Efficacy and safety of Latanoprost/Timolol fixed combinations in treatment of refractory glaucoma following vitrectomy in short period

AIM: To evaluate the efficacy and safety of Latanoprost/Timolol fixed combinations(LTFC)in treatment of refractory glaucoma following vitrectomy in short period.<p>METHODS: In the present study, 42 eyes of 38 refractory glaucoma patients who had received vitrectomy were carried out. The patients were randomly divided into two groups after a 2-week washout period for previous antiglaucoma medication. Patients in group 1 underwent a 6-week treatment with LTFC and those in group 2 were treated with Latanoprost/Timolol unfixed combinations(LTuFC)for 6 weeks. The IOP, visual field, and mRNFL were measured after the washout period as the baseline, and after 6 weeks of therapy. Eye condition and adverse reactions were observed. <p>RESULTS: The mean baseline IOPs of groups 1 and 2 were respectively 37.90±3.74mmHg and 37.57±3.23mmHg. After 6 weeks, the mean IOPs were respectively 30.10±4.90mmHg and 30.62±4.62mmHg, indicating a significant reduction from the baseline(<i>t</i>=12.16, <i>t</i>=13.78, <i>P</i><0.01). No difference was observed in the IOP reduction between LTFC and LTuFC(20.54%±7.88%, 18.23%±7.03%, <i>t</i>=0.75, <i>P</i>>0.05). IOP reduction was 24.87%(20 eyes), 17.46%(15 eyes), and 9.65%(7 eyes)respectively among those with open-angle glaucoma, with partially open-angle glaucoma, and with closed-angle glaucoma. The eye drops didn't have effects on the vision field and mRNFL(all <i>P</i>>0.05), and their main adverse reactions were eye irritation and mild hyperemia.<p>CONCLUSION: In refractory glaucoma, especially in open-angle or partially-open-angle glaucoma, LTFC, administered after vitrectomy, helps to reduce IOP with desirable safetly and tolerance

Pengaruh Penerapan Strategi Concept Mapping terhadap Hasil Belajar Siswa di Sekolah Dasar

This study aimed to analyze the influence of concept mapping strategy towards the learning result students in social science study on the V B grade of SD Negeri 17 Pontianak Kota. This study used an experimental method with Pre-Experimental design form using One-Group Pretest-Posttest Design. The population in this research were 68 students. The samples in this research was V B as a research class. Based on the t-test, the calculation result obtained t test (7,29) > t table (1,699) with significance level α = 5% means a significant influence using concept mapping strategy. The value of effect size (ES) is 0.39 with moderate category. It means that concept mapping strategy give a moderate effect to the learning result students in social science study on the V B grade of SD Negeri 17 Pontianak Kota

Salmonella produce microRNA-like RNA fragment Sal-1 in the infected cells to facilitate intracellular survival.

Salmonella have developed a sophisticated machinery to evade immune clearance and promote survival in the infected cells. Previous studies were mostly focused on either bacteria itself or host cells, the interaction mechanism of host-pathogen awaits further exploration. In the present study, we show that Salmonella can exploit mammalian cell non-classical microRNA processing machinery to further process bacterial small non-coding RNAs into microRNA-like fragments. Sal-1, one such fragment with the highest copy number in the infected cells, is derived from Salmonella 5-leader of the ribosomal RNA transcript and has a stem structure-containing precursor. Processing of Sal-1 precursors to mature Sal-1 is dependent on host cell Argonaute 2 (AGO2) but not Dicer. Functionally, depleting cellular Sal-1 strongly renders the Salmonella bacteria less resistant to the host defenses both in vitro and in vivo. In conclusion, we demonstrate a novel strategy for Salmonella evading the host immune clearance, in which Salmonella produce microRNA-like functional RNA fragments to establish a microenvironment facilitating bacterial survival

Electromagnetic Source Imaging via a Data-Synthesis-Based Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Network

Electromagnetic source imaging (ESI) requires solving a highly ill-posed inverse problem. To seek a unique solution, traditional ESI methods impose various forms of priors that may not accurately reflect the actual source properties, which may hinder their broad applications. To overcome this limitation, in this paper a novel data-synthesized spatio-temporally convolutional encoder-decoder network method termed DST-CedNet is proposed for ESI. DST-CedNet recasts ESI as a machine learning problem, where discriminative learning and latent-space representations are integrated in a convolutional encoder-decoder network (CedNet) to learn a robust mapping from the measured electroencephalography/magnetoencephalography (E/MEG) signals to the brain activity. In particular, by incorporating prior knowledge regarding dynamical brain activities, a novel data synthesis strategy is devised to generate large-scale samples for effectively training CedNet. This stands in contrast to traditional ESI methods where the prior information is often enforced via constraints primarily aimed for mathematical convenience. Extensive numerical experiments as well as analysis of a real MEG and Epilepsy EEG dataset demonstrate that DST-CedNet outperforms several state-of-the-art ESI methods in robustly estimating source signals under a variety of source configurations.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures, and journa