J Am Med Dir Assoc
January 2025
Hierarchical self-assembly of nanostructures with addressable complexity has been a promising route for realizing novel functional materials. Traditionally, the fabrication of such structures on a large scale has been achievable using top-down methods but with the cost of complexity of the fabrication equipment resolution and limitation mainly to 2D structures. More recently bottom-up methods using molecules like DNA have gained attention due to the advantages of low fabrication costs, high resolution and simplicity in an extension of the methods to the third dimension.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Pneumonia is a very common infection in the cognitively impaired adult population, often leading to long-term deterioration, in physical and cognitive performance. Evidence is lacking on whether chronic comorbidities and drug use are risk factors for pneumonia in persons with Alzheimer's disease (AD). The objective of this study was to investigate the risk factors of pneumonia in community dwellers with and without AD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Acute onset of interstitial lung disease (ILD) has been described in patients with idiopathic inflammatory myositis (IIM), but controlled studies about this issue are sparse. The aim of this study was to compare disease onset, demographics, and high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) patterns in IIM-ILD and other connective tissue disease (CTD)-ILDs.
Methods: Clinical and radiological data of 22 IIM-ILD and 132 other CTD-ILD patients was retrospectively gathered from hospital registries between January 2000 and November 2019.
Unlabelled: Lynch syndrome (LS) is the most common hereditary cancer syndrome. Early diagnosis improves prognosis and reduces health care costs, through existing cancer surveillance methods. The problem is finding and diagnosing the cancer predisposing genetic condition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Juvenile polyposis syndrome (JPS) is a rare, autosomal-dominantly inherited cancer predisposition caused in approximately 50% of cases by pathogenic germline variants in SMAD4 and BMPR1A. We aimed to gather detailed clinical and molecular genetic information on JPS disease expression to provide a basis for management guidelines and establish open access variant databases.
Methods: We performed a retrospective, questionnaire-based European multicenter survey on and established a cohort of SMAD4/BMPR1A pathogenic variant carriers from the medical literature.
Contemporary collective effective doses to the population from x-ray and nuclear medicine examinations in Finland in 2018 was estimated. The estimated effective dose per caput from x-ray examinations increased from year 2008 to 2018 respectively from 0.45 mSv to 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn contemporary interventional cardiology, for typical elderly patients, the most severe radiation-related harm to patients can be considered to come from skin exposures. In this paper, maximum local skin doses in cardiological procedures are explored with Gafchromic film dosimetry. Film and reader calibrations and reading were performed at the Secondary Standards Dosimetry Laboratory of the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK), and data were gathered from seven hospitals in Finland.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe amount of interventional procedures such as percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI), pacemaker implantation (PI) and ablations has increased within the previous decade. Simultaneously, novel fluoroscopy mainframes enable lower radiation doses for patients and operators. Therefore, there is a need to update the existing diagnostic reference levels (DRLs) and propose new ones for common or recently introduced procedures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMobile, vehicle-installed road weather sensors are becoming ubiquitous. While mobile sensors are often capable of making observations on a high frequency, their reliability and accuracy may vary. Large-scale road weather observation and forecasting are still mostly based on stationary road weather stations (RWS).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInterventional cardiac procedures may be associated with high patient doses and therefore require special attention to protect the patients from radiation injuries such as skin erythema, cardiovascular tissue reactions or radiation-induced cancer. In this study, patient exposure data is collected from 13 countries (37 clinics and nearly 50 interventional rooms) and for 10 different procedures. Dose data was collected from a total of 14,922 interventional cardiology procedures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground & Aims: Patients with Lynch syndrome are at high risk for developing colorectal cancer (CRC). Regular colonoscopic surveillance is recommended, but there is no international consensus on the appropriate interval. We investigated whether shorter intervals are associated with lower CRC incidence and detection at earlier stages by comparing the surveillance policies in Germany, which evaluates patients by colonoscopy annually, in the Netherlands (patients evaluated at 1-2-year intervals), and Finland (patients evaluated at 2-3-year intervals).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Persons with Alzheimer's disease (AD) are frequently hospitalized from infection-related causes. There are no previous studies investigating hospitalization associated with antibiotic initiation in persons with AD.
Objective: To investigate the frequency and risk of hospitalization associated with oral antibiotic initiation among community dwellers with and without AD.
As in any medical intervention, there is either a known or an anticipated benefit to the patient from undergoing a medical imaging procedure. This benefit is generally significant, as demonstrated by the manner in which medical imaging has transformed clinical medicine. At the same time, when it comes to imaging that deploys ionising radiation, there is a potential associated risk from radiation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe ACCIRAD project, commissioned by the European Commission (EC) to develop guidelines for risk analysis of accidental and unintended exposures in external beam radiotherapy (EBRT), was completed in the year 2014. In 2015, the "General guidelines on risk management in external beam radiotherapy" were published as EC report Radiation Protection (RP)-181. The present document is the third and final report of the findings from the ACCIRAD project.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: We have previously reported a high incidence of colorectal cancer (CRC) in carriers of pathogenic variants ) despite follow-up with colonoscopy including polypectomy.
Methods: The cohort included Finnish carriers enrolled in 3-yearly colonoscopy ( = 505; 4625 observation years) and carriers from other countries enrolled in colonoscopy 2-yearly or more frequently ( = 439; 3299 observation years). We examined whether the longer interval between colonoscopies in Finland could explain the high incidence of CRC and whether disease expression correlated with differences in population CRC incidence.
Optimization is one of the key concepts of radiation protection in medical imaging. In practice, it involves compromising between the image quality and dose to the patient; the dose should not be higher than necessary to achieve an image quality (or diagnostic information) needed for the clinical task. Monitoring patient dose is a key requirement toward optimization.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGenome-wide association studies have been successful in elucidating the genetic basis of colorectal cancer (CRC), but there remains unexplained variability in genetic risk. To identify new risk variants and to confirm reported associations, we conducted a genome-wide association study in 1,701 CRC cases and 14,082 cancer-free controls from the Finnish population. A total of 9,068,015 genetic variants were imputed and tested, and 30 promising variants were studied in additional 11,647 cases and 12,356 controls of European ancestry.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The aim of the study was to assess patient dose from whole-body computed tomography (CT) in association with patient size, automatic exposure control (AEC) and intravenous (IV) contrast agent.
Patients And Methods: Sixty-five testicular cancer patients (mean age 28 years) underwent altogether 279 whole-body CT scans from April 2000 to April 2011. The mean number of repeated examinations was 4.
Background: The risk of metachronous colorectal cancer is high after surgical resection for first colon cancer in Lynch syndrome.
Objective: This study aimed to examine whether extended surgery decreases the risk of subsequent colorectal cancer and improves long-term survival.
Design: This was a retrospective study.
Approximately 15% of colorectal cancers exhibit microsatellite instability (MSI), which leads to accumulation of large numbers of small insertions and deletions (indels). Genes that provide growth advantage to cells via loss-of-function mutations in microsatellites are called MSI target genes. Several criteria to define these genes have been suggested, one of them being simple mutation frequency.
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