Acute appendicitis secondary to Enterobius vermicularis infection in a middle-aged man: a case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>Acute appendicitis due to <it>Enterobius vermicularis </it>is very rare, affecting mostly children. Whether pinworms cause inflammation of the appendix or just appendiceal colic has been a matter of controversy.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>A Caucasian 52-year-old man was referred to our Emergency Department with acute abdominal pain in his right lower quadrant. The physical and laboratory examination revealed right iliac fossa tenderness and leukocytosis with neutrophilia. An open appendectomy was performed. The pathological examination showed the lumen containing pinworms. Two oral doses of mebendazole were administered postoperatively. The follow-up to date was without incident and he was free of symptoms one year after the operation.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The finding of <it>E. vermicularis </it>in appendectomy pathological specimens is infrequent. Parasitic infections rarely cause acute appendicitis, especially in adults.</p> <p>One should keep in mind that the clinical signs of intestinal parasite infection may mimic acute appendicitis, although rare. A careful evaluation of symptoms such as pruritus ani, or eosinophilia on laboratory examination, could prevent unnecessary appendectomies.</p

Mitochondrial superclusters influence age of onset of Parkinson’s disease in a gender specific manner in the Cypriot population: A case-control study

Despite evidence supporting an involvement of mitochondrial dysfunction in the pathogenesis of some neurodegenerative disorders, there are inconsistent findings concerning mitochondrial haplogroups and their association to neurodegenerative disorders, including idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD).To test this hypothesis for the Greek-Cypriot population, a cohort of 230 PD patients and 457 healthy matched controls were recruited. Mitochondrial haplogroup distributions for cases and controls were determined. Association tests were carried out between mitochondrial haplogroups and PD.Mitochondrial haplogroup U was associated with a reduced PD risk in the Cypriot population. After pooling mitochondrial haplogroups together into haplogroup clusters and superclusters, association tests demonstrated a significantly protective effect of mitochondrial haplogroup cluster N (xR) and supercluster LMN for PD risk only in females. In addition, for female PD cases belonging to UKJT and R (xH, xUKJT) haplogroup, the odds of having a later age of onset of PD were 13 and 15 times respectively higher than the odds for female cases with an H haplogroup.Statistically significant associations regarding PD risk and PD age of onset were mostly detected for females thus suggesting that gender is a risk modifier between mitochondrial haplogroups and PD status / PD age of onset. The biological mechanisms behind this gender specificity remain to be determined

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IST PROJECT 35111 Tightening knowledge sharing in distributed software communities by applying semantic technologies Tightening knowledge sharing in distributed software communities by applying semantic technologies STRE

Fermentation characteristics of Fusarium oxysporum grown on acetate

In this study, the growth characteristics of Fusarium oxysporum were evaluated in minimal medium using acetate or different mixtures of acetate and glucose as carbon source. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of acetic acid that F. oxysporum cells could tolerate was 0.8% w/v while glucose was consumed preferentially to acetate. The activity of isocitrate lyase was high when cells were grown on acetate and acetate plus glucose indicating an activation of the glyoxylate cycle. Investigation of the metabolic fingerprinting and footprinting revealed higher levels of intracellular and extracellular TCA cycle intermediates when F. oxysporum cells were grown on mixtures of acetate and glucose compared to growth on only glucose. Our data support the hypothesis that a higher flux through TCA cycle during acetate consumption could significantly increase the pool of NADH, resulting in the activation of succinate-propionate pathway which consumes reducing power (NADH) via conversion of succinate to propionyl-CoA and produce propionate. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Aortic Arch. The Final Frontier in Cardiac Surgery

Aortic arch pathologies such as acute aortic dissection and aneurysmal disease represent surgical challenges. Various emerging techniques and surgical prostheses have expanded the therapeutic armamentarium over the last years with one principal objective; to simplify the operation and reduce the surgical time. Besides the classic elephant trunk which has been regarded as an evolutionary leap in the treatment of extensive thoracic disease, other novel surgical approaches such as the frozen elephant trunk, the thoracic endovascular aortic repair (TEVAR) and the hybrid open branched stent grafts have been introduced. This brief review aims to evaluate the surgical alternatives used in the management of complex aortic arch and proximal descending aorta pathologies with particular consideration given to the contemporary approaches which endorse single stage operation

A Comparative Study between SVM and Fuzzy Inference System for the Automatic Prediction of Sleep Stages and the Assessment of Sleep Quality

This paper compares two supervised learning algorithms for predicting the sleep stages based on the human brain activity. The first step of the presented work regards feature extraction from real human electroencephalography (EEG) data together with its corresponding sleep stages that are utilized for training a support vector machine (SVM), and a fuzzy inference system (FIS) algorithm. Then, the trained algorithms are used to predict the sleep stages of real human patients. Extended comparison results are demonstrated which indicate that both classifiers could be utilized as a basis for an unobtrusive sleep quality assessment

Priority Handling Aggregation Technique (PHAT) for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have limited power capabilities, whereas they serve applications which usually require specific packets, i.e. High Priority Packets (HPP), to be delivered before a deadline. Hence, it is essential to reduce the energy consumption and to have real-time behavior. To achieve this goal we propose a hybrid technique which explores the benefits of data aggregation without data size reduction in combination with prioritized queues. The energy consumption is reduced by appending data from incoming packets with already buffered Low Priority Packets (LPP). The real-time behavior is achieved by directly forwarding the HPP to the next node. Our study explores the impact of the proposed hybrid technique in several all-to-one data flow scenarios with various traffic loads, wait time intervals and percentage of HPP. Our results show gain up to 23,3% in packet loss and 36,6% in energy consumption compared with the direct forwarding of packets. © 2012 IEEE.IEEE Industrial Electronics Societ