A smartphone-based technology combining a digital stethoscope (DS) with simultaneous phonocardiography (PCG) and 1-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) is available. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of the DS for the detection of heart disease in cats considering transthoracic echocardiography as gold standard. The study is prospective and observational inlcuding 42 client-owned cats.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Cardiovascular involvement in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is frequent but little is known about possible distinctive traits of SLE-related myocarditis (myoSLE) in comparison to patients with SLE (onlySLE) or myocarditis alone (onlyMyo).
Methods: A retrospective analysis was performed comparing patients with myoSLE (n = 25) from three centres with consecutive patients with onlySLE (n = 279) and onlyMyo (n = 88). SLE patients were dichotomised by disease duration ≤1 vs >1 year into recent onlySLE/early myoSLE vs longstanding onlySLE/late myoSLE.
Population aging and multimorbidity challenge health system sustainability, but the role of assistance-related variables rather than individual pathophysiological factors in determining patient outcomes is unclear. To identify assistance-related determinants of sustainable hospital healthcare, all patients hospitalised in an Internal Medicine Unit (n = 1073) were enrolled in a prospective year-long observational study and split 2:1 into a training (n = 726) and a validation subset (n = 347). Demographics, comorbidities, provenance setting, estimates of complexity (cumulative illness rating scale, CIRS: total, comorbidity, CIRS-CI, and severity, CIRS-SI subscores) and intensity of care (nine equivalents of manpower score, NEMS) were analysed at individual and Unit levels along with variations in healthcare personnel as determinants of in-hospital mortality, length of stay and nosocomial infections.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: The aim of this study was to assess whether circulating histone-specific T cells represent tools for precision medicine in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE).
Methods: Seroprevalence of autoantibodies and HLA-DR beta (DRB) 1 profile were assessed among 185 patients with SLE and combined with bioinformatics and literature evidence to identify HLA-peptide autoepitope couples for ex vivo detection of antigen-specific T cells through flow cytometry. T cell differentiation and polarization was investigated in patients with SLE, patients with Takayasu arteritis, and healthy controls carrying HLA-DRB1*03:01 and/or HLA-DRB1*11:01.