Background: The aim of our study was to investigate serum chitotriosidase level in tuberculosis patients, its relationship with microbiological and clinical parameters, and response to treatment.
Materials And Methods: This longitudinal panel study included 149 patients with confirmed TB disease. Serum chitotriosidase activity was measured at the beginning and the end of treatment.
Li-Fraumeni syndrome (LFS) is a cancer predisposition syndrome associated with a high, lifetime risk of a broad spectrum of cancers caused by pathogenic germline TP53 mutations. Numerous different germline TP53 mutations have been associated with LFS, which has an exceptionally diverse clinical spectrum in terms of tumor type and age of onset. Our patient has developed six asynchronous tumors to date: a phyllode tumor of the breast, a pheochromocytoma, a rosette-forming glioneuronal tumor (RGNT), an adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC), a ductal carcinoma of the breast, and a thymoma.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis case report presents a unique instance of small bowel perforation caused by solitary metastasis from renal cell carcinoma (RCC), a rare and complex clinical scenario. The patient, a 59-year-old male with a history of RCC treated with nephrectomy four years prior, presented with acute abdomen symptoms. Emergency diagnostic procedures identified a significant lesion in the small intestine.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis case report details a rare instance of a perforated jejunal gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) in a 76-year-old female patient. The patient presented with acute abdominal pain and distension without any changes in bowel habits or episodes of nausea and vomiting. Initial diagnostics, including abdominal plain radiography and ultrasonography, were inconclusive; however, a computed tomography (CT) scan revealed pneumoperitoneum and an irregular fluid collection suggestive of small intestine perforations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSince the end of 2019, the global spread of COVID-19 has represented a historic event that changed our way of treating patients globally. The use of long-acting injections (LAI) antipsychotics was emphasized. Our goal was to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on the frequency of prescribing LAI and compare it with a period before.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the scenario of a natural or human-induced disaster, traditional communication infrastructure is often disrupted or even completely unavailable, making the employment of emergency wireless networks highly important. In this paper, we consider an industrial Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system assisted by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that restores connectivity from the master terminal unit (MTU) to the remote terminal unit (RTU). The UAV also provides power supply to the ground RTU, which transmits the signal to the end-user terminal (UT) using the harvested RF energy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe continuous evolution of cancer biology has led to the discovery of mammaglobin, a potential novel biomarker for breast carcinoma. This review aims to unravel the enigmatic aspects of mammaglobin and elucidate its potential role in redefining the paradigm of breast carcinoma biomarkers. We will thoroughly examine its expression in tumoral and peritumoral tissues and its circulating levels in the blood, thereby providing insights into its possible function in cancer progression and metastasis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAmyand's hernia represents an inguinal hernia containing an appendix within the hernia sac. This extremely rare condition occurs in approximately 1% of all inguinal hernias. This report describes the case of an 84-year-old male who presented with a right inguinal mass that intraoperatively turned out to be Amyand's hernia type-II with a gangrenous and perforated appendix.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAcute pancreatitis (AP) is an abrupt, variable inflammatory condition of the pancreas, potentially escalating to severe systemic inflammation, rampant pancreatic necrosis, and multi-organ failure. Its complex pathogenesis involves an intricate immune response, with different T cell subsets (Th1, Th2, Th9, Th17, Th22, TFH, Treg, and CD8 T cells) and B cells playing pivotal roles. Early T cell activation initiates the AP development, triggering cytokines associated with the Th1 response, which stimulate macrophages and neutrophils.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe relentless expansion of communications services and applications in 5G networks and their further projected growth bring the challenge of necessary spectrum scarcity, a challenge which might be overcome using the concept of cognitive radio. Furthermore, an extremely high number of low-power devices are introduced by the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT), which also requires efficient energy usage and practically applicable device powering. Motivated by these facts, in this paper, we analyze a wirelessly powered underlay cognitive system based on a realistic case in which statistical channel state information (CSI) is available.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
December 2022
The COVID-19 pandemic impacted workers globally during 2020-2022 and it has had major psychological implications for workers' wellbeing. This longitudinal study analyzed risk and protective factors predicting COVID-19 anxiety among workers in Finland. Longitudinal national sample of Finnish workers (n = 685) participated in a five-wave study conducted in 2020-2022, covering multiple waves of the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBreast cancer as most often women's cancer is the second cause of mortality worldwide. Research interest increased in testing non-standard drugs to suppress breast cancer progression and become significant supplements in anticancer therapy. The anti-obesity drug Orlistat showed significant ability for modulation of cancer cell metabolism via antiproliferative, proapoptotic, antiangiogenic, antimetastatic, and hypolipidemic effects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Assoc Med Microbiol Infect Dis Can
December 2021
Background: Women represent one quarter of the population living with HIV in Canada and are an increasingly important sector of the HIV community. While some women's health issues such as cervical cancer screening and management are well addressed in HIV management guidelines, others are not. These include sexual and reproductive health factors such as contraception, pre-conception planning, and menopause.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudy Objective: Assess the relationship between the Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS®) pathway and routine care and 30-day postoperative outcomes.
Design: Prospective cohort study.
Setting: European centers (185 hospitals) across 21 countries.
Since the outbreak of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19), the whole world has taken interest in the mechanisms of its spread and development. Mathematical models have been valuable instruments for the study of the spread and control of infectious diseases. For that purpose, we propose a two-way approach in modeling COVID-19 spread: a susceptible, exposed, infected, recovered, deceased (SEIRD) model based on differential equations and a long short-term memory (LSTM) deep learning model.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Detailed reporting is essential in non-inferiority randomized controlled trials (NI-RCTs) to assess evidence quality, as these trials inform standards of care.
Objectives: The primary objective was to evaluate the methodological and reporting quality of antifungal NI-RCTs.
Data Sources: Medline, EMBASE, the Cochrane CENTRAL and the United States Federal Drug Administration (FDA) drugs database were searched to 9 September 2020.
Introduction: Infective endocarditis (IE) is a severe and highly prevalent infection among people who inject drugs (PWID). While short-term (30-day) outcomes are similar between PWID and non-PWID, the long-term outcomes among PWID after IE are poor, with 1-year mortality rates in excess of 25%. Novel clinical interventions are needed to address the unique needs of PWID with IE, including increasing access to substance use treatment and addressing structural barriers and social determinants of health.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNoninferiority randomized controlled trial (RCT) effectiveness may erode when results favor the active control over time and when a decreasingly effective control arm is used in serial trials. We analyzed 32 antifungal noninferiority RCTs (NI-RCTs) for these scenarios in this secondary analysis of a systematic review. Our exploratory analysis suggests that the erosion risk in the effectiveness of antifungal noninferiority trials is uncommon.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Numerous statistical methods can be used to calculate the confidence interval (CI) of risk differences. There is consensus in previous literature that the Wald method should be discouraged. We compared five statistical methods for estimating the CI of risk difference in terms of CI width and study conclusion in antibiotic non-inferiority trials.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: In non-inferiority trials, there is a concern that intention-to-treat (ITT) analysis, by including participants who did not receive the planned interventions, may bias towards making the treatment and control arms look similar and lead to mistaken claims of non-inferiority. In contrast, per protocol (PP) analysis is viewed as less likely to make this mistake and therefore preferable in non-inferiority trials. In a systematic review of antibiotic non-inferiority trials, we compared ITT and PP analyses to determine which analysis was more conservative.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: 1. To compare the effectiveness of four different surveillance strategies in detecting COVID-19 within the homeless shelter population. 2.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Antibiotic noninferiority randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are used for approval of new antibiotics and making changes to antibiotic prescribing in clinical practice. We conducted a systematic review to assess the methodological and reporting quality of antibiotic noninferiority RCTs.
Methods: We searched MEDLINE, Embase, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and the Food and Drug Administration drug database from inception until November 22, 2019, for noninferiority RCTs comparing different systemic antibiotic therapies.