Regional vulnerability of the hippocampus to repeated motor activity deprivation

Spontaneous vertical and horizontal exploratory movements are integral components of rodent behavior. Little is known, however, about the structural and functional consequences of restricted spontaneous exploration. Here, we report two experiments to probe whether restriction in vertical activity (rearing) in rats could induce neuro-hormonal and behavioral disturbances. Rearing movements in rats were deprived for 3 h/day for 30 consecutive days by placing the animal into a circular tunnel task. Rats temporarily deprived of rearing behavior showed elevated plasma corticosterone levels but no detectable psychological distress and/or anxiety-related behavior within an elevated plus maze. However, rats emitted a greater number of 22-kHz ultrasonic vocalizations and spent significantly more time vocalizing than controls when deprived of their rearing behavior. Despite intact spatial performance within wet- and dry-land spatial tasks, rearing-deprived rats also exhibited a significant alteration in search strategies within both spatial tasks along with reduced volume and neuron number in the hippocampal subregion CA2. These data suggest a new approach to test the importance of free exploratory behavior in endocrine and structural manifestations. The results support a central role of the CA2 in spontaneous exploratory behavior and vulnerability to psychological stress. © 2015 Elsevier B.V

Resection of thoracic malignancies infiltrating cardiac structures with use of cardiopulmonary bypass

Background: Only few reports exist on malignant thoracic neoplasms that require cardiopulmonary bypass during resection. We aimed to investigate the early and late clinical outcome of these patients. Methods: Patients with thoracic malignancies that underwent surgery between 2002 and 2014 were analyzed. All patients had cardiopulomonary bypass support during resection. Clinical and perioperative data was retrospectively reviewed for outcome and overall survival. Results: Fifteen patients (12 female, mean age of 55 ± 15 years, range 24 to 80 years) were identified. Eleven (8 female) were diagnosed with primary thoracic malignomas and four with metastases. Three patients died early postoperatively. Patients diagnosed with sarcoma had a significantly worse outcome than non-sarcoma patients (83.3 ± 15.2 % after 1 year, 31.3 ± 24.5 % after 5 years vs. 83.3 ± 15.2 % after 1 year, 0 ± 0 % after 5 years, p = 0.005). Conclusions: Malignancies with extension into cardiac structures or infiltration of great vessels can be resected with cardiopulmonary bypass support and tolerable risk. Carefully selected patients can undergo advanced operative procedures with an acceptable 1-year-survival, but only few patients achieved good long-term outcome

Comparing Functional and Cellular Layouts: A Simulation Study Based on Standardization

In the last decade, over two dozen simulation studies have focused on comparing cellular and functional layouts. The results reported by these studies vary widely, however. This remains true even when the key performance measure is flow time. These variations reflect the disparate manufacturing and operating environments, as well as differences in parts demands, set-up economies, overall loads and other factors. This work attempts to reduce the sources of variation due to different operating assumptions while retaining the variability associated with differences in part mix and demand characteristics. Instead of focusing on a single data source, this study uses a test bed of six problems extracted from the literature and ensures they share the same operational rules. The simulation results show that conversion to CMS can reduce flow times (relative to the job shop configuration) consistently across all data sets, provided the same operating rules and ranges for key parameter are used. We investigate the reduction in flow time while controlling for the key factors of set-up reduction, overall load on the system and batch size. We also assess the benefits of using transfer batches as a further factor in reducing flow time. Our overall conclusion is that set-up reductions in cells can overcome pooling losses, even under the conservative assumptions where batch size remain unchanged and the material transport times in the job shop are assumed to be negligible

Stress enhances return-based behaviors in Wistar rats during spatial navigation without altering spatial performance: Improvement or deficit?

Stress is frequently reported to be deleterious to spatial learning and memory. However, there are many instances in which spatial performance is not affected by stress. This discrepancy observed across different studies, in addition to the animals' strain and gender, may be caused by the type of the task employed to assess stress-related behavioral changes. The present experiments set out to investigate the effects of repeated restraint stress (3. h/21. days) on spatial performance within the two wet-land (Morris water task; MWT) and dry-land (the ziggurat task; ZT) tasks for spatial learning and memory in adult male Wistar rats. All rats were tested before and after stress treatment. Stressed rats gained less weight than controls. Stress also enhanced circulating corticosterone (CORT). We did not observe a deleterious effect of stress on spatial learning and memory in either of the tasks: both groups successfully performed the wet- and dry-land tasks across all spatial testing days, indicating intact spatial cognition in control and stress rats. However, daily restraint stress for 21. days significantly caused enhancement in rats' memory-dependent returns during the goal-directed investigation in the ZT. The number of returns on learning days was not affected by repeated restraint stress. Return-based spatial investigation induced by stress only on memory days in the dry-land task, not only emphasize on the task-dependent nature of stress-related alterations, it may reveal one of the silent, but arguably deleterious effects of stress on spatial memory in Wistar rats. © 2013 Elsevier Inc

Development of a Severe Mitral Valve Stenosis Secondary to the Treatment of Mitral Regurgitation with a Single MitraClip

We report a patient with class III heart failure symptoms due to mitral regurgitation (MR) subsequent to nonischemic cardiomyopathy. The patient underwent percutaneous transcatheter mitral valve repair using a single MitraClip, which reduced the MR; however it created mild-to-moderate mitral stenosis, which progressed to severe mitral stenosis. Subsequently the patient underwent mitral valve replacement surgery

Successful support of biventricular heart failure patients by new EXCOR® Adult pumps with bileaflet valves: a prospective study

AIMS The Berlin Heart EXCORAdult biventricular assist device (BiVAD) is an approved mechanical circulatory support for patients with end-stage biventricular heart failure. In this prospective post-market clinical follow-up study, we present the first clinical experience of the new EXCORAdult pump with bileaflet (BL) valves in Europe. METHODS AND RESULTS After CE-mark approval in August 2014, a total of 12 patients were enrolled with a mean age of 44 years ± 11 (range 21-58 years). The majority of patients (n = 11) were in INTERMACS level 1 or 2. Eight patients had a median pre-operative extracorporeal life support (ECLS) of 6 days (range 1-37 days). Primary end point was survival, either to heart transplantation (HTx), recovery or alive at 12 months on device, whichever occurred first. Secondary end point was the number of adverse events throughout EXCORBiVAD support. Median support time up to last follow-up on EXCORBiVAD device was 248 days (range 57-381 days) and patient survival at 1 year was 92%. Half of the EXCORBiVAD patients (n = 6) were transplanted and five patients were still on support at 1 year post-implantation. Complications during EXCORBiVAD support were thoracic bleeding, exit site infection and ischemic cerebrovascular incidents in three cases, respectively. CONCLUSION The new EXCORAdult pump with BL provides pulsatile high cardiac output with excellent outcome and successful bridging to HTx, particularly in critically ill patients with INTERMACS level 1 or 2 at the time of implantation