Angiostrongylus cantonensis eosinophilic meningitis

AbstractIn the past 50 years, Angiostrongylus cantonensis, the most common cause of eosinophilic meningitis, has spread from Southeast Asia to the South Pacific, Africa, India, the Caribbean, and recently, to Australia and North America, mainly carried by cargo ship rats. Humans are accidental, “dead-end” hosts infected by eating larvae from snails, slugs, or contaminated, uncooked vegetables. These larvae migrate to the brain, spinal cord, and nerve roots, causing eosinophilia in both spinal fluid and peripheral blood. Infected patients present with severe headache, vomiting, paresthesias, weakness, and occasionally visual disturbances and extraocular muscular paralysis. Most patients have a full recovery; however, heavy infections can lead to chronic, disabling disease and even death. There is no proven treatment for this disease. In the authors' experience, corticosteroids have been helpful in severe cases to relieve intracranial pressure as well as neurologic symptoms due to inflammatory responses to migrating and eventually dying worms

Compressive Phase Contrast Tomography

When x-rays penetrate soft matter, their phase changes more rapidly than their amplitude. In- terference effects visible with high brightness sources creates higher contrast, edge enhanced images. When the object is piecewise smooth (made of big blocks of a few components), such higher con- trast datasets have a sparse solution. We apply basis pursuit solvers to improve SNR, remove ring artifacts, reduce the number of views and radiation dose from phase contrast datasets collected at the Hard X-Ray Micro Tomography Beamline at the Advanced Light Source. We report a GPU code for the most computationally intensive task, the gridding and inverse gridding algorithm (non uniform sampled Fourier transform).Comment: 5 pages, "Image Reconstruction from Incomplete Data VI" conference 7800, SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications 1-5 August 2010 San Diego, CA United State

Vulnerability of CMOS image sensors in megajoule class laser harsh environment

CMOS image sensors (CIS) are promising candidates as part of optical imagers for the plasma diagnostics devoted to the study of fusion by inertial confinement. However, the harsh radiative environment of Megajoule Class Lasers threatens the performances of these optical sensors. In this paper, the vulnerability of CIS to the transient and mixed pulsed radiation environment associated with such facilities is investigated during an experiment at the OMEGA facility at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE), Rochester, NY, USA. The transient and permanent effects of the 14 MeV neutron pulse on CIS are presented. The behavior of the tested CIS shows that active pixel sensors (APS) exhibit a better hardness to this harsh environment than a CCD. A first order extrapolation of the reported results to the higher level of radiation expected for Megajoule Class Laser facilities (Laser Megajoule in France or National Ignition Facility in the USA) shows that temporarily saturated pixels due to transient neutron-induced single event effects will be the major issue for the development of radiation-tolerant plasma diagnostic instruments whereas the permanent degradation of the CIS related to displacement damage or total ionizing dose effects could be reduced by applying well known mitigation techniques

Sleep during the third trimester of pregnancy: the role of depression and anxiety

Depression has been associated with sleep disturbances in pregnancy; however, no previous research has controlled the possible confounding effect of anxiety on this association. This study aims to analyze the effect of depression on sleep during the third trimester of pregnancy controlling for anxiety. The sample was composed by 143 depressed (n = 77) and non-depressed (n = 66) pregnant women who completed measures of depression, anxiety, and sleep. Differences between groups in sleep controlling for anxiety were found. Depressed pregnant women present higher number of nocturnal awakenings and spent more hours trying falling asleep during the night and the entire 24 h period. Present findings point out the effect of depression on sleep in late pregnancy, after controlling for anxiety.This research was supported by FEDER Funds through the Programa Operacional Factores de Competitividade - COMPETE and by National Funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia under the project: PTDC/SAU/SAP/116738/2010

Sleep During Pregnancy: The nuMoM2b Pregnancy and Sleep Duration and Continuity Study

Study Objectives: To characterize sleep duration, timing and continuity measures in pregnancy and their association with key demographic variables. Methods: Multisite prospective cohort study. Women enrolled in the nuMoM2b study (nulliparous women with a singleton gestation) were recruited at the second study visit (16-21 weeks of gestation) to participate in the Sleep Duration and Continuity substudy. Women <18 years of age or with pregestational diabetes or chronic hypertension were excluded from participation. Women wore a wrist activity monitor and completed a sleep log for 7 consecutive days. Time in bed, sleep duration, fragmentation index, sleep efficiency, wake after sleep onset, and sleep midpoint were averaged across valid primary sleep periods for each participant. Results: Valid data were available from 782 women with mean age of 27.3 (5.5) years. Median sleep duration was 7.4 hours. Approximately 27.9% of women had a sleep duration of 9 hours. In multivariable models including age, race/ethnicity, body mass index, insurance status, and recent smoking history, sleep duration was significantly associated with race/ethnicity and insurance status, while time in bed was only associated with insurance status. Sleep continuity measures and sleep midpoint were significantly associated with all covariates in the model, with the exception of age for fragmentation index and smoking for wake after sleep onset. Conclusions: Our results demonstrate the relationship between sleep and important demographic characteristics during pregnancy

Modification in Structural and Optical Properties of Erbium-doped Zinc Sodium Tellurite Glass: Effect of Bimetallic Nanoparticles

The demand in accomplishing modified structural and optical features of trivalent rare earth (RE) ions doped amorphous media through the incorporation of metallic nanoparticles (NPs) of controlled sizes is ever-increasing for short wavelength solid state lasers development. In this view, we attempt to alter the optical properties of bimetallic NPs and erbium (Er3+) integrated zinc-sodium-tellurite glass. Modifications in structural properties are triggered via precise control of titanium and copper NPs nucleation and growth processes underneath the amorphous matrix. The changes in ligand interactions in the fragile disordered matrix are found to be accountable for the variations in structural and optical properties. A series of glass with composition of (70-x-y)TeO2-20ZnO-9Na2O-1Er2O3-(x)CuO-(y)TiO2 (x = 0.0 and 0.04 mol%; y = 0.0 and 0.1 mol%) are prepared following melt-quenching method and characterized. UV-Vis-NIR spectra displayed seven absorption bands corresponding to the transitions from ground state (4I15/2) to 4F5/2, 4F7/2, 2H11/2, 4S3/2, 4F9/2, 4I9/2 and 4I11/2 excited states of Er3+. FTIR spectra show the presence of symmetric Te-O-Te linkage vibrations and stretching vibrations of Cu-O on monoclinic CuO, Te-O bond of the trigonal bypiramidal unit [TeO4] with non-bridging oxygen symmetrical TeO3 groups and vibrations of water molecule. The presence of bimetallic NPs is confirmed from transmission electron microscopy (TEM) imaging. Our glass composition demonstrating such significant modification in structural and optical properties may be beneficial for the development of plasmonic devices

Modulation of CD8\u3csup\u3e+\u3c/sup\u3e T cell responses to AAV vectors with IgG-derived MHC class II epitopes

Immune responses directed against viral capsid proteins constitute a main safety concern in the use of adeno-associated virus (AAV) as gene transfer vectors in humans. Pharmacological immunosuppression has been proposed as a solution to the problem; however, the approach suffers from several potential limitations. Using MHC class II epitopes initially identified within human IgG, named Tregitopes, we showed that it is possible to modulate CD8+ T cell responses to several viral antigens in vitro. We showed that incubation of peripheral blood mononuclear cells with these epitopes triggers proliferation of CD4+CD25+FoxP3+ T cells that suppress killing of target cells loaded with MHC class I antigens in an antigen- specific fashion, through a mechanism that seems to require cell-to-cell contact. Expression of a construct encoding for the AAV capsid structural protein fused to Tregitopes resulted in reduction of CD8+ T cell reactivity against the AAV capsid following immunization with an adenoviral vector expressing capsid. This was accompanied by an increase in frequency of CD4+CD25+FoxP3+ T cells in spleens and lower levels of inflammatory infiltrates in injected tissues. This proof-of-concept study demonstrates modulation of CD8+ T cell reactivity to an antigen using regulatory T cell epitopes is possible

Prognostic value of microvessel density in stage II and III colon cancer patients:a retrospective cohort study

Background Microvessel density (MVD), as a derived marker for angiogenesis, has been associated with poor outcome in several types of cancer. This study aimed to evaluate the prognostic value of MVD in stage II and III colon cancer and its relation to tumour-stroma-percentage (TSP) and expression of HIF1A and VEGFA. Methods Formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) colon cancer tissues were collected from 53 stage II and 54 (5-fluorouracil-treated) stage III patients. MVD was scored by digital morphometric analysis of CD31-stained whole tumour sections. TSP was scored using haematoxylin-eosin stained slides. Protein expression of HIF1A and VEGFA was determined by immunohistochemical evaluation of tissue microarrays. Results Median MVD was higher in stage III compared to stage II colon cancers (11.1% versus 5.6% CD31-positive tissue area, p <0.001). High MVD in stage II patients tended to be associated with poor disease free survival (DFS) in univariate analysis (p = 0.056). In contrast, high MVD in 5FU-treated stage III patients was associated with better DFS (p = 0.006). Prognostic value for MVD was observed in multivariate analyses for both cancer stages. Conclusions MVD is an independent prognostic factor associated with poor DFS in stage II colon cancer patients, and with better DFS in stage III colon cancer patients treated with adjuvant chemotherapy