Thromboembolic complication in Essential Thrombocythemia

Pan African Medical Journal 2012; 13:5

Diet and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma risk

Background: The role of dietary factors in the epidemiology of Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) remains largely undefined. Dietary habits may play a role in the etiology of NHL by influencing the immune system. Methods: Dietary patterns and the risk of NHL were analyzed in a case control study; including 170 NHL cases and 190 controls. All subjects completed a validated food-frequency questionnaire. The dietary pattern was investigated separately and in nine nutritional groups. Crosstab tables were used to estimate the odds ratios (OR), and Ptrend. Results: Consumption of highest versus lowest quartile of proteins (OR, 8.088 Ptrend=0.000), fats (OR, 6.17 Ptrend=0.000) and sweets (OR, 8.806 Ptrend=0.000) were associated with a significantly increased NHL risk. The inverse association was found for fresh fruits (OR, 0.117 Ptrend=0.000) and vegetables (OR, 0.461 Ptrend =0.010). Conclusion: An association between dietary intake and the risk of NHL is biologically plausible due to immunosuppressive effects of fat and animal proteins, and antioxidant properties of vegetables and fruits. Pan African Medical Journal 2012; 12:5

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.Peer reviewe

Bilateral Conjunctival Infiltration as an Extramedullary Relapse of AML

Acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) accounts for 1.2% of all cancer deaths. Relapse is the major cause of treatment failure in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients. AML rarely presents as ocular manifestation in relapse or at presentation. The M4 subtype of AML is most commonly presented with extramedullary involvement. In this report, we presented a young female with AML who was diagnosed and treated for AML about 40 months ago. She did not transplant because she did not have a full-match donor. About 4 months ago, she visited with a red eye and conjunctival infiltration. She was referred to an ophthalmologist for a biopsy, and the pathology report showed the relapse of AML which was treated with systemic chemotherapy. Red eyes with subconjunctival nodules in patients with a history of previous AML should raise the suspicion for recurrent disease that warrants urgent biopsy and systemic treatment. Eye involvement with leukemia is usually responsive to systemic chemotherapy

Effect of hydroxychloroquine on COVID-19 prevention in cancer patients undergoing treatment: a structured summary of a study protocol for a randomised controlled trial

In this study, we investigate the effect of hydroxychloroquine on the prevention of Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) in cancer patients being treated