Beware of the Unexpected: Acute Coronary Thrombosis Following the Mildly Symptomatic COVID-19 Infection and Two Different Therapeutic Options

COVID-19 infection was declared a pandemic in March 2020 and is responsible for high morbidity and mortality around the globe. Although the most common clinical presentation is respiratory, cardiac complications are common and create new challenges for healthcare. We discuss two mildly symptomatic outpatients with COVID-19 presenting with acute ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) and high coronary thrombus burden without atherosclerotic plaque. Our report describes two different therapeutic approaches that illustrate the challenges encountered in the management of disseminated coronary thrombosis in patients with STEMI and COVID-19. Clinicians should be aware of the high pro-coagulant state caused by COVID-19, even in mildly symptomatic outpatients, and aggressive pharmacological therapy may be an effective alternative treatment option to percutaneous coronary intervention

Relationship Between Heart Rate Recovery and Mean Platelet Volume in Healthy Individuals

Heart rate recovery index (HRRI) and mean platelet volume (MPV) are two cardiovascular prognostic markers. Low HRRI and high MPV values have been observed in several diseases and conditions. However, the relationship between these two markers is unclear. In this study, the relationship between HRRI and MPV in healthy individuals is examined. Materials and Methods: The exercise tests performed between January and December 2020 were evaluated, and 120 individuals who met the study criteria were included in the present study. An abnormal HRRI was defined as a decrease in heart rate of 12 beats or more until one minute after the peak of exercise. Those with abnormal HRRI were defined as the study group (n=60), and those with normal HRRI as the control group (n=60). Results: A total of 120 healthy individuals were included in the study (54% female; mean age 40.14±7.90 years). High- er MPV values were detected in the study group when compared to the control group (10.27±0.10 fl vs. 9.44±0.12 fl; p<0.001). This significance continued in the logistic regression analysis (odds ratio=3.78, p<0.001). In addition, a moderate negative correlation was found between HRRI and MPV (r=-0.404, p<0.001). The MPV value of 10.25 fl was identified as an effective cutoff point for the prediction of abnormal HRRI (area under the curve [AUC]: 0.758; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.674–0.843). Conclusion: Healthy individuals with abnormal HRRI have elevated MPV levels. Additionally, a negative correlation be- tween MPV and HRRI in healthy subjects indicates a causal relation between MPV and autonomic dysfunction

The relationship between epicardial fat thickness and gestational diabetes mellitus

Aim: Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is associated with cardiovascular diseases; however, the relationship between epicardial fat thickness (EFT) and GDM remains unclear. The present study evaluates and compares EFT using transthoracic echocardiography in pregnant women with GDM. Materials and methods: This cross-sectional study included 129 pregnant women in the third trimester: 65 with GDM (GDM group) and 64 with uncomplicated pregnancies (control group). As defined by the World Health Organization, the diagnosis of GDM was based on an abnormal 2-h oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) results. We used echocardiography to measure EFT in blood samples for all the participants. Results: The postprandial blood glucose level was significantly higher in the GDM group than in the control group (P < 0.001). There were no significant differences in BMI, heart rate, systolic and diastolic blood pressure or lipid parameters between the groups. In the GDM group, isovolumic relaxation time (IVRT) parameters were significantly higher than in the control group. EFT was significantly higher in the GDM group (P < 0.001) and was correlated with postprandial glucose, BMI, age, and heart rate in both the groups. Only postprandial glucose and BMI remained significantly associated with EFT after multiple stepwise regression analysis. Conclusion: Echocardiographically measured EFT was significantly higher in the patients with GDM. The findings show that EFT was strongly correlated with postprandial glucose. © 2014 Nar et al

Genetic relationship between Kangal, Akbash and other dog populations

Kangal and Akbash dogs are the two well-known shepherd dog breeds in Turkey. In order to contribute to the understanding of the genetic relationship between Kangal dogs, Akbash dogs and the dogs from different regions of Eurasia, 585 base pair (bp) segment of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region was sequenced from Kangals and Akbashes. Sequences of the Kangal and Akbash dogs examined in the present study were comparatively examined with those of previous studies on dogs. Consensus neighbour-joining tree with bootstrapping, which is constructed based on pairwise Fst values between populations, indicated that Kangal dogs and Akbash dogs are on different branches of the tree. Furthermore, the nodes of these branches were supported with high bootstrap values. In conclusion, the present study indicated that Kangal and Akbash dogs might have descended maternally from different origins along the evolutionary history of domestic dogs

Co-location detection on the Cloud

In this work we focus on the problem of co-location as a first step of conducting Cross-VM attacks such as Prime and Probe or Flush+Reload in commercial clouds. We demonstrate and compare three co-location detection methods namely, cooperative Last-Level Cache (LLC) covert channel, software profiling on the LLC and memory bus locking. We conduct our experiments on three commercial clouds, Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure. Finally, we show that both cooperative and non-cooperative co-location to specific targets on cloud is still possible on major cloud services

SpecTre: A Tiny Side-Channel Resistant Speck Core for FPGAs

Emerging applications such as the Internet of Things require security solutions that are small and low cost, yet feature solid protection against a wide range of sophisticated attacks. Lightweight cryptographic schemes such as the Speck cipher that was recently proposed by the NSA aim to solve some of these challenges. However, before using Speck in any practical application, sound protection against side-channel attacks must be in place. In this work, we propose a bit-serialized implementation of Speck, to achieve minimal area footprint. We further propose a Speck core that is provably secure against first-order side-channel attacks using a threshold implementation technique which depends on secure multiparty computation. The resulting design is a tiny crypto core that provides AES-like security in under 45 slices on a low-cost Xilinx Spartan 3 FPGA. The first-order side-channel resistant version of the same core needs less than 100 slices. The security of the protected core is validated by state-of-the-art side-channel leakage detection tests

How did the updated 2019 european society of cardiology/european atherosclerosis society risk categorization for patients with diabetes affect the risk perception and lipid goals, a simulated analysis of real-life data from EPHESUS study

Background: The recent 2019 European Society of Cardiology/European Atherosclerosis Society practice guidelines introduced a new risk categorization for patients with diabetes. We aimed to compare the implications of the 2016 and 2019 European Society of Cardiology/European Atherosclerosis Society guidelines with regard to the lipid-lowering treatment use, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol goal attainment rates, and the estimated proportion of patients who would be at goal in an ideal setting. Methods: Patients with diabetes were classified into 4 risk categories according to 2019 European Society of Cardiology/European Atherosclerosis Society dyslipidemia guidelines from the database of EPHESUS (cross-sectional, observational, countrywide registry of cardiology outpatient clinics) study. The use of lipid-lowering treatment and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol goal attainment rates were then compared according to previous and new guidelines. Results: This analysis included a total of 873 diabetic adults. Half of the study population (53.8%) were on lipid-lowering treatment and almost one-fifth (19.1%) were on high-intensity statins. While low-density lipoprotein cholesterol goal was achieved in 19.5% and 7.5% of patients, 87.4% and 69.6% would be on target if their lipid-lowering treatment was intensified according to 2016 and 2019 European Society of Cardiology/European Atherosclerosis Society lipid guidelines, respectively. The new target <55 mg/dL could only be achieved in 2.2% and 8.1% of very high-risk primary prevention and secondary prevention patients, respectively. Conclusion: The control of dyslipidemia was extremely poor among patients with diabetes. The use of lipid-lowering treatment was not at the desired level, and high-intensity lipid-lowering treatment use was even lower. Our simulation model showed that the high-dose statin plus ezetimibe therapy would improve goal attainment; however, it would not be possible to get goals with this treatment in more than one-third of the patients

Fine grain Cross-VM Attacks on Xen and VMware are possible!

This work exposes further vulnerabilities in virtualized cloud servers by mounting Cross-VM cache attacks in Xen and VMware VMs targeting AES running in the victim VM. Even though there exists a rich literature on cache attacks on AES, so far only a single work, demonstrating a working attack on an ARM platform running a L4Re virtualization layer has been published. Here we show that AES in a number popular cryptographic libraries including OpenSSL, PolarSSL and Libgcrypt are vulnerable to Bernstein’s correlation attack when run in Xen and VMware (bare metal version) VMs, the most popular VMs used by cloud service providers (CSP) such as Amazon and Rackspace. We also show that the vulnerability persists even if the VMs are placed on different cores in the same machine. The results of this study shows that there is a great security risk to AES and (data encrypted under AES) on popular cloud services