Telehealth Management and Risk Stratification of Older Patients With Chronic Heart Failure During COVID-19 Pandemic: Prognostic Evaluation of the TeleHFCovid19-Score.

Objectives: To evaluate 6-month risk stratification capacity of the newly developed TeleHFCovid19-Score for remote management of older patients with heart failure (HF) during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic.

Design: Monocentric observational prospective study.

Setting And Participants: Older HF outpatients remotely managed during the first pandemic wave.

Role of Frailty on Risk Stratification in Cardiac Surgery and Procedures.

The number of older people candidates for interventional cardiology, such as PCI but especially for transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) , would increase in the future. Generically, the surgical risk, the amount of complications in the perioperative period, mortality and severe disability remain significantly higher in the elderly than in younger. For this reason it's important to determine the indication for surgical intervention, using tools able to predict not only the classics outcome (length of stay, mortality), but also those more specifically geriatrics, correlate to frailty: delirium, cognitive deterioration, risk of institutionalization and decline in functional status.

Cardiac surgery in the elderly: What goals of care?

At present, the majority of cardiac surgery interventions have been performed in the elderly with successful short-term mortality and morbidity, however significant difficulties must to be underlined about our capacity to predict long-term outcomes such as disability, worsening quality of life and loss of functional capacity.The reason probably resides on inability to capture preoperative frailty phenotype with current cardiac surgery risk scores and consequently we are unable to outline the postoperative trajectory of an important patients' centered outcome such as disability free survival. In this perspective, more than one geriatric statements have stressed the systematic underuse of patient reported outcomes in cardiovascular trials even after taking account of their relevance to older feel and wishes.

Institutional experience of PTH evaluation on fine-needle washing after aspiration biopsy to locate hyperfunctioning parathyroid tissue.

Assaying parathyroid hormone (PTH) in the washing liquid after fine-needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB) seems to be a valid approach to locate parathyroid tissue. PTH-FNAB was evaluated in 47 patients with a clinical picture of primary hyperparathyroidism (PHP) and ultrasonography (US) suggestive of parathyroid lesion. The patients were subdivided into two groups on the basis of the absence or presence of US thyroid alterations.

Absence of thyrotropin-induced increase in leptin levels in patients with history of differentiated thyroid carcinoma undergoing recombinant human thyrotropin testing.

Background: Some extra-thyroid effects of TSH have been described in vitro and in vivo. TSH has recently been suggested to induce interleukin-6 secretion by adipocytes. Leptin is the main protein secreted by adipose tissue.

Recombinant human thyroid stimulating hormone does not acutely change serum osteoprotegerin and soluble receptor activator of nuclear factor-kappaBeta ligand in patients under evaluation for differentiated thyroid carcinoma.

Objective: Some extra-thyroid actions of thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH), such as an in vitro action on bone, have been described. Our aim was to evaluate in vivo the acute effect of a recombinant human TSH (rhTSH)-induced TSH surge on Osteoprotegerin (OPG) and receptor activator of the nuclear factor-kappaBeta (RANK-L) levels in patients under levo-thyroxine (L-T4) therapy.

Design: 24 patients with differentiated thyroid carcinoma (DTC) were studied.

Metabolomic fingerprinting of plant extracts.

The standardization and quality control of plant extracts is an important topic, in particular, when such extracts are used for medicinal purposes. Consequently, the development of fast and effective analytical methods for metabolomic fingerprinting of plant extracts is of high interest. In this investigation, electrospray mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) and (1)H NMR techniques were employed with further statistical analyses of the acquired data.

A rapid liquid chromatography electrospray ionization mass spectrometry(n) method for evaluation of synephrine in Citrus aurantium L. samples.

Immature bitter orange fruit and its extracts have been introduced into the market as an alternative to Ephedra in weight loss products. However, the safety of the immature bitter orange fruit and its extracts is a debated argument due to the presence of synephrine, a constituent known as a sympathomimetic agent. In this paper, we describe the development of a new, rapid, and simple liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization-tandem mass spectrometry method devoted to the quantitative determination of synephrine in bitter orange samples, containing a high quantity of synephrine, and sweet orange samples, known to contain a low level of synephrine but at the same time being one of the main synephrine sources in a normal human diet.

Evaluation of the dissolution behaviour of some commercial herbal drugs and their preparations.

Dissolution rates are routinely performed with synthetic drugs, however, in the field of herbal drugs (HD), their preparations (HDP) and herbal medicinal products (HMP) this crucial property is generally not investigated. According to the European Pharmacopoeia, we have evaluated the dissolution behaviour of capsules containing various herbal drugs (Passira, Senna, Ginkgo) and some of their commercial dried extracts, manufactured with different methods, by analysis of their active components or marker constituents. Adequate dissolution behaviours of the flavonoids of Ginkgo were obtained for all preparations, while for both Passiflora and Senna only the extracts showed complete dissolution of the marker flavones and sennosides, respectively, in the investigated media.

Investigation of mammalian lignan precursors in flax seed: first evidence of secoisolariciresinol diglucoside in two isomeric forms by liquid chromatograph/mass spectrometry.

A strong research effort has been devoted in recent years to the mammalian lignans enterolactone and enterodiol because of their claimed protective effects against breast and colon cancer. Some plant lignans appear to be precursors of these molecules. This paper reports a novel identification procedure for one of these precursors, the secoisolariciresinol diglucoside, in the extracts of defatted flax-seed meal.

Revealing the mammalian lignan precursor secoisolariciresinol diglucoside in flax seed by ionspray mass spectrometry.

Ionspray mass spectrometry allowed the rapid detection and unambiguous identification of secoisolariciresinol diglucoside, an important mammalian lignan precursor occurring in flax seed. It was observed that this compound is embedded in a complex form, probably a complex glucoside of still undisclosed structure, among the polar solvent extractables of flax seed from which it could not be released as such without the intervention of alkaline methanolysis. Comparison of ionspray mass spectra of untreated and methanolysed flax-seed extracts confirmed methanolysis as the crucial step in setting up any further analytical or preparative procedure concerned with secoisolariciresinol diglucoside.

Effects of vitamin E on liver DNA.

Vitamin E, both in the form of dl-alpha-tocopherol and dl-alpha-tocopheryl acetate, was capable of inducing an increased alkaline elution rate of liver DNA from rats treated i.p. with the vitamin.