Objective: To evaluate osteoporosis in asthmatic patients.
Methods: Bone mineral density (BMD) was measured using three different methods, namely computed X-ray densitometry (CXD), digital image processing (DIP), and dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA). The BMD data were standardized using the sex- and age-matched mean value of BMD.
Patients: One hundred and twenty-eight patients with persistent asthma.
Results: The standardized BMD expressed as Z-score in asthmatic patients was significantly lower than the norm (Z-score -0.48 +/- 1.17, mean +/- SD). In patients who had been continuously treated with oral corticosteroids (OCS), the standardized BMD was significantly lower than that in patients treated without OCS. In addition, the standardized BMD in patients 60 years and over (Z-score -0.71 +/- 1.10, mean +/- SD, n = 58) had decreased to a greater extent than the decrease seen in patients under 60 years (Z-score -0.30 +/- 1.21, n=70). Moreover, BMD in these older patients decreased after a 6-month treatment protocol involving the use of an inhaled corticosteroid, fluticasone propionate (FP). During the 6 months, the treatment did not affect BMD in patients who were receiving FP for the first time. Although the BMD did not decrease in patients treated with FP without OCS, the BMD in patients treated with both FP and OCS decreased during the 6 months.
Conclusion: These results indicate that the continuous administration of OCS in patients with severe persistent asthma, particularly in older patients, may affect BMD in the short term even at a low OCS dose.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.2169/internalmedicine.41.798 | DOI Listing |
Clin Trials
January 2025
Rare Diseases Team, Office of New Drugs, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Silver Spring, MD, USA.
Background/aims: Rare disease drug development faces unique challenges, such as genotypic and phenotypic heterogeneity within small patient populations and a lack of established outcome measures for conditions without previously successful drug development programs. These challenges complicate the process of selecting the appropriate trial endpoints and conducting clinical trials in rare diseases. In this descriptive study, we examined novel drug approvals for non-oncologic rare diseases by the U.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the context of Chinese clinical texts, this paper aims to propose a deep learning algorithm based on Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT) to identify privacy information and to verify the feasibility of our method for privacy protection in the Chinese clinical context. We collected and double-annotated 33,017 discharge summaries from 151 medical institutions on a municipal regional health information platform, developed a BERT-based Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Model (BiLSTM) and Conditional Random Field (CRF) model, and tested the performance of privacy identification on the dataset. To explore the performance of different substructures of the neural network, we created five additional baseline models and evaluated the impact of different models on performance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiomark Med
January 2025
The Nutristasis Unit, Synnovis, St. Thomas' Hospital, London, UK.
This case describes a patient with pancreatic exocrine insufficiency and persistently elevated serum vitamin B12 concentrations that were not due to supplementation or associated with hepatic or hematological pathology. Laboratory investigations suggested the presence of macro-B12 as the cause of this patient's raised serum vitamin B12. Macro-B12 is often formed when vitamin B12-vitamin binding proteins (transcobalamin and haptocorrin) complex with immunoglobulins.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClin Trials
January 2025
Department of Biostatistics, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA.
Introduction: The sequential parallel comparison design has emerged as a valuable tool in clinical trials with high placebo response rates. To further enhance its efficiency and effectiveness, adaptive strategies, such as sample size adjustment and allocation ratio modification can be employed.
Methods: We compared the performance of Jennison and Turnbull's method and the Promising Zone approach for sample size adjustment in a two-phase sequential parallel comparison design study.
Ocul Immunol Inflamm
January 2025
Ocular Oncology Service, Institute of Oncology, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico.
Purpose: To present the case of a young patient with BRAF V600E-mutant cutaneous melanoma who developed bilateral choroidal metastases complicated by neovascular glaucoma (NVG) in both eyes following the interruption of nivolumab therapy.
Methods: A 28-year-old female with primary cutaneous melanoma of the left hand underwent surgical resection and adjuvant nivolumab. Immunotherapy was discontinued due to immune-related acute interstitial nephritis.
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