Surgery for Traumatic Injury of the Trachea and Bronchus

Surgery for traumatic disruption of the trachea and the bronchus was evaluated with respect to the surgical outcome in three with tracheal injury and four with bronchial injury. In this series, the results were satisfied except for one who underwent delayed operation. Experience seems to indicate that the primary care to ensure security of air way is of great value in life-saving and guarantee of the outcome including pulmonary function following surgery. In conclusion, it is emphasized that the fortuitous result and preservation of pulmonary function are mandatory for pertinent treatment with expediously precise diagnosis

Acute Pancreatitis due to pH-Dependent Mesalazine That Occurred in the Course of Ulcerative Colitis

We report the case of a 26-year-old male who presented with acute pancreatitis during the course of treatment for pancolitic ulcerative colitis (UC) with a time-dependent mesalazine formulation, prednisolone and azathioprine (AZA). Despite a review of his clinical history and various tests, the cause of pancreatitis could not be determined. Since drug-induced pancreatitis was considered possible, administration of the time-dependent mesalazine preparation and AZA was discontinued, and conservative treatment for acute pancreatitis was performed. The pancreatitis promptly improved with these treatments, but drug lymphocyte stimulation test (DLST) for both the time-dependent mesalazine formulation and AZA was negative. A pH-dependent mesalazine formulation was given for maintenance therapy of UC. Subsequently, as the pancreatitis relapsed, drug-induced pancreatitis was strongly suspected. Administration of mesalazine was discontinued, and pancreatitis was smoothly in remission by conservative treatment. According to the positive DLST result for the pH-dependent mesalazine formulation and the clinical course, a diagnosis of pH-dependent mesalazine-induced pancreatitis due to this formulation was made. During the clinical course of UC, occurrence of drug-induced pancreatitis must always be considered

Esophagectomy in Combination with a Resection of Involved Lung for Esophageal Cancer

The combined resection with involved lung for esophageal carcinoma was evaluated in terms of surgical indication and outcome in the 6 patients who underwent subtotal esophagectomy with pulmonary resection. It was confirmed that the operation was technically feasible but the surgical results were unsatisfactory. It was reasoned that grave surgical insult and adjuvant therapy to prevent recurrence result in immunodepressive status of the host and tends to accompany postoperative complications related to operative death. In conclusion, prevention of immunosuppression for the host is required by meticulous cares of nutrition and elimination of surgical stress by staged operation in order to obtain satisfactory result after surgery

A novel approach for assessing neuromodulation using phase-locked information measured with TMS-EEG

Neuromodulation therapies such as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) are used to treat several neuropsychiatric disorders, including major depressive disorder (MDD). Recent work has highlighted the use of combined transcranial magnetic stimulation and electroencephalography (TMS-EEG) to evaluate the therapeutic effects of neuromodulation; particularly, the phase locking factor (PLF) and phase locking value (PLV) can reportedly assess neuromodulation-induced functional changes in cortical networks. To examine changes in TMS-induced PLV and PLF before and after ECT, and their relationship with depression severity in patients with MDD, TMS-EEG and the Montgomery–Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS; depression severity) were implemented before and after ECT in 10 patients with MDD. Single-pulse TMS was applied to the visual and motor areas to induce phase propagation in the visuo-motor network at rest. Functional changes were assessed using PLF and PLV data. Pre-ECT TMS-induced alpha band (9–12 Hz) PLV was negatively correlated with depression severity, and increments of post-ECT from pre-ECT TMS-induced alpha band PLV were positively correlated with the reduction in depression severity. Moreover, we found a negative correlation between pre-ECT TMS-induced PLF at TMS-destination and depression severity. Finally, differences in post-ECT TMS-induced PLF peak latencies between visual and motor areas were positively correlated with depression severity. TMS-EEG-based PLV and PLF may be used to assess the therapeutic effects of neuromodulation and depressive states, respectively. Furthermore, our results provide new insights about the neural mechanisms of ECT and depression

Genome-Wide Association Study Confirming Association of HLA-DP with Protection against Chronic Hepatitis B and Viral Clearance in Japanese and Korean

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection can lead to serious liver diseases, including liver cirrhosis (LC) and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC); however, about 85–90% of infected individuals become inactive carriers with sustained biochemical remission and very low risk of LC or HCC. To identify host genetic factors contributing to HBV clearance, we conducted genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and replication analysis using samples from HBV carriers and spontaneously HBV-resolved Japanese and Korean individuals. Association analysis in the Japanese and Korean data identified the HLA-DPA1 and HLA-DPB1 genes with Pmeta = 1.89×10−12 for rs3077 and Pmeta = 9.69×10−10 for rs9277542. We also found that the HLA-DPA1 and HLA-DPB1 genes were significantly associated with protective effects against chronic hepatitis B (CHB) in Japanese, Korean and other Asian populations, including Chinese and Thai individuals (Pmeta = 4.40×10−19 for rs3077 and Pmeta = 1.28×10−15 for rs9277542). These results suggest that the associations between the HLA-DP locus and the protective effects against persistent HBV infection and with clearance of HBV were replicated widely in East Asian populations; however, there are no reports of GWAS in Caucasian or African populations. Based on the GWAS in this study, there were no significant SNPs associated with HCC development. To clarify the pathogenesis of CHB and the mechanisms of HBV clearance, further studies are necessary, including functional analyses of the HLA-DP molecule

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