Helping spine surgeons detect pre-surgical psychological distress in complex spine patients: an observational pilot study.

Study Design: Retrospective analysis.

Objective: Analysis of a standardized, pre-surgical psychological evaluation program for complex spine surgery. Adult spinal deformity (ASD) patients have a high rate of comorbid mental health conditions.

The Seattle spine score: Predicting 30-day complication risk in adult spinal deformity surgery.

Background: Complication rates in complex spine surgery range from 25% to 80% in published studies. Numerous studies have shown that surgeons are not able to accurately predict whether patients are likely to face post-operative complications, in part due to biases based on individual experience. The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate a predictive risk model and decision support system that could accurately predict the likelihood of 30-day postoperative complications in complex spine surgery based on routinely measured preoperative variables.

The anterior cardiac plexus: an intrinsic neurosecretory site within the stomatogastric nervous system of the crab Cancer productus.

The stomatogastric nervous system (STNS) of decapod crustaceans is modulated by both locally released and circulating substances. In some species, including chelate lobsters and freshwater crayfish, the release zones for hormones are located both intrinsically to and at some distance from the STNS. In other crustaceans, including Brachyuran crabs, the existence of extrinsic sites is well documented.

Antibody response in salmonids against the 70 kDa serine protease of Aeromonas salmonicida studied by a monoclonal antibody-based ELISA.

An antigen-capture enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (cELISA) based on monoclonal antibodies (mAb) was set up and evaluated for selective detection of salmonid antibody responses to the antigen P1, which is a weakly immunogenic exoprotease of typical Aeromonas salmonicida. This new assay permits a specific determination of anti-protease-antibodies, without antigen purification. Serum antibodies induced by the strongly immunogenic lipopolysaccharide could reliably be discriminated from anti-P1-antibodies.

Testing fish vaccines with an in vitro lymphocyte blastogenesis assay.

Lethal-challenge experiments are provided by German law till now for testing fish vaccines. Finding an in vitro-assay which could replace this experiments was subject of our work. Two questions must have been answered to develop the lymphocyte blastogenesis assay: Do lymphocytes of immunised fish react the same way as lymphocytes of naive fish, being incubated with antigen and is there a coherence between the lymphocyte's in-vitro-response and the immune status of challenged fish.