment of complex aortic pathologies. Although FET has been associated with favorable aortic remodeling, it is also associated with the potential development of distal stent graft-induced new entries (dSINEs). The aim of our review is to collect data about the incidence and the supposed conditions for the occurrence of dSINE after total hybrid arch replacement with FET technique.

Aortic root aneurysm in a patient with Aarskog-Scott syndrome.

We present the case of a 69 years old man affected by Aarskog-Scott syndrome. He came to our attention for an aneurysm of the aortic root, with almost moderate aortic regurgitation; moderate mitral regurgitation was discovered during preoperative assessment. We performed a modified Bentall's procedure and mitral valve repair.

"Why is frozen elephant trunk better than classical elephant trunk?".

The treatment of complex aortic arch disease, in chronic or acute setting, has always represented a fascinating challenge for the heart surgeon also because, often, the involvement of the aortic arch is associated with a simultaneous involvement of the ascending aorta and of the proximal portion of the descending thoracic aorta. In recent years, there have been many surgical and/or endovascular techniques and approaches in a single step or multiple steps proposed with the aim of treating and simplifying these complex conditions. The first procedure available for this purpose was the conventional elephant trunk technique, proposed by the German surgeon Hans Borst, back in 1983.

Therapeutic alternatives in chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension: from pulmonary endarterectomy to balloon pulmonary angioplasty to medical therapy. State of the art from a multidisciplinary team.

Chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH) is a rare disease with a very complex pathophysiology differing from other causes of pulmonary hypertension (PH). It is an infrequent consequence of acute pulmonary embolism that is frequently misdiagnosed. Pathogenesis has been related to coagulation abnormalities, infection or inflammation, although these disturbances can be absent in many cases.

Diversity and dynamics in larval digenean assemblages parasitizing in a freshwater shallow lake from the Southeastern Pampa plain, Argentina.

Digeneans have important roles within ecosystems; however, it is estimated that only 14% of the species have been described. Therefore, before being able to detail their role, digenean species’ identification and the diversity present in the ecosystems must be known. In this study, the diversity and the temporal-spatial dynamics of larval digeneans in the freshwater snail Heleobia parchappii were analysed in a shallow lake.

Reduced Incidence of Carbapenem-Resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae Infections in Cardiac Surgery Patients after Implementation of an Antimicrobial Stewardship Project.

Infections due to carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae (CR-Kp) are associated with increased mortality in cardiac surgery patients. In this short communication, we report on the changes in the incidence of CR-Kp colonization and CR-Kp infection in cardiac surgery patients from 2014 to 2018 in a teaching hospital in Italy, after the implementation of an antimicrobial stewardship project in 2014. During the study period, 2261 patients underwent open-heart surgery.

Tyrosine kinase inhibitor STI571 (Imatinib) cooperates with wild-type p53 on K562 cell line to enhance its proapoptotic effects.

In order to ascertain whether p53 has a role in chronic myeloid leukemia hematopoietic progenitor response to the innovative tyrosine kinase inhibitor STI571 (Imatinib), we overexpressed a wild type (wt) p53 construct in the K562 cell line, generated from a human blast crisis and lacking endogenous p53. Wt p53 overexpression was associated with a significant reduction of bcr-abl expression levels resulting, at least in part, from post-transcriptional events affecting the stability of p210 bcr-abl fusion protein. Moreover, we demonstrated that p53 overexpression enhances the commitment to the apoptotic death fate of K562 following its in vitro exposure to 1 microM STI571.

Expression of P21(WAF1/CIP1/SID1) cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor in hematopoietic progenitor cells.

P21(Waf1/Cip1/Sid1) is a critical component of biomolecular pathways leading to the G(1) arrest evoked in response to DNA damage, growth arrest signals and differentiation commitment. It belongs to the Cip/Kip class of cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors and is at least partly regulated by p53. P21(Waf1/Cip1/Sid1) functional inactivation possibly resulting from mutations of the gene itself or, more likely, from p53 mutations may be critical for either the cell fate following DNA-damaging insults or clonal evolution toward malignancy.

Competitive polymerase chain reaction as a method to detect the amplification of bcr-abl gene of chronic myeloid leukemia.

Background And Objectives: The chimeric product of the bcr-abl rearranged gene is critical in the pathogenesis of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), yet its role in the progression of the disease remains unclear. There is some evidence that increased bcr-abl expression levels, possibly due to gene amplification, precede the clonal evolution of CML hematopoietic progenitors toward a fully transformed phenotype and might be involved in their resistance to interferon-alpha or tyrosine kinase inhibitors.

Design And Methods: To quantify the bcr-abl gene both at the genomic and at the transcriptional levels we developed a competitive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) strategy.

Expression and characterization of a novel structural protein of human cytomegalovirus, pUL25.

Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) UL25 has recently been found to encode a new structural protein that is present in both virion and defective viral particles (C. J. Baldick and T.

Procedure for the quantitation of Gadd45 expression levels in clonal hematopoietic progenitor cells by competitive polymerase chain reaction.

Objective: The growth arrest and DNA damage-inducible (gadd) genes represent a family of stress-inducible genes that are coordinately regulated at transcriptional level. Gadd45, in particular, has been linked to a p53-dependent inducible network required for regulated transition from G1 to S phase of cell cycle following genotoxic insult and growth arrest treatments and has seemingly a pivotal role in DNA repair.

Design And Methods: Here we show that competitive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is an adequate method to quantitate gadd45 expression levels in hematopoietic progenitor cell line 32D, whose constitutive gene expression is very low.

Development of a new cytomegalovirus (CMV) immunoglobulin M (IgM) immunoblot for detection of CMV-specific IgM.

We developed a new cytomegalovirus (CMV) immunoglobulin M (IgM) immunoblot to detect CMV-specific IgM in human sera. The new test contains four viral proteins (vp150, vp82, vp65, and vp28) purified from viral particles and four recombinant proteins (rp150, rp130, rp52, and rp38) purified from Escherichia coli. These antigens were individually loaded onto nitrocellulose strips, and the strips were then used to detect CMV-specific IgM by using a mu-specific conjugate.

The major open reading frame of the beta2.7 transcript of human cytomegalovirus: in vitro expression of a protein posttranscriptionally regulated by the 5' region.

beta2.7 is the major early transcript produced during human cytomegalovirus infection. This abundantly expressed RNA is polysome associated, but no protein product has ever been detected.

Human cytomegalovirus product UL44 downregulates the transactivation of HIV-1 long terminal repeat.

Objective: Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is often isolated from HIV-1-infected patients and the two viruses can infect the same cell type giving rise to direct bidirectional interactions. Whereas the long terminal repeat (LTR) transactivation ability of HCMV immediate early gene (IE1/IE2) is well documented, no information is available on the possible role of other HCMV proteins. In this study, the activity of ppUL44, an early DNA-binding protein, on HIV LTR transactivation was investigated.

Intracellular production of a major cytomegalovirus antigenic protein in the methylotrophic yeast Pichia pastoris.

We have previously shown that single or multiple epitopes of the major human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) antigens, produced as fusion proteins in prokaryotes can be valuable diagnostic material in the serology of HCMV infection. In this work we moved to a eukaryotic system, to produce one of the most immunogenic HCMV antigens, ppUL44 (also called pp52 due to its apparent molecular size on acrylamide gels), as a non-fusion protein, in an attempt to eliminate some non-specific reactivity of human sera with bacterial carrier proteins. We expressed the DNA encoding ppUL44 in a highly efficient expression system based on the methylotrophic yeast, Pichia pastoris.

Cytomegalovirus-mediated induction of antisense mRNA expression to UL44 inhibits virus replication in an astrocytoma cell line: identification of an essential gene.

We have used an antisense RNA approach in the analysis of gene function in human cytomegalovirus (HCMV). An astrocytoma cell line (U373-MG) that is permissive for virus replication was permanently transfected with a construct bearing sequence from HCMV UL44 (coding for the major late DNA-binding protein, ppUL44, also known as pp52 or ICP36) in an antisense orientation and under the control of the immediate-early enhancer-promoter element. Upon HCMV infection at a high multiplicity, we found a marked reduction in UL44 protein products (the ICP36 family of proteins) in established cell transfectants and a strong inhibition of virus yield in infected-cell supernatants at two weeks postinfection, while herpes simplex virus replication was not affected.