Photodynamic therapy: Truly a marriage between a drug and a light

Microbial biofilms in the oral cavity are involved in the etiology of various oral conditions, including caries, periodontal and endodontic diseases, oral malodor, denture stomatitis, candidiasis and dental implant failures. It is generally recognized that the growth of bacteria in biofilms imparts a substantial decrease in susceptibility to antimicrobial agents compared with cultures grown in suspension. It is therefore not surprising that bacteria growing in dental plaque, a naturally occurring biofilm, show increased resistance to antimicrobial agents. As result there is pronounced interest and keenness in the development of alternate antimicrobial concepts. Therefore, the application of alternative method to eradicate bacteria from periodontal pockets is desirable. One such approach is photodynamic therapy (PDT). The purpose of this review was to evaluate the effectiveness of PDT for periodontitis as an adjunct to non-surgical treatment of scaling and root planning. This review provides an overview of PDT with emphasis on its current status as an antimicrobial therapy to control oral bacteria. Finally, new frontiers of antimicrobial PDT research will be introduced, including targeting strategies that may open new opportunities for the maintenance of bacterial homeostasis in dental plaque, thereby providing the opportunity for more effective disease prevention and control. Thus, the available knowledge of PDT should encourage a more clinically oriented application of this technique

Organizing pneumonia as the initial presentation in rheumatoid arthritis – A case report

Organizing pneumonia (OP), can be seen in association with lung injury, infection, drug intoxication, and connective tissue diseases. Patients of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) are prone to develop interstitial lung disease (ILD), but the pulmonary involvement usually occurs several years after the joint manifestations. Only in about 10% cases of RA, the initial manifestation of the disease can be in the form of interstitial lung disease. OP as the initial manifestation of RA is extremely uncommon occurrence. Here is presented a case of 52-year-old male who presented with OP as the initial manifestation of RA. On investigation, the RA factor and anti-CCP Antibodies were positive. Based on clinical, radiological and histopathological findings the diagnosis was established

COVID-19 and rhino-orbital mucormycosis – a case report

There is a constant rise in cases of rhino-orbital mucormycosis in people with Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Generally, Mucormycosis develops in immunosuppression or debilitating diseases. In cases having head and neck involvement, the mold enters the respiratory tract with further involvement of nose and sinuses and there is consecutive progression into orbital and intracranial structures. Diabetes Mellitus (DM) is an independent risk factor for both severe COVID-19 and mucormycosis. The clinical examination and direct smears are helpful for early diagnosis of the disease and timely intervention. For the better prevention and management of such opportunistic infections in COVID-19 patients, it is prudent to establish prophylactic treatment protocols along with rational use of corticosteroids. We here report a case of Rhino-orbital Mucormycosis infection caused by Rhizopus oryzae in a COVID-19 patient with Diabetes Mellitus

Evolving practice and changing phenotype in pediatric autoimmune liver disease: Outcomes from an Australian center

Autoimmune liver disease (AILD) incorporates primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC), autoimmune hepatitis (AIH), and autoimmune sclerosing cholangitis (ASC). ASC is a condition that includes overlap of AIH and PSC. We investigate changes in practice in relation to diagnosis and phenotype over 2 time periods.Retrospective chart review was conducted from January 2000 to 2016. Data were divided into two 8-year cohorts, CI and C2.Data were collected in 75 children, 29 in 2000-2007 (C1) and 46 in 2008-2016 (C2). Presenting AILD type was AIH in 59%, ASC in 10%, and PSC in 31%. Final AILD type was AIH in 53%, ASC in 16%, and PSC in 31%. When comparing C1 to C2, those with AIH decreased (65% vs 45%) and those with ASC increased (14% vs 18%). Use of magnetic resonance cholangio-pancreatography increased from 34% in C1 to 65% in C2. Advanced liver disease on biopsy was noted in 53% of all children at presentation. Only 5 female children progressed to liver transplant (3 ASC-IBD [inflammatory bowel disease]; 1 PSC-IBD; 1 AIH). Colonoscopy performance increased from 48% in C1 to 63% in C2 with diagnosis of AILD-IBD increasing from 31% to 52%. Right-sided disease was present in 46% and macroscopic rectal sparing in 36% of those with ulcerative colitis. Colectomy was required in 3 children with large duct PSC-IBD.PSC and ASC are increasing in relevance along with IBD and reflect increasing performance of magnetic resonance cholangio-pancreatography and colonoscopy. Large duct PSC and ASC with IBD are risk factors for colectomy and along with female gender, for liver transplant

Heterocyclic ring formation via intramolecular coordination of hydroxyl oxygen of carboxyl group to arsenic(V) in <i>o</i>-carboxyphenylrnethyldialkyl/arylarsonium iodides

83-84IR, PMR and mass spectral data of o-carboxyphenylmethyldialkyl/arylarsonium iodides [(2a): R = Me, Ph or p-tolyl] favour the formation of a five-membered heterocyclic ring (2c) through intramolecular coordination of hydroxyl oxygen of carboxyl group to arsenic(V). This is in contrast to the reported heterocyclic ring formation via intramolecular coordination of carbonyl oxygen to arsenic(III) in o-carboxyphenylarsonous dichloride(1b)

Family physicians' knowledge and awareness regarding oral health: A survey

INTRODUCTION: Oral health is an important component of general health. The World Health Organization has highly recommended the integration of oral health promotion into general health care. In majority of the cases, patients visit their physicians with simultaneous oral and systemic complaints, and primary oral complaints are more frequently encountered. Therefore, primary care physicians can play an expanded role within oral health care to raise the overall health of the patients. AIM: This study aimed to assess the knowledge and awareness of family physicians regarding oral health. MATERIALS AND METHODS: An observational (cross-sectional) study was conducted among 250 family physicians who are practicing in Tricity. A self-structured questionnaire (close-ended) prepared by a panel of oral health experts in English language (close-ended) was administered to the study participants. The questionnaire which was divided into two parts, A and B, contained 15 questions on knowledge and awareness regarding oral health. Categorization of knowledge scores was done at three levels: low, medium, and high. Statistical analysis was performed using analysis of variance and Student's t-test. RESULTS: Males comprised 72.8% (182) of the study population and 55.2% (138) of the participants were doing combined practice (academic and private both). Low knowledge scores were reported in 47.2% (118) of the participants whereas only 22.4% (56) of participants had a high score. The mean knowledge score according to educational level and working profile was statistically significant (P < 0.05). CONCLUSION: The results of our study showed a considerable lack of knowledge among family physicians regarding connection of oral health with general health. Therefore, there is an urgent need to increase their knowledge by various continued medical education and training programs

Code Switched and Code Mixed Speech Recognition for Indic languages

Training multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems is challenging because acoustic and lexical information is typically language specific. Training multilingual system for Indic languages is even more tougher due to lack of open source datasets and results on different approaches. We compare the performance of end to end multilingual speech recognition system to the performance of monolingual models conditioned on language identification (LID). The decoding information from a multilingual model is used for language identification and then combined with monolingual models to get an improvement of 50% WER across languages. We also propose a similar technique to solve the Code Switched problem and achieve a WER of 21.77 and 28.27 over Hindi-English and Bengali-English respectively. Our work talks on how transformer based ASR especially wav2vec 2.0 can be applied in developing multilingual ASR and code switched ASR for Indic languages.Comment: This paper for submitted to Interspeech 202