Overview of Transdermal Medicated Patches with its research updates in preceding years

Innovations in transdermal drug delivery systems (TDDS) is an important influence to medical practice by providing advances in the delivery of treatment with existing conventional drugs and novel drugs. Transdermal drug delivery is one of the most promising methods for drug application. It has several benefits over conventional system to offer sustained drug release, avoidance of first pass effect, patient compliance, ease of application and removal in case of toxicity as well as decrease in the side effects as compared with conventional therapy. Transdermal patches are dosage forms which transport drug to viable epidermal and dermal tissues of the skin for local therapeutic effect while a very major fraction of drug is transported into the systemic blood circulation. Skin penetration enhancement techniques have been developed to improve bioavailability and increase the range of drugs for which topical and transdermal delivery. The purpose of this review is to introduce transdermal patches including type of transdermal patches, components of transdermal patches, method of preparation of TDDS, evaluation parameters, researches and development done on TDDS in last decade etc.  Keywords: Transdermal Drug Delivery System, Permeation Enhancers, Transdermal Patch, Polymer Matrix

Accuracy of PECARN, CATCH, and CHALICE head injury decision rules in children: a prospective cohort study

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd Background Clinical decision rules can help to determine the need for CT imaging in children with head injuries. We aimed to validate three clinical decision rules (PECARN, CATCH, and CHALICE) in a large sample of children. Methods In this prospective observational study, we included children and adolescents (age

External validation of the Scandinavian guidelines for management of minimal, mild and moderate head injuries in children

© 2018 The Author(s). Background: Clinical decision rules (CDRs) aid in the management of children with traumatic brain injury (TBI). Recently, the Scandinavian Neurotrauma Committee (SNC) has published practical, evidence-based guidelines for children with Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) scores of 9-15. This study aims to validate these guidelines and to compare them with other CDRs. Methods: A large prospective cohort of children (< 18 years) with TBI of all severities, from ten Australian and New Zealand hospitals, was used to assess the SNC guidelines. Firstly, a validation study was performed according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria of the SNC guideline. Secondly, we compared the accuracy of SNC, CATCH, CHALICE and PECARN CDRs in patients with GCS 13-15 only. Diagnostic accuracy was calculated for outcome measures of need for neurosurgery, clinically important TBI (ciTBI) and brain injury on CT. Results: The SNC guideline could be applied to 19,007/20,137 of patients (94.4%) in the validation process. The frequency of ciTBI decreased significantly with stratification by decreasing risk according to the SNC guideline. Sensitivities for the detection of neurosurgery, ciTBI and brain injury on CT were 100.0% (95% CI 89.1-100.0; 32/32), 97.8% (94.5-99.4; 179/183) and 95% (95% CI 91.6-97.2; 262/276), respectively, with a CT/admission rate of 42% (mandatory CT rate of 5%, 18% CT or admission and 19% only admission). Four patients with ciTBI were missed; none needed specific intervention. In the homogenous comparison cohort of 18,913 children, the SNC guideline performed similar to the PECARN CDR, when compared with the other CDRs. Conclusion: The SNC guideline showed a high accuracy in a large external validation cohort and compares well with published CDRs for the management of paediatric TBI

The direction of research into visual disability and quality of life in glaucoma

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Glaucoma will undoubtedly impact on a person's ability to function as they go about their day-to-day life. The purpose of this study is to investigate the amount of published knowledge in quality of life (QoL) and visual disability studies for glaucoma, and make comparisons with similar research in other chronic conditions.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A systematic literature search of the Global Health, EMBASE Psychiatry and MEDLINE databases. Title searches for glaucoma and six other example chronic diseases were entered alongside a selection of keywords chosen to capture studies focusing on QoL and everyday task ability. These results were further filtered during a manual search of resulting abstracts. Outcomes were the number of publications per year for each disease, number relating to QoL and type of glaucoma QoL research.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Fifteen years ago there were no published studies relating to the impact of glaucoma on QoL but by 2009 this had risen to 1.2% of all glaucoma articles. The number of papers relating to QoL as a proportion of all papers in glaucoma in the past 10 years (0.6%) is smaller than for AMD and some other disabling chronic diseases. Most QoL studies in glaucoma (82%) involve questionnaires.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>QoL studies in glaucoma are increasing in number but represent a tiny minority of the total publications in glaucoma research. There are fewer QoL articles in glaucoma compared to some other disabling chronic conditions. The majority of QoL articles in glaucoma research use questionnaires; performance-based measures of visual disability may offer an additional method of determining how the disease impacts on QoL.</p

Performance of two head injury decision rules evaluated on an external cohort of 18,913 children

The Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) decision rule demonstrates high sensitivity for identifying children at low risk for clinically important traumatic brain injury (ciTBI). As with the PECARN rule, the Israeli Decision Algorithm for Identifying TBI in Children (IDITBIC) recommends proceeding directly to computed tomography (CT) in children with Glasgow Coma Score (GCS) lower than 15. The aim was to assess the diagnostic accuracy of two clinical rules that assign children with GCS lower than 15 at presentation directly to CT

A prospective observational study to assess the diagnostic accuracy of clinical decision rules for children presenting to emergency departments after head injuries (protocol): The Australasian Paediatric Head Injury Rules Study (APHIRST)

Background: Head injuries in children are responsible for a large number of emergency department visits. Failure to identify a clinically significant intracranial injury in a timely fashion may result in long term neurodisability and death. Whilst cranial computed tomography (CT) provides rapid and definitive identification of intracranial injuries, it is resource intensive and associated with radiation induced cancer. Evidence based head injury clinical decision rules have been derived to aid physicians in identifying patients at risk of having a clinically significant intracranial injury. Three rules have been identified as being of high quality and accuracy: the Canadian Assessment of Tomography for Childhood Head Injury (CATCH) from Canada, the Children's Head Injury Algorithm for the Prediction of Important Clinical Events (CHALICE) from the UK, and the prediction rule for the identification of children at very low risk of clinically important traumatic brain injury developed by the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) from the USA. This study aims to prospectively validate and compare the performance accuracy of these three clinical decision rules when applied outside the derivation setting.Methods/design: This study is a prospective observational study of children aged 0 to less than 18 years presenting to 10 emergency departments within the Paediatric Research in Emergency Departments International Collaborative (PREDICT) research network in Australia and New Zealand after head injuries of any severity. Predictor variables identified in CATCH, CHALICE and PECARN clinical decision rules will be collected. Patients will be managed as per the treating clinicians at the participating hospitals. All patients not undergoing cranial CT will receive a follow up call 14 to 90 days after the injury. Outcome data collected will include results of cranial CTs (if performed) and details of admission, intubation, neurosurgery and death. The performance accuracy of each of the rules will be assessed using rule specific outcomes and inclusion and exclusion criteria.Discussion: This study will allow the simultaneous comparative application and validation of three major paediatric head injury clinical decision rules outside their derivation setting.Trial registration: The study is registered with the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ANZCTR)- ACTRN12614000463673 (registered 2 May 2014). © 2014 Babl et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd

The Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic Infection in Patients Admitted to the Hospital for Reasons Other Than COVID-19 Infection.

COVID-19 or SARS CoV-2 is a worldwide public health emergency. The first case of COVID-19 was described in Wuhan, China in December, 2019 and within a short time the infection had spread quickly to the rest of China and then the world. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on patients who do not have COVID-19 but other diseases like cancer, diabetes, and many more non-communicable diseases; their care is compromised because of the pandemic. COVID-19 also poses a work-related health risk for healthcare workers who are treating patients with COVID-19, and many have themselves become infected. Healthcare workers involved in diagnosing and treating patients with COVID-19 should be evaluated for stress, anxiety and depression