Pulmonary gas exchange and ventilatory efficiency during exercise in health and diseases.

Introduction: Cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) is nowadays used to study the exercise response in healthy subjects and in disease. Ventilatory efficiency is one of the main determinants in exercise tolerance, and its main variables are a useful tool to guide pathophysiologists toward specific diagnostic pathways, providing prognostic information and improving disease management, treatment, and outcomes.

Areas Covered: This review will be based on today's available scientific evidence, describing the main physiological determinants of ventilatory efficiency at rest and during exercise, and focusing also on how CPET variables are modified in specific diseases, leading to the possibility of early diagnosis and management.

Ventilatory efficiency in long-term dyspnoeic patients following COVID-19 pneumonia.

Background: Long COVID is defined as persistency of symptoms, such as exertional dyspnea, twelve weeks after recovery from SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Objectives: To investigate ventilatory efficiency by the use of cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) in patients with exertional dyspnea despite normal basal spirometry after 18 (T) and 36 months (T) from COVID-19 pneumonia.

Methods: One hundred patients with moderate-critical COVID-19 were prospectively enrolled in our Long COVID program.

Early Stage In Vitro Bioprofiling of Potential Low-Molecular-Weight Organoboron Compounds for Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT)-Proposal for a Guide.

Given the renewed interest in boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT) and the intensified search for improved boron carriers, as well as the difficulties of coherently comparing the carriers described so far, it seems necessary to define a basic set of assays and standardized methods to be used in the early stages of boron carrier development in vitro. The selection of assays and corresponding methods is based on the practical experience of the authors and is certainly not exhaustive, but open to discussion. The proposed tests/characteristics: Solubility, lipophilicity, stability, cytotoxicity, and cellular uptake apply to both low molecular weight (up to 500 Da) and high molecular weight (5000 Da and more) boron carriers.