Volatile agents for cardiac protection in noncardiac surgery: a randomized controlled study.

Objective: Volatile anesthetics reduce the risk of myocardial infarction and mortality in coronary artery surgery. Recently, the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Guidelines suggested the use of volatile anesthetic agents for the maintenance of general anesthesia during noncardiac surgery in patients at risk for perioperative myocardial ischemia, but no randomized experience to document the cardioprotective effects of these agents exists in this setting. Therefore, the authors performed a prospective, randomized, controlled trial to compare the effects of sevoflurane versus total intravenous anesthesia, in terms of postoperative cardiac troponin I release in patients undergoing noncardiac surgery.

Improving the quality of data entry in a low-budget head injury database.

Background: To assess the efficacy of a centralised review of a voluntary low-budget head injury database with a retrospective analysis of data before and after a centralised review.

Method: A computerised data collection (Neurolink) on traumatic brain injury cases admitted to three neuro-intensive care units in Milan (Italy): analysis of a three-year period (1999-2001). Data from 499 patients (epidemiology, type of lesion, clinical course, monitoring, treatment, complications and outcome).

A study of some pathogenetic aspects of bovine viral diarrhea virus infection.

The cytopathic (CP) strain TVM-2 of bovine virus diarrhea virus (BVDV) induced in calves a severe disease, whereas the calves inoculated with the non-cytopathic (NCP) New York-1 strain, remained clinically normal. When calves were immunosuppressed with dexamethasone (DMS) they underwent an overt, generally fatal disease. This result was obtained with either the CP and the NCP strain of BVDV.

A further study on relationships between herpes simplex virus and Bovid herpesvirus-2.

Calves exposed by intravenous or intradermal inoculation with Herpes simplex virus (HSV), types 1 and 2, remained clinically normal and HSV was not recovered from nasal secretion nor blood samples. However, the clinical response of calves pre-inoculated with HSV, to Bovid herpesvirus-2 (BH-2) challenge infection was much milder than that in the challenge control calves, and the titer of BHV-2 by skin titration underwent a significant (2-2.5 log units) reduction in the HSV pre-inoculated calves.

A study of some pathogenetic aspects of bovine viral diarrhea virus infection.

The cytopathic (CP) TVM-2 strain of bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) induced in calves a severe disease, characterized by the clinical picture which is usually reported for the acute primary infection observed under natural conditions. In contrast, the calves inoculated with a different biotype of BVDV, the non-cytopathic (NCP) New York-1 strain, remained clinically normal with the only evidence of virus replication in these calves being the recovery of the virus from their pharyngeal swabbings and blood and also the detection of specific neutralizing antibody in their serums. When calves were immunosuppressed with dexamethasone (DMS), they underwent an overt systemic disease of such a severity that in most of the cases it ended with the death of the animals.