Standards for the care of people with cystic fibrosis (CF); Planning for a longer life.

This is the final of four papers updating standards for the care of people with CF. That this paper "Planning a longer life" was considered necessary, highlights how much CF care has progressed over the past decade. Several factors underpin this progress, notably increased numbers of people with CF with access to CFTR modulator therapy.

Impact of illness on mothers of children with cystic fibrosis in Tunisia: A qualitative interview study: Impact of cystic fibrosis on Tunisian mothers.

Background: Caring for a child with cystic fibrosis (CF) is challenging and stressful and even more so in a country with limited resources. Our aim was to study the impact of CF on the daily life of mothers with children who have CF in Tunisia, emphasizing the difficulties encountered.

Methods: Overall, 20 participants were interviewed about their experiences of being caregivers and mothers of children with CF, including their knowledge about the condition, their attitude toward it, the impact of CF on their daily lives, the main difficulties they had faced, and their concerns and wishes about CF management.

Evaluation of a similarity anisotropic diffusion denoising approach for improving in vivo CEST-MRI tumor pH imaging.

Purpose: Chemical exchange saturation transfer MRI provides new approaches for investigating tumor microenvironment, including tumor acidosis that plays a key role in tumor progression and resistance to therapy. Following iopamidol injection, the detection of the contrast agent inside the tumor tissue allows measurements of tumor extracellular pH. However, accurate tumor pH quantifications are hampered by the low contrast efficiency of the CEST technique and by the low SNR of the acquired CEST images, hence in a reduced detectability of the injected agent.

A fast multislice sequence for 3D MRI-CEST pH imaging.

Purpose: Chemical exchange saturation transfer MRI can provide accurate pH images, but the slow scan time (due to long saturation periods and multiple offsets sampling) reduce both the volume coverage and spatial resolution capability, hence the possibility to interrogate the heterogeneity in tumors and organs. To overcome these limitations, we propose a fast multislice CEST-MRI sequence with high pH accuracy and spatial resolution.

Methods: The sequence first uses a long saturation pulse to induce the steady-state CEST contrast and a second short saturation pulse repeated after each image acquisition to compensate for signal losses based on an uneven irradiation scheme combined with a single-shot rapid acquisition with refocusing echoes readout.