Remote Symptom Monitoring in Thoracic Surgery Patients After Discharge.

Objective: Evaluate an electronic platform for remote symptom monitoring to enhance postdischarge care in thoracic surgery using patient reporting of symptoms.

Summary Background Data: Owing to the increased use of enhanced recovery after surgery protocols, patients are spending a larger portion of their postoperative course at home. For patients undergoing complex operations, this represents an opportunity for early identification of abnormal symptoms at home before deterioration.

Broth microdilution protocol for determining antimicrobial susceptibility of Legionella pneumophila to clinically relevant antimicrobials.

Currently there is no detailed, internationally agreed protocol defined to evaluate antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) for Legionella pneumophila (required to establish epidemiological cut-off value or "ECOFF" boundaries); therefore, antimicrobial resistance in these isolates cannot be defined. AST methods utilising media containing activated charcoal as an ingredient, to enable Legionella growth, are unreliable as noted in an internationally authored opinion paper and a new gold standard is required. Here we define a detailed protocol for broth microdilution (BMD) using defined cell culture collection-deposited control reference strains (Philadelphia-1 and Knoxville-1) as well as two accessible reference strains with moderately (lpeAB-carrying) and markedly (23S rRNA mutation-carrying) elevated azithromycin minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC).

Esophagectomy may have a role in stage IV esophageal adenocarcinoma.

Objective: We sought to determine whether aggressive local treatment provides a benefit in patients with stage IV esophageal adenocarcinoma and to determine factors associated with survival.

Methods: Patients with clinical stage IV esophageal adenocarcinoma at diagnosis who underwent esophagectomy from 2010 to 2023 were identified from our prospectively maintained database. Clinicopathologic and demographic characteristics were compared among patients by stage.

Antarctic cushion star Odontaster validus larval performance is negatively impacted by long-term parental acclimation to elevated temperature.

Cross-generational responses, when the parents' environment influences offspring performance, may contribute to species resilience to climate change in rapidly warming regions such as coastal Antarctica. Adult Antarctic sea stars Odontaster validus were conditioned in the laboratory to two temperature treatments (ambient, 0 °C and warming, +3 °C) for two years, and their gametes were used to generate larval offspring. The response of their larvae to five temperatures (0 °C, 1 °C, 2 °C, 3 °C, and 4 °C) was examined over 145 days.