Preoperative MRI-based vertebral bone quality (VBQ) score assessment in patients undergoing lumbar spinal fusion.

Background Context: The importance of bone status assessment in spine surgery is well recognized. The current gold standard for assessing bone mineral density is dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA). However, DEXA has been shown to overestimate BMD in patients with spinal degenerative disease and obesity.

Procedure-Specific Complications Associated with Ultrasound-Guided Erector Spinae Plane Block for Lumbar Spine Surgery: A Retrospective Analysis of 342 Consecutive Cases.

Purpose: Presumed benefits of erector spinae plane blocks (ESPB) include an enhanced safety profile and few complications. There are few large series, which report the incidence of complications associated with ESPB on a procedure-specific basis. The objective of this retrospective cohort study was to estimate the incidence of complications of ESPB in a large series of patients undergoing lumbar spine surgery.

A multifaceted cellular damage repair and prevention pathway promotes high-level tolerance to β-lactam antibiotics.

Bactericidal antibiotics are powerful agents due to their ability to convert essential bacterial functions into lethal processes. However, many important bacterial pathogens are remarkably tolerant against bactericidal antibiotics due to inducible damage repair responses. The cell wall damage response two-component system VxrAB of the gastrointestinal pathogen Vibrio cholerae promotes high-level β-lactam tolerance and controls a gene network encoding highly diverse functions, including negative control over multiple iron uptake systems.

Genetic Determinants of Penicillin Tolerance in Vibrio cholerae.

Many bacteria are resistant to killing (tolerant) by typically bactericidal antibiotics due to their ability to counteract drug-induced cell damage. , the cholera agent, displays an unusually high tolerance to diverse inhibitors of cell wall synthesis. Exposure to these agents, which in other bacteria leads to lysis and death, results in a breakdown of the cell wall and subsequent sphere formation in Spheres readily recover to rod-shaped cells upon antibiotic removal, but the mechanisms mediating the recovery process are not well characterized.