<Orignal>The Relationship Between the Pharmacological Effects of Benzodiazepines and Their in vivo Binding Sites in the Brain of Rats.

ベンゾジアゼピン系薬剤とフェノバルビタール薬理作用と脳内分布との関連を生体内で調べるため, 60匹のラット(体重470～480 g)を3郡に分け, 3^H-diazepam, 3^H-flunitrazepamまたは3^H-ohenobarbital 5μciを投与した。それぞれのグループのラットは薬剤の静脈内投与後3分, 10分, または40分の時点で断頭し, 各組織の放射能を測定し, d.p.m/g・tissueに換算した。この結果, 3^H-diazepamの放射線量は脳幹および視床下部で他の大脳皮質に比べ有意に高かった。また, 3^H-phenobarbitalの脳内濃度は換与後40分経ってもほとんど低下しなかった。これらの結果はベンゾジアゼピン系薬剤の薬理作用との密接な関連があり, in-vitroで証明されたbenzobiazepinereceotorはin-vivoではあまり重要な意味を持たない可能性があることを示唆している。To compare the in vitro pharmacological effect and in the brain distribution of benzodiazepines and phenobarbital, three group of sixty anesthetized rats (470～480g) were administered 5μCi of 3^H-diazepam, 3^H-flunitrazepam or 3^H-phenobarbital. The rats were decapitated 3, 10, or 40 minutes after the intravenous injection of these drugs. Radioactivity of the tissue was measured and calculated as d.p.m./g. tissue. 3^H-diazepam radioactivity in the brainstem and hypothalamus was significantly higher than in the brain cortex 3 and 10 minutes after the injection. 3^H-flunitrazepam radioactivity in the brain cortex was higher than in other regions. There was no significant decrease in 3^H-phenobarbital brain concentration, even 40 minutes after injection. The distribution of benzodiazepine is closely related with its pharmacological effect, and this suggests that in vitro benzodiazepine binding sites are not responsible for the pharmacological action in vivo

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

Microendoscope-Assisted Versus Open Posterior Lumbar Interbody Fusion for Lumbar Degenerative Disease: A Multicenter Retrospective Cohort Study

Background and objectives: Minimally invasive surgery has become popular for posterior lumbar interbody fusion (PLIF). Microendoscope-assisted PLIF (ME-PLIF) utilizes a microendoscope within a tubular retractor for PLIF procedures; however, there are no published reports that compare Microendoscope-assisted to open PLIF. Here we compare the surgical and clinical outcomes of ME-PLIF with those of open PLIF. Materials and Methods: A total of 155 consecutive patients who underwent single-level PLIF were registered prospectively. Of the 149 patients with a complete set of preoperative data, 72 patients underwent ME-PLIF (ME-group), and 77 underwent open PLIF (open-group). Clinical and radiographic findings collected one year after surgery were compared. Results: Of the 149 patients, 57 patients in ME-group and 58 patients in the open-group were available. The ME-PLIF procedure required a significantly shorter operating time and involved less intraoperative blood loss. Three patients in both groups reported dural tears as intraoperative complications. Three patients in ME-group experienced postoperative complications, compared to two patients in the open-group. The fusion rate in ME-group at one year was lower than that in the open group (p = 0.06). The proportion of patients who were satisfied was significantly higher in the ME-group (p = 0.02). Conclusions: ME-PLIF was associated with equivalent post-surgical outcomes and significantly higher rates of patient satisfaction than the traditional open PLIF procedure. However, the fusion rate after ME-PLIF tended to be lower than that after the traditional open method