Indirect inguinal hernia masquerading as a Spigelian hernia

Inguinal hernia usually developed and descended into scrotum. The clinical presentation is inguinal or inguino-scrotal swelling. Abdominal wall weakness as it is frequently seen in African tropical zones produces often rare clinical case. We report a case of inguinal hernia presented as an abdominal wall swelling clinically suggestive of a Spigelian hernia and discuss the mechanism

Losartan Slows Pancreatic Tumor Progression and Extends Survival of SPARC-Null Mice by Abrogating Aberrant TGFβ Activation

Pancreatic adenocarcinoma, a desmoplastic disease, is the fourth leading cause of cancer-related death in the Western world due, in large part, to locally invasive primary tumor growth and ensuing metastasis. SPARC is a matricellular protein that governs extracellular matrix (ECM) deposition and maturation during tissue remodeling, particularly, during wound healing and tumorigenesis. In the present study, we sought to determine the mechanism by which lack of host SPARC alters the tumor microenvironment and enhances invasion and metastasis of an orthotopic model of pancreatic cancer. We identified that levels of active TGFβ1 were increased significantly in tumors grown in SPARC-null mice. TGFβ1 contributes to many aspects of tumor development including metastasis, endothelial cell permeability, inflammation and fibrosis, all of which are altered in the absence of stromal-derived SPARC. Given these results, we performed a survival study to assess the contribution of increased TGFβ1 activity to tumor progression in SPARC-null mice using losartan, an angiotensin II type 1 receptor antagonist that diminishes TGFβ1 expression and activation in vivo. Tumors grown in SPARC-null mice progressed more quickly than those grown in wild-type littermates leading to a significant reduction in median survival. However, median survival of SPARC-null animals treated with losartan was extended to that of losartan-treated wild-type controls. In addition, losartan abrogated TGFβ induced gene expression, reduced local invasion and metastasis, decreased vascular permeability and altered the immune profile of tumors grown in SPARC-null mice. These data support the concept that aberrant TGFβ1-activation in the absence of host SPARC contributes significantly to tumor progression and suggests that SPARC, by controlling ECM deposition and maturation, can regulate TGFβ availability and activation

Overcoming ABCG2-mediated drug resistance with imidazo-[1,2-b]-pyridazine-based Pim1 kinase inhibitors

Purpose Multidrug efflux pumps such as ABCG2 confer drug resistance to a number of cancer types, leading to poor prognosis and outcome. To date, the strategy of directly inhibiting multidrug efflux pumps in order to overcome drug resistance in cancer has been unsuccessful. An alternative strategy is to target proteins involved in the regulation of multidrug efflux pump activity or expression. Pim1 kinase has been demonstrated to phosphorylate ABCG2, promote its oligomerisation and contribute to its ability to confer drug resistance. Methods In the present manuscript, imidazo-pyridazine-based inhibitors of Pim1 were examined for their ability to overcome ABCG2-mediated drug resistance. Drug efficacy was measured as a cytotoxic response or an effect on transport by ABCG2. Protein expression patterns were assessed using western immuno-blotting. Results The two Pim1 inhibitors increased the potency of flavopiridol, mitoxantrone, topotecan and doxorubicin, specifically in ABCG2-expressing cells. This effect was associated with an increase in the cellular accumulation of [3H]-mitoxantrone, suggesting direct impairment of the transporter. However, prolonged pre-incubation with the studied inhibitors greatly enhanced the effect on mitoxantrone accumulation. The inhibitors caused a significant time-dependent reduction in the expression of ABCG2 in the resistant cells, an effect that would improve drug efficacy. Conclusion Consequently, it appears that the Pim1 inhibitors display a dual-mode effect on ABCG2-expressing cancer cells. This may provide a powerful new strategy in overcoming drug resistance by targeting proteins that regulate expression of efflux pumps

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (4th edition)1.

In 2008, we published the first set of guidelines for standardizing research in autophagy. Since then, this topic has received increasing attention, and many scientists have entered the field. Our knowledge base and relevant new technologies have also been expanding. Thus, it is important to formulate on a regular basis updated guidelines for monitoring autophagy in different organisms. Despite numerous reviews, there continues to be confusion regarding acceptable methods to evaluate autophagy, especially in multicellular eukaryotes. Here, we present a set of guidelines for investigators to select and interpret methods to examine autophagy and related processes, and for reviewers to provide realistic and reasonable critiques of reports that are focused on these processes. These guidelines are not meant to be a dogmatic set of rules, because the appropriateness of any assay largely depends on the question being asked and the system being used. Moreover, no individual assay is perfect for every situation, calling for the use of multiple techniques to properly monitor autophagy in each experimental setting. Finally, several core components of the autophagy machinery have been implicated in distinct autophagic processes (canonical and noncanonical autophagy), implying that genetic approaches to block autophagy should rely on targeting two or more autophagy-related genes that ideally participate in distinct steps of the pathway. Along similar lines, because multiple proteins involved in autophagy also regulate other cellular pathways including apoptosis, not all of them can be used as a specific marker for bona fide autophagic responses. Here, we critically discuss current methods of assessing autophagy and the information they can, or cannot, provide. Our ultimate goal is to encourage intellectual and technical innovation in the field

Anomalies of coronary artery origin: About two cases

Anomalies of coronary artery origin are congenital malformations characterized by the abnormal birth of a coronary artery from the controlateral coronary aortic sinus (birth of the left coronary artery from the right sinus or birth of the right coronary artery from the left sinus). The artery concerned has an abnormal initial path between the aorta and the pulmonary artery; this segment is most often intramural, in the aortic wall. They are rare with a prevalence (0.1% to 0.3% of the population). They pose a high risk of sudden stress death related to exercise myocardial ischemia. The most common mode of discovery is aborted sudden death, but sometimes fortuitously. The contribution of multi-round CT is described for the positive diagnosis of these anatomical variations, sometimes delicate in coronary angiography, but also for the distinction between “benign” and “malignant” forms, potentially responsible for myocardial ischemia. Treatment is usually surgical in symptomatic forms. We report the cases of two patients with coronary connection abnormalities discovered in adulthood