Radiation Retinopathy: Case report and review

BACKGROUND: Ocular damage from radiation treatment is a well established phenomenon. Many factors are now known to influence the incidence of radiation retinopathy, including total dosage and daily fraction size. Patients who are diabetic, hypertensive or received previous chemotherapy are more susceptible to radiation retinopathy. CASE PRESENTATION: A 55 year old male was referred from the oncology department with epiphora. His medical history included Type 2 Insulin treated Diabetes Mellitus and hypertension. One year prior to presentation he had undergone a total rhinectomy with a 4 week course of post-operative radiotherapy for an aggressive sqaumous cell carcinoma of the nose. On examination the visual acuity was noted to be 6/36 left eye and 6/9 right eye. Posterior segment examination revealed marked retinal ischaemia present in the posterior pole and macular region of both eyes. The appearance was not thought to be typical of diabetic changes, radiation retinopathy being the more likely diagnosis especially in view of his history. Over the next four months the vision in both eyes rapidly deteriorated to 3/60 left eye and 1/60 right eye. Bilateral pan retinal photocoagulation was thought to be appropriate treatment at this point. CONCLUSION: This case highlights the importance for ophthalmologists and oncologists to be aware of the close relationship between diabetes and radiation treatment and the profound rapid impact this combination of factors may have on visual function. Radiation is being used with increasing frequency for ocular and orbital disease, because of this more cases of radiation retinopathy may become prevalent. Factors which may potentiate radiation retinopathy should be well known including, increased radiation dosage, increased fraction size, concomitant systemic vascular disease and use of chemotherapy. Counselling should be offered in all cases at risk of visual loss. As no effective treatment currently exists to restore visual function, monitoring of visual acuity in all cases and early referral to the ophthalmologist as appropriate is warranted

Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review

In a meta-analysis, Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues find that individuals' social relationships have as much influence on mortality risk as other well-established risk factors for mortality, such as smoking

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

An overview of preharvest factors influencing mango fruit growth, quality and postharvest behaviour

International audienceMango, a tropical fruit of great economic importance, is generally harvested green and then commercialised after a period of storage. Unfortunately, the final quality of mango batches is highly heterogeneous, in fruit size as well as in gustatory quality and postharvest behaviour. A large amount of knowledge has been gathered on the effects of the maturity stage at harvest and postharvest conditions on the final quality of mango. Considerably less attention has been paid to the influence of environmental factors on mango growth, quality traits, and postharvest behaviour. In this paper, we provide a review of studies on mango showing how environmental factors influence the accumulation of water, structural and non-structural dry matter in the fruit during its development. These changes are discussed with respect to the evolution of quality attributes on the tree and after harvest. The preharvest factors presented here are light, temperature, carbon and water availabilities, which can be controlled by various cultural practices such as tree pruning, fruit thinning and irrigation management. We also discuss recent advances in modelling mango function on the tree according to environmental conditions that, combined with experimental studies, can improve our understanding of how these preharvest conditions affect mango growth and quality. (Résumé d'auteur)Manga, um fruto tropical de grande importância, é geralmente colhido verde e comercializado após um período de armazenamento. Infelizmente, a qualidade final da manga na prateleira é altamente heterogênea, em termos de tamanho do fruto, qualidade do paladar e comportamento pós-colheita. Tem-se obtido uma quantidade expressiva de informações sobre os efeitos do estádio de maturação e condições pós-colheita sobre a qualidade final da manga. Contudo, tem-se dado atenção consideravelmente menor à influência dos fatores ambientes sobre o crescimento da manga, características de qualidade e comportamento pós-colheita. Neste artigo, faz-se uma revisão dos estudos sobre manga, evidenciando-se como fatores ambientes afetam o acúmulo de água e de matéria seca estrutural e não-estrutural nos frutos durante o seu desenvolvimento. Discutem-se essas alterações com relação à evolução de atributos de qualidade dos frutos ainda nas plantas e após a colheita. Os fatores de pré-colheita abordados são luz, temperatura, disponibilidades de água e de carbono, raleio de frutos e manejo da irrigação. Discutem-se também recentes avanços sobre modelagem associada à função do fruto na planta, conforme as condições ambientes que, combinados com estudos experimentais, pode melhorar a nossa compreensão sobre como as condições de pré-colheita afetam o crescimento e a qualidade da manga