Case Report: Behavioral Disorder Following Hemispherotomy: A Valproate Effect?

Background: Hemispherotomy is an epilepsy surgery procedure applied to cure particularly pharmacorefractory lesional epilepsy due to unihemispheric pathologies. Such a disconnection of an entire hemisphere is followed by reorganizational processes. Methods: We describe an acute aggravation of behavioral problems following a hemispherotomy in a patient treated with valproic acid, which subsided once valproate was discontinued. Results: A 9-year-old boy with drug-resistant epilepsy caused by the residua of a perinatal stroke treated for several years with valproic acid and lamotrigine underwent hemispherotomy. Shortly after surgery, minimal preoperative behavioral problems intensified dramatically, and aggression occurred as a new symptom. Assuming a correlation between valproate treatment and the postoperative altered neuronal network, we tapered off valproate. The behavioral problems decreased in intensity with the reduction of valproate dose and disappeared after drug discontinuation. Conclusion: We describe severe behavioral problems after hemispherotomy that subsided when valproate was tapered off. While we cannot rule out a spontaneous correction of a post-hemispherotomy network dysregulation, our report raises awareness to possible altered effects of the anticonvulsant valproic acid parallel to reorganizational processes after hemispherotomy

Succesfull multidisciplinary treatment in a case of Buerger

A 58-year-old male patient had diagnosed with Buerger's disease for 30 years. Patient referred us with non-healing scar on his right thumb. In another center, amputation was suggested due to his non-healing scar. We have assessed the patient multidisciplinary with cardiovascular and plastic reconstructive esthetic surgery for non-healing scar. During the multidisciplinary surgical treatment we applied radial artery endarterectomy, cross finger flap reconstruction, after operation medically we have treated with cilostazol. Patient's scar completely healed. Follow up one year patient have no problem and radial artery in angiography was opened. © 2013, SciBioIMed.Org, Published by Reed Elsevier India Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved

Contrast Enhancement of Microscopy Images Using Image Phase Information

Contrast enhancement is an important preprocessing step for the analysis of microscopy images. The main aim of contrast enhancement techniques is to increase the visibility of the cell structures and organelles by modifying the spatial characteristics of the image. In this paper, phase information-based contrast enhancement framework is proposed to overcome the limitations of existing image enhancement techniques. Inspired by the groundbreaking design of the phase contrast microscopy (PCM), the proposed image enhancement framework transforms the changes in image phase into the variations of magnitude to enhance the structural details of the image and to improve visibility. In addition, the concept of selective variation (SV) technique is introduced and enhancement parameters are optimized using SV. The experimental studies that were carried out on microscopy images show that the proposed scheme outperforms the baseline enhancement frameworks. The contrast enhanced images produced by the proposed method have comparable cellular texture structure as PCM images.This work was supported by the Turkish Ministry of Development under KanSiL_2016K121540 Project

Phonophoresis in Treatment of Knee Osteoarthritis

[Purpose] The aim of this study was to compare the effectiveness of pulsed and continuous diclofenac gel phonophoresis with topical diclofenac gel treatment. [Methods] Eighty patients with knee osteoarthritis were randomly assigned to 4 groups. The first group received Continuous diclofenac gel phonophoresis, the second group received pulsed diclofenac gel phonophoresis, the third group received diclofenac gel with sham ultrasound, and the fourth group received acoustic gel applied with sham ultrasound. Range of knee motion, VAS pain at rest and in activity, the WOMAC Index and 20 in walking time were evaluated before the treatment, at the end of treatment and I month after the treatment. [Results] Improvements were found in VAS pain at rest, VAS pain in activity, WOMAC pain and physical function scores in all of the groups Lip to I month after the therapy. Both modalities of phonophoresis were shown to improve VAS pain at rest, VAS pain in activity, WOMAC pain and physical function scores compared to the other treatments. There was no significant difference in the improvements between the pulsed phonophoresis group and the continuous phonophoresis group. [Conclusion] We showed that both continuous and pulsed ultrasound diclofenac gel phonophoresis is more effective for pain and functional status of patients with knee osteoarthritis than topical application of diclofenac gel, and that the effectiveness of pulsed phonophoresis and continuous phonophoresis is simila

Synthesis and biological evaluation of novel pyrazolic chalcone derivatives as novel hepatocellular carcinoma therapeutics

Despite having the second highest mortality associated with cancer, currently Sorafenib is the only FDA-approved chemotherapeutic agent available for liver cancer patients which can only improve survival for few months. In this study, various pyrazolic chalcone analogous compounds were synthesized and evaluated as potential chemotherapeutic agents for the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Modifying the central pyrazole ring at the C(3)-position with different heteroaryl rings and substituting the C(4)-position of pyrazole with differently substituted chalcone moiety produced fouthy two variant compounds. For all these compounds, cytotoxicity was evaluated using sulforhodamine B assay and real time cell growth tracking, respectively. Based on 50\% inhibitory concentration (IC50) values, compounds 39, 42, 49, and 52 were shown to exhibit potent cytotoxic activity against all the cancer cell lines tested, and had better cytotoxic activities than the well-known chemotherapeutic drug 5-FU. Therefore, these compounds were chosen to be further evaluated in a panel of HCC cell lines. Flow cytometric analysis of HCC cells treated with compounds 39, 42, 49, and 52 demonstrated that these compounds caused cell cycle arrest at G2/M phase followed by the apoptotic cell death and impaired cell growth as shown by real-time cell growth surveillance. Consistent with these results, western blotting of HCC cells treated with the compounds resulted in molecular changes for cell cycle proteins, where p21 levels were increased independent of p53 and the levels of the key initiators of mitosis Cyclin B1 and CDK1 were shown to decrease upon treatment. In conclusion, chalcone derivatives 42 and 52 show potent bioactivities by modulating the expression of cell-cycle related proteins and resulting in cell-cycle arrest in the HCC cell lines tested here, indicating that the compounds can be considered as preclinical candidates. (C) 2017 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved

Memory for object locations: Priority effect and sex differences in associative spatial learning

This paper reports two experiments conducted to examine priority effects and sex differences in object location memory. A new task of paired position-learning was designed, based on the A-B A-C paradigm, which was used in paired word learning. There were three different paired position-learning conditions: (1) positions of several different objects (B-objects and C-objects) around referent objects (A-objects) were learned in the A-B A-C position-learning condition, (2) positions of several different objects with no referent objects were learned in the 0-B 0-C position-learning condition, and (3) positions of identical objects (stars) with no referent objects were learned in the 0-star 0-star position-only condition. The results revealed a significant priority effect on performance in the A-B A-C and the 0-B 0-C position-learning conditions but not in the 0-star 0-star position-only condition. Contradictory results were obtained with respect to the sex variable: a female superiority effect on paired position learning was significant in Experiment 1, but this effect was not replicated in Experiment 2. In addition, an articulatory suppression task used in Experiment 2 had a significant effect on recall of different object positions but no effect on recall of identical object positions. This suggested that verbal encoding was not necessary for learning of positions of identical objects. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved