Tag: nevin manimala

Psychiatr Danub. 2021 Spring-Summer;33(Suppl 4):1309-1312.

ABSTRACT

Preservation of health, increase in life expectancy determine the need to improve the effectiveness of medical recommendations, which, despite the success of pharmacology, are insufficient for reasons related to the low level of compliance with these recommendations by patients. The authors of the article believe that compliance is a kind of quantifiable and behaviorally realized reflection of therapeutic interaction, refracted through the prism of the patient’s individual personality characteristics. Participants of the study-148 employees of medical institutions: 12 men, 136 women, their age ranged from 27 to 74 years. The research tool was the neuropsychological rapid method. 3 research subgroups were formed: 27-40 years (37 people), 41-50 years (60 people), 51 years and older (51 people). Comparison of the results of subtests of neuropsychological Express technique showed heterogeneous results in subgroups of the study. In addition, the dynamic characteristics of psychological processes were evaluated: depletion, inertia, impulsivity. A significant difference in the performance of the graphomotor test between the subjects of the age subgroup of 27-40 years and the subgroup of 41-50 years was statistically confirmed. For the qualitative performance of this simple test requires a sufficient level of development of all structural and functional components of brain functions and, in particular, the “front” function of programming and management and consistent organization of movements. In older people revealed a much greater number of errors, interruptions of the test than the representatives of the more “young” subgroup. Similar results were obtained when comparing the “young” and “old” subgroups. Despite the absence of signs of decompensation of concomitant pathology, representatives of the subgroups took a different amount of concomitant therapy. Using the scale of assessment of drug compliance, it was found that compliance is most reduced in the subgroup of 41-50 years. In this subgroup, a comprehensive decrease in compliance across the “behavioral”, “emotional”, and “cognitive” domains was detected in 87.8% of cases, while in the younger subgroup partial non-compliance was 32.4%, in the older subgroup – 74.5% An analysis of the states of cognitive functions in 52 representatives of the middle age subgroup with low compliance rates showed that, unlike other representatives of the same subgroup, their indices for a number of neuropsychological tests are close to the results of more adult participants in the study. Individuals demonstrating low compliance with quite favorable CNS resources are at risk for the formation of pathological aging.

PMID:35503947

Psychiatr Danub. 2021 Spring-Summer;33(Suppl 4):1287-1293.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Previous studies have indicated that changes in the expression of certain inflammatory biomarkers are associated with cognitive impairment (CI), but only a limited number of studies were conducted in patients with acute ischemic stroke (AIS). The present study aimed to evaluate the potential association between serum levels of several inflammatory markers and cognitive impairment in AIS patients. These markers included interleukin 6 (IL-6), C-reactive protein (CRP), plasma fibrinogen, erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), and white blood cell (WBC) count.

SUBJECTS AND METHODS: All participants were prospectively recruited from the Department of Neurology, Clinical Center University of Sarajevo. A total of 100 patients with first-ever AIS were included in stroke group and 30 in the non-stroke control group. Each patient underwent a comprehensive cognitive assessment and laboratory tests (IL-6, CRP, fibrinogen, ESR and WBC) within the first three days of admission. Cognitive status was assessed using cognitive instruments: the Mini-Mental State Examination, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, the Frontal Assessment Battery, and the Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination-Revised.

RESULTS: Female stroke patients with CI had higher levels of IL-6 compared to those without CI and controls (p<0.017). AIS patients with CI had significantly higher plasma fibrinogen (p<0.001) and CRP levels (p<0.001) than controls, whereas there was no significant difference in comparison with cognitively intact patients. There were no statistical differences in ESR or WBC count between groups.

CONCLUSIONS: Of the inflammatory markers, only IL-6 levels were associated with CI in AIS patients. Measuring circulating IL-6 could be used as a screening test to identify all such patients.

PMID:35503943

Can J Diet Pract Res. 2022 May 3:1-4. doi: 10.3148/cjdpr-2022-012. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Purpose: To determine if intake (servings/day) of total dairy and/or dairy subtypes (milk, cheese, and yogurt) were associated with biomarkers related to dyslipidemia, insulin sensitivity and inflammation in a sample of cardio-metabolically healthy young children from the Guelph Family Health Study at the University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada.Methods: Baseline data from 42 children (aged 2.0-6.2 years) from 33 families who provided a dietary assessment and a fasted blood sample were included in this cross-sectional analysis. Linear and logistic regressions using generalized estimating equations were used for analysis and models were adjusted for age, gender, and household income.Results: In total, 42 children (3.74 ± 1.23 years old; mean (± SD)) consumed median (25th percentile, 75th percentile) servings/day of 1.70 (1.16, 2.81) for total dairy, 0.74 (0.50, 1.70) for milk, 0.63 (0.00, 1.16) for cheese, and 0.00 (0.00, 0.38) for yogurt. Cheese intake was significantly inversely associated with LDL cholesterol (-0.16 (95% CI: -0.29, -0.03) mmol/L per serving; P = 0.02)). No other associations between dairy intake and biomarkers were significant.Conclusions: Cheese intake was inversely associated with LDL cholesterol in this preliminary study of cardio-metabolically healthy young children, thereby warranting further research on dairy intake and cardiometabolic risk factors.

PMID:35503897 | DOI:10.3148/cjdpr-2022-012

Am J Dermatopathol. 2022 Apr 27. doi: 10.1097/DAD.0000000000002208. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Spitzoid melanocytic neoplasms are a diagnostically challenging class of lesions in dermatopathology. Recently, molecular assays and immunohistochemical markers have been explored as ancillary methods to assist in the diagnostic workup. Specifically, preferentially expressed antigen in melanoma (PRAME) immunohistochemistry is a nuclear stain commonly positive in melanomas, but not in nevi. This study investigates PRAME immunoreactivity (≥75% positive nuclear staining in tumor cells) in a set of 59 spitzoid melanocytic neoplasms with known clinical outcomes. We compared PRAME status with (1) the clinical outcomes, (2) the morphologic diagnoses, and (3) the status of TERT promoter mutation. Regarding clinical outcomes, 3 cases developed metastatic disease, of which 2 expressed diffusely positive PRAME staining. Of the 56 cases that did not show evidence of metastasis, 6 expressed diffusely positive PRAME staining. Morphologically, diffusely positive PRAME staining was seen in 7 of 21 cases (33.3%) diagnosed as melanoma and only 1 benign tumor 1 of 38 (2.6%). There were 4 of 8 cases with a TERT promoter mutation which were diffusely PRAME-positive compared with 4 of 51 cases without TERT promoter mutation (P = 0.001). Our results show a statistically significant correlation between PRAME expression and the diagnosis, outcome, and TERT promoter mutation status of atypical spitzoid melanocytic neoplasms, suggesting immunohistochemistry for PRAME can help support a suspected diagnosis. However, because of occasional false-positive and negative test results, correlation with the clinical and histologic findings as well as results from other tests is needed for the interpretation of diagnostically challenging spitzoid melanocytic neoplasms.

PMID:35503885 | DOI:10.1097/DAD.0000000000002208

IEEE J Biomed Health Inform. 2022 May 3;PP. doi: 10.1109/JBHI.2022.3171673. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Sepsis is a systemic inflammatory response caused by pathogens such as bacteria. Because its pathogenesis is not clear, the clinical manifestations of patients vary greatly, and the alarming incidence and mortality pose a great threat to patients and medical systems, especially in Intensive Care Unit (ICU). The traditional judgment criteria have the problem of low specificity. Artificial intelligence models could greatly improve the accuracy of sepsis prediction and judgment. Based on the XGBoost machine learning framework taken demographic, vital signs, laboratory tests and medical intervention data as input, this paper proposes a novel model for dynamically predicting sepsis and assessing risk. To realize the model, two methods for feature construction are introduced. For the observed time series data of vital signs and laboratory tests, time-dependent method performs to construct the time- dependent characteristics after statistical screening. For the clinical intervention data, statistical counting method is applied to construct count-dependent characteristics. Moreover, a new objective function is proposed for the XGBoost framework, and the first-order and second-order gradient of the objective function are also given for model training. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods at present, the proposed model has the best performance, with AUROC improved by 5.4% on the MIMIC-III dataset and 2.1% on PhysioNet Challenge 2019 dataset. The data processing and training methods of this model can be conveniently applied in different electronic health record systems, and has a wide application prospect.

PMID:35503852 | DOI:10.1109/JBHI.2022.3171673

IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2022 May 3;PP. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2022.3171982. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disorder affecting 1% of people worldwide, deep learning (DL) algorithms-based electroencephalograph (EEG) analysis provides the possibility for accurate epileptic seizure (ES) prediction, thereby benefiting patients suffering from epilepsy. To identify the preictal region that precedes the onset of seizure, a large number of annotated EEG signals are required to train DL algorithms. However, the scarcity of seizure onsets leads to significant insufficiency of data for training the DL algorithms. To overcome this data insufficiency, in this paper, we propose a preictal artificial signal synthesis algorithm based on a generative adversarial network to generate synthetic multichannel EEG preictal samples. A high-quality single-channel architecture, determined by visual and statistical evaluations, is used to train the generators of multichannel samples. The effectiveness of the synthetic samples is evaluated by comparing the ES prediction performances without and with synthetic preictal sample augmentation. The leave-one-seizure-out cross validation ES prediction accuracy and corresponding area under the receiver operating characteristic curve evaluation improve from 73.0% and 0.676 to 78.0% and 0.704 by 10x synthetic sample augmentation, respectively. The obtained results indicate that synthetic preictal samples are effective for enhancing ES prediction performance.

PMID:35503840 | DOI:10.1109/TBME.2022.3171982

IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2022 May 3;PP. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2022.3171493. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: Acoustic emission (AE) sensed from knee joints during weight-bearing movements greatly increases with joint deterioration, but the relationship between AE patterns and specific anatomical damage, as seen for example in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), is unknown. This knowledge is essential to validate AE biomarkers for the evaluation of knee joints, and forms the objective of this exploratory work to associate knee AE and MRI.

METHODS: A novel processing framework is proposed to enable direct correlation between static 3D MRI of knees and their dynamic 1D AE during sit-stand-sit movements. It comprises a method to estimate articular cartilage thickness according to joint angle from knee MRI, and a method to derive statistically representative waveform features according to joint angle from movement and load-dependent knee AE.

RESULTS: In 10 subjects diagnosed with knee osteoarthritis, age 55~79 years and body mass index 25~35 kg/m2, a strong inverse relationship between knee AE and cartilage thickness in the medial tibiofemoral compartment around the fully standing position was observed. Knees with thinner articular cartilage generated more AE with higher amplitude, greater energy, longer duration, and higher frequencies, in agreement with the assumption of more intense articulation friction under full body weight.

CONCLUSION: AE provides promising quantitative biomarkers in knee joint disease.

SIGNIFICANCE: These findings provide impetus for the further development of AE as a low-cost non-invasive biomarker modality to improve the management of knee joint disease.

PMID:35503843 | DOI:10.1109/TBME.2022.3171493

Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg. 2022 May 3:1945998221099028. doi: 10.1177/01945998221099028. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: Airborne aerosol transmission, an established mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 spread, has been successfully mitigated in the health care setting through the adoption of universal masking. Upper airway endoscopy, however, requires direct access to the face, thereby potentially exposing the clinic environment to infectious particles. This study quantifies aerosol production during rigid nasal endoscopy (RNE) and RNE with debridement (RNED) as compared with intubation, a posited gold standard aerosol-generating procedure.

STUDY DESIGN: Prospective cross-sectional study.

SETTING: Subspecialty single-center clinic and surgical study.

METHOD: Three aerosol detectors (NANOSCAN-3910, OPS-3330, and APS-3321) with a particle size sensitivity of 10 to 20,000 nm were utilized to detect particulate production during the clinical care of 209 patients undergoing RNE/RNED and 25 patients undergoing intubation.

RESULTS: RNE and RNED produced statistically significant particles over baseline in 29.3% and 51.0% of subjects (P = .003-.049 and .002-.047, respectively). Intubation produced statistically significant particles in 31.2% (P = .001-.015). The mean ± SD particle diameter in all tests was 69.9 ± 10.5 nm with 99.7% <300 nm. There were no statistical differences in particle production among RNE, RNED, and intubation. The presence of concomitant cough, sneeze, or prolonged speech similarly did not significantly affect particle production during any procedure.

CONCLUSIONS: Instrumentation of nasal airway produces airborne aerosols to a similar degree of those seen during intubation, independent of reactive patient behaviors such as cough or sneeze. These data suggest that an improved understanding is necessary of both the definition of an aerosol-generating procedure and the functional consequences of procedural aerosol generation in clinical settings.

PMID:35503253 | DOI:10.1177/01945998221099028

Cureus. 2022 Mar 28;14(3):e23557. doi: 10.7759/cureus.23557. eCollection 2022 Mar.

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION: Venipuncture is often a painful procedure causing significant anxiety, distress, and psychological consequences. We evaluated the efficacy of estradiol cream and compared it with a eutectic mixture of local anesthetics (EMLA) cream for alleviation of venipuncture pain and to make cannulation easy in female obese patients.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: The clearance from the Institutional Ethical Committee as well as prior written and informed consent were obtained from the participants. A total of 105 obese female adult patients aged between 25 and 64 years belonging to the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) physical status I and II with body mass index (BMI) > 30 kg/m² were included in our study. The study participants were randomly allocated into three groups: In group I, a placebo cream was applied; in group II, estradiol cream was applied, and in group III, EMLA cream was applied. Any abnormal sensation at the site of application of the cream was noted and followed up at 0, 2, and 6 hours for the same. The primary outcome was the measurement of the severity of the pain experienced during venipuncture using the visual analog scale (VAS). Ease of cannulation was our secondary outcome. VAS was compared with the Z test. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) v16.0 software (SPSS Inc., Chicago) was used for statistical analysis. A p-value of <0.05 was considered statistically significant.

RESULT: The final analysis was carried out on 25 patients in group I, 27 patients in group II, and 33 patients in group III. There was no significant improvement in the ease of cannulation in group II when compared to group I. The mean VAS was similar in group I and group II, whereas it was significantly reduced in group III (p < 0.05).

CONCLUSION: EMLA cream was found to significantly reduce the pain of venipuncture in comparison to placebo and estradiol cream. There is no beneficial effect of estradiol cream in reducing the pain from venipuncture or in ease of cannulation compared to placebo.

PMID:35503278 | PMC:PMC9044105 | DOI:10.7759/cureus.23557

Rev Environ Health. 2022 May 3. doi: 10.1515/reveh-2021-0166. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

As environmental and occupational noise can be health hazards, recent studies have investigated the effects of noise exposure during pregnancy. Despite biological plausibility and animal studies supporting an association, studies focusing on congenital anomalies and perinatal mortality as outcomes of noise exposure are still scarce. We performed a scoping review to collect, summarise, and discuss the existing scientific research about the relationships between noise exposure during pregnancy and congenital anomalies and/or perinatal mortality. We searched electronic databases for papers published between 1970 and March 2021. We included 16 studies (seven on congenital anomalies, three on perinatal mortality, and two on both congenital anomalies and perinatal mortality). We assessed four studies on congenital hearing dysfunction as the definition of congenital anomalies includes functional anomalies. We found few studies on this topic and no studies on the combined effects of occupational and environmental noise exposures. Evidence suggests a small increase in the risk of congenital anomalies in relation to occupational and to a lesser extent environmental noise exposure. In addition, few studies investigated perinatal mortality and the ones that did, used different outcome definitions, so no conclusions could be made. However, a recent big cross-sectional study demonstrated an association between road traffic noise and stillbirth. A few studies suggest a possible association between congenital hearing dysfunction and occupational noise exposure during pregnancy. Future studies with larger samples, better exposure assessments, and better statistical modelling strategies are needed to investigate these relationships further.

PMID:35503245 | DOI:10.1515/reveh-2021-0166