Bear bile: dilemma of traditional medicinal use and animal protection

Bear bile has been used in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) for thousands of years. Modern investigations showed that it has a wide range of pharmacological actions with little toxicological side effect and the pure compounds have been used for curing hepatic and biliary disorders for decades. However, extensive consumption of bear bile made bears endangered species. In the 1980's, bear farming was established in China to extract bear bile from living bears with "Free-dripping Fistula Technique". Bear farming is extremely inhumane and many bears died of illness such as chronic infections and liver cancer. Efforts are now given by non-governmental organizations, mass media and Chinese government to end bear farming ultimately. At the same time, systematic research has to be done to find an alternative for bear bile. In this review, we focused on the literature, laboratory and clinical results related to bear bile and its substitutes or alternative in English and Chinese databases. We examined the substitutes or alternative of bear bile from three aspects: pure compounds derived from bear bile, biles from other animals and herbs from TCM. We then discussed the strategy for stopping the trading of bear bile and issues of bear bile related to potential alternative candidates, existing problems in alternative research and work to be done in the future

Impact of opioid-free analgesia on pain severity and patient satisfaction after discharge from surgery: multispecialty, prospective cohort study in 25 countries

Background: Balancing opioid stewardship and the need for adequate analgesia following discharge after surgery is challenging. This study aimed to compare the outcomes for patients discharged with opioid versus opioid-free analgesia after common surgical procedures.Methods: This international, multicentre, prospective cohort study collected data from patients undergoing common acute and elective general surgical, urological, gynaecological, and orthopaedic procedures. The primary outcomes were patient-reported time in severe pain measured on a numerical analogue scale from 0 to 100% and patient-reported satisfaction with pain relief during the first week following discharge. Data were collected by in-hospital chart review and patient telephone interview 1 week after discharge.Results: The study recruited 4273 patients from 144 centres in 25 countries; 1311 patients (30.7%) were prescribed opioid analgesia at discharge. Patients reported being in severe pain for 10 (i.q.r. 1-30)% of the first week after discharge and rated satisfaction with analgesia as 90 (i.q.r. 80-100) of 100. After adjustment for confounders, opioid analgesia on discharge was independently associated with increased pain severity (risk ratio 1.52, 95% c.i. 1.31 to 1.76; P < 0.001) and re-presentation to healthcare providers owing to side-effects of medication (OR 2.38, 95% c.i. 1.36 to 4.17; P = 0.004), but not with satisfaction with analgesia (beta coefficient 0.92, 95% c.i. -1.52 to 3.36; P = 0.468) compared with opioid-free analgesia. Although opioid prescribing varied greatly between high-income and low- and middle-income countries, patient-reported outcomes did not.Conclusion: Opioid analgesia prescription on surgical discharge is associated with a higher risk of re-presentation owing to side-effects of medication and increased patient-reported pain, but not with changes in patient-reported satisfaction. Opioid-free discharge analgesia should be adopted routinely

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

The predicting factors and outcomes of caesarean section of the second twin

The aim of this study was to review the indications for caesarean delivery of second twins after vaginal delivery of a first twin (combined delivery) and the associated foetal outcomes of the second twin. Possible factors that could be employed to predict combined delivery were explored. This was a retrospective review of all twin pregnancies delivered in a tertiary maternity unit between 2000 and 2013. All twins (> =24 week gestation) with vaginal delivery of the first twin were reviewed. Of a total of 1039 pairs of twins, 441 pairs had vaginal delivery of the first twin, of which 47 (10.7%) needed combined delivery. Presentation of the second twin was found to be significantly associated with combined delivery (p < .001). The odds ratio for combined delivery for breech second twin was 2.4 compared with vertex second twins while the odds ratio for transverse lie second twin was 182.8. Second twins who were delivered by combined delivery had a higher incidence of 5 min Apgar score <7. The extremely high odds ratio for combined delivery for second twins in transverse lie would probably indicate that attempts at vaginal delivery of these vertex/transverse twin pregnancies would not be worthwhile.Impact statement It remains controversial in the literature whether non-vertex second twins are associated with a higher risk for combined delivery as compared to vertex second twins. Almost all previous studies have analysed the non-vertex second twins as a whole group rather than separating them into breech presentation and transverse lie. There is only one study analysing breech presentation and transverse lie of second twin separately but it has recruited only 14 patients. To our knowledge, the cohort is the largest available dataset comparing the odds ratio for combined delivery of breech and transverse lie of the second twin separately. We found that transverse lie of the second twin have extremely high rates of combined delivery with an odds ratio 182.8 and this may be ascribed to the lack of attempts to perform internal podalic version. Combined delivery is associated with higher maternal and neonatal morbidities. With such a high risk of transverse lie second twin in having combined delivery, it appears reasonable to advise women with vertex/transverse twins not to attempt vaginal delivery unless there are obstetricians who have experience in performing internal podalic version at the time of delivery. This is useful for patient counselling regarding the decision of the mode of delivery

Risk factors for severe postpartum haemorrhage during caesarean section for placenta praevia

The objective of this study was to evaluate the value of clinical and ultrasound risk factors in predicting severe postpartum haemorrhage (PPH) (≥1.5 L) in pregnancies undergoing caesarean section for placenta praevia. This cohort consists of all cases of placenta praevia undergoing caesarean delivery over a period of 5 years in a service unit. Patients and their delivery data were retrieved from an obstetric database. Ultrasound features were prospectively recorded before caesarean section. The incidence of caesarean section for placenta praevia was 0.98% (n = 215). Of these, 12.1% (n = 26) had severe PPH. A logistic regression model showed that major praevia, antepartum haemorrhage before delivery and anterior placenta remained significant factors associated with severe PPH. The sensitivity/specificity and positive/negative predictive value of the model are 96.2%, 59.8%, 24.8% and 99.1%, respectively. Our model had high sensitivity and negative predictive value for severe PPH during caesarean section for placenta praevia.Impact statement What is already known on this subject? Placenta praevia is known to be one of the leading causes of severe PPH. Many risk factors have been associated with severe bleeding during caesarean section for placenta praevia. However, the importance of individual factors in predicting pregnancy outcome remains controversial. What the results of this study add? Our model includes only three simple parameters, namely the presence of significant antepartum haemorrhage (APH) from the history, and anterior or posterior placenta and major or minor praevia from ultrasound findings, but could predict up to 96.2% of all severe PPH. More importantly, the absence of APH, a posterior minor praevia, was associated with a negative predictive value of 99.1% of severe PPH, implying that such cases could be treated as ‘normal’ low risk caesarean sections. What the implications are of these findings for clinical practice and/or further research? This simple model would allow differential pre-operative counselling of patients on risks and complications, planning and preparation of operation, allocation of staff as well as in contingency measures to be taken during operation. The establishment of a differential protocol for placenta praevia based on these simple risks factors and a prospective trial of such a protocol is suggested