Raltegravir, tenofovir, and emtricitabine in an HIV-Infected patient with HCV chronic hepatitis, NNRTI intolerance and protease inhibitors-induced severe liver toxicity

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>in HIV-infected patients with HCV-related chronic hepatitis, liver impairment and drug toxicity may substantially reduce the number of possible therapeutic options.</p> <p>Case Description</p> <p>we here describe the case of an HCV-HIV coinfected woman who had repeated severe episodes of drug-related liver toxicity with indinavir, saquinavir, fosamprenavir, and darunavir, with minimal further therapeutic options left in this class. Previous treatment-limiting side effects with efavirenz and nevirapine also precluded use of non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors. Introduction of an integrase-inhibitor regimen based on raltegravir, tenofovir, and emtricitabine allowed a prompt achievement of undetectable viral load and a substantial rise of CD4 count to high levels, with no subsequent episodes of hepatic toxicity, and no other side effects.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>given the relatively common prevalence of HCV-related chronic hepatitis among people with HIV, raltegravir might represent an important alternative option for a substantial number of patients who cannot be treated with protease inhibitors or NNRTI because of drug-related hepatic toxicity.</p

Are bullies more productive? Empirical study of affectiveness vs. issue fixing time

Human Affectiveness, i.e., The emotional state of a person, plays a crucial role in many domains where it can make or break a team's ability to produce successful products. Software development is a collaborative activity as well, yet there is little information on how affectiveness impacts software productivity. As a first measure of this impact, this paper analyzes the relation between sentiment, emotions and politeness of developers in more than 560K Jira comments with the time to fix a Jira issue. We found that the happier developers are (expressing emotions such as JOY and LOVE in their comments), the shorter the issue fixing time is likely to be. In contrast, negative emotions such as SADNESS, are linked with longer issue fixing time. Politeness plays a more complex role and we empirically analyze its impact on developers' productivity

A Structural Investigation of Heteroleptic Lanthanide Substituted Cyclopentadienyl Complexes

The synthesis and structural authentication of novel heteroleptic lanthanide complexes supported by bulky cyclopentadienyl ligands is herein presented. Steric effects play a fundamental role in the coordination motifs.</p

The emotional side of software developers in JIRA

Issue tracking systems store valuable data for testing hypotheses concerning maintenance, building statistical prediction models and (recently) investigating developer affectiveness. For the latter, issue tracking systems can be mined to explore developers emotions, sentiments and politeness |affects for short. However, research on affect detection in software artefacts is still in its early stage due to the lack of manually validated data and tools. In this paper, we contribute to the research of affects on software artefacts by providing a labeling of emotions present on issue comments. We manually labeled 2,000 issue comments and 4,000 sentences written by developers with emotions such as love, joy, surprise, anger, sadness and fear. Labeled comments and sentences are linked to software artefacts reported in our previously published dataset (containing more than 1K projects, more than 700K issue reports and more than 2 million issue comments). The enriched dataset presented in this paper allows the investigation of the role of affects in software development

Effect of psychosocial stress and coping strategies on non-surgical periodontal therapy in patients with generalized stage III/IV periodontitis: a longitudinal intervention study

Objectives: The aim of this longitudinal intervention study was to assess the impact of psychosocial stress and coping response strategies on the clinical outcomes in periodontitis patients treated with non-surgical periodontal therapy (NSPT). Materials and methods: After the administration of psychological questionnaires, patients diagnosed with generalized stage III–IV periodontitis were categorized into different groups depending on their stress levels (10-item perceived stress level (PSS-10)) and coping response strategies (coping responses inventory (CRI)). Clinical data were collected 1 week before and 3 months after the completion of NSPT. Results: Of the 90 patients included at baseline, 27 presented major and 63 minor stress levels, while 40 had avoidance and 50 approach coping behavior. All clinical parameters were similar at the baseline across different categories. At re-evaluation, full-mouth bleeding score (FMBS), mean probing pocket depth (PPD), and number of residual pathological pockets were significantly superior in groups with higher stress levels (p <0.001, p =0.001, and p =0.020, respectively), while higher full-mouth plaque scores (FMPS) and FMBS were found in patients with avoidance coping strategies (p =0.009 and p <0.001, respectively). When jointly evaluated, an added detrimental effect of coping styles on allostatic load was observed. Multivariate analysis confirmed a significant effect of stress levels and coping strategies on final FMBS, but not of coping on mean PPD. Conclusion: Psychosocial stress and avoidance coping strategy seem to negatively influence the clinical outcomes of NSPT at short term (NCT04739475; 9/1/2017). Practical implications: Based on these findings, patients reflecting these psychological profiles should be considered at greater risk for poor NSPT response and may benefit from complementary stress management strategies

Impact of pulsed-wave-Doppler velocity-envelope tracing techniques on classification of complete fetal cardiac cycles

Fetal echocardiography is an operator-dependent examination technique requiring a high level of expertise. Pulsed-wave Doppler (PWD) is often used as a reference for the mechanical activity of the heart, from which several quantitative parameters can be extracted. These aspects suggest the development of software tools that can reliably identify complete and clinically meaningful fetal cardiac cycles that can enable their automatic measurement. Several scientific works have addressed the tracing of the PWD velocity envelope. In this work, we assess the different steps involved in the signal processing chains that enable PWD envelope tracing. We apply a supervised classifier trained on envelopes traced by different signal processing chains for distinguishing complete and measurable PWD heartbeats from incomplete or malformed ones, which makes it possible to determine the impact of each of the different processing steps on the detection accuracy. In this study, we collected 43 images and labeled 174,319 PWD segments from 25 pregnant women volunteers. By considering seven envelope tracing techniques and the 23 different processing steps involved in their implementation, the results of our study reveal that, compared to the steps investigated in most other works, those that achieve binarisation and envelope extraction are significantly more important (p &lt; 0.05). The best approaches among those studied enabled greater than 98% accuracy on our large manually annotated dataset

Relationship between gastric pouch and GERD after laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy

open9noAims and objectives Laparoscopic Sleeve Gastrectomy (LSG) is considered safe and effective even as conversion procedure after primary bariatric operations. The correlation between gastric pouch volumes and gastro-esophageal reflux disease's (GERD) symptoms (heartburn, reflux, regurgitation) remains unclear (1, 2). With this study we want to assess a correlation between the gastric remnant size and GERD.openPomerri, F.; Romanucci, G.; Barbiero, G.; Zuliani, M.; Ortu, V.; Miotto, D.; Albanese, A.; Prevedello, L.; Foletto, M.Pomerri, Fabio; Romanucci, G.; Barbiero, G.; Zuliani, M.; Ortu, V.; Miotto, Diego; Albanese, A.; Prevedello, L.; Foletto, M