Paracentral acute middle maculopathy in otherwise, young healthy female patients.

Purpose: The retina is supplied with blood through superficial and deep capillary systems. Paracentral acute middle maculopathy (PAMM) is a relatively new terminology based on pathognomonic findings in the spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT). A connection with various retinal vascular diseases has been described, which is indicative of an ischemic etiology.

Intellectual disabilities and dementia: New tasks and experiences of Austrian formal caregivers.

Background: In Austria, due to its history, only relatively little research on the topic of intellectual disabilities and dementia has been conducted to date. The present study thus aims to explore the challenges and tasks currently facing formal caregivers, together with assessing their wishes for further development.

Methods: Ten semi-structured interviews were held with formal caregivers.

Construction of item-level scales from the Personality Assessment Inventory to assess levels of personality functioning.

The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) introduced the clinician-rated Levels of Personality Functioning Scale (LPFS) as an indicator of general personality functioning based on four elements: Identity, Self-Direction, Empathy, and Intimacy. Construct validation strategies were employed to select and evaluate items from the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; Morey, 2007) to measure the four elements of the LPFS. In Study 1, conceptual ratings of PAI items produced lists of candidate items for the four elements.

Patient-derived head and neck tumor slice cultures: a versatile tool to study oncolytic virus action.

Head and neck cancer etiology and architecture is quite diverse and complex, impeding the prediction whether a patient could respond to a particular cancer immunotherapy or combination treatment. A concomitantly arising caveat is obviously the translation from pre-clinical, cell based in vitro systems as well as syngeneic murine tumor models towards the heterogeneous architecture of the human tumor ecosystems. To bridge this gap, we have established and employed a patient-derived HNSCC (head and neck squamous cell carcinoma) slice culturing system to assess immunomodulatory effects as well as permissivity and oncolytic virus (OV) action.

Dysbiosis of skin microbiota with increased fungal diversity is associated with severity of disease in atopic dermatitis.

Background: Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a multifactorial inflammatory skin disease and an altered skin microbiota with an increase of Staphylococcus aureus has been reported. However, the role of fungi remains poorly investigated.

Objectives: We aimed to improve the understanding of the fungal skin microbiota, the mycobiota, in AD in relation to the bacterial colonization.