Current Issue : January - March Volume : 2015 Issue Number : 1 Articles : 5 Articles
Blood pressure is one important risk factor for stroke prognosis. Therefore, continuous monitoring of blood pressure is crucial\nfor preventing and predicting stroke. However, current blood pressure devices are mainly air-cuff based, which only can provide\nmeasurements intermittently. This study proposed a newblood pressure estimation method based on the pulse transit time to realize\ncontinuous monitoring.Theproposedmethod integrated a linear model with a compensation algorithm. A calibration method was\nfurther developed to guarantee that the model was personalized for individuals. Variation and variability of pulse transit time were\nintroduced to construct the compensation algorithm in the model. The proposed method was validated by the data collected from\n30 healthy subjects, aged from 23 to 25 years old. By comparing the estimated value to the measurement from an oscillometry,\nthe result showed that the mean error of the estimated blood pressure was ?0.2 �± 2.4mmHg and 0.5 �± 3.9mmHg for systolic\nand diastolic blood pressure, respectively. In addition, the estimation performance of the proposed model is better than the linear\nmodel, especially for the diastolic blood pressure. The results indicate that the proposed method has promising potential to realize\ncontinuous blood pressure measurement....
Objectives.The identification of epidemiological factors increasing the risk of endometriosis could shorten the time to diagnosis.\nSpecific blood groups may be more common in patients with endometriosis. Study Design. We designed a cross-sectional study\nof 633 Caucasian women living in the same geographic area. Study group included 311 patients with histologically proven\nendometriosis. Control group included 322 patients without endometriosis as checked during surgery. Frequencies of ABO and\nRhesus groups in the study and control groups were compared using univariate and multivariate analyses. Results. We observed a\nhigher proportion of Rh-negativewomen in the study group, as compared to healthy controls.Multivariate analysis showed that Rhnegative\nwomen are twice as likely to develop endometriosis (aOR = 1.90; 95% CI: 1.20ââ?¬â??2.90). There was no significant difference\nin ABO group distribution between patients and controls. There was no difference when taking into account either the clinical\nforms (superficial endometriosis, endometrioma, and deep infiltration endometriosis) or the rAFS stages. Conclusion. Rh-negative\nwomen are twice as likely to develop endometriosis. Chromosome 1p, which contains the genes coding for the Rhesus, could also\nharbor endometriosis susceptibility genes....
Red blood cells (RBCs) undergo extensive deformation when travelling through the microcapillaries. Deformability, the combined\nresult of properties of the membrane-cytoskeleton complex, the surface area-to-volume ratio, and the hemoglobin content, is\na critical determinant of capillary blood flow. During blood bank storage and in many pathophysiological conditions, RBC\nmorphology changes, which has been suggested to be associated with decreased deformability and removal of RBC.While various\ntechniques provide information on the rheological properties of stored RBCs, their clinical significance is controversial. We\ndeveloped a microfluidic approach for evaluating RBC deformability in a physiologically meaningful and clinically significant\nmanner. Unlike other techniques, our method enables a high-throughput determination of changes in deformation capacity to\nprovide statistically significant data, while providing morphological information at the single-cell level. Our data show that, under\nconditions that closely mimic capillary dimensions and flow, the capacity to deformand the capacity to relax are not affected during\nstorage in the blood bank. Our data also show that altered cell morphology by itself does not necessarily affect deformability....
Introduction.We designed this study to evaluate how coagulation parameters are changed in metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC)\npatients treated with bevacizumab, irinotecan, 5-fluorouracil, and leucovorin (FOLFIRI). Methods. A total of 48 mCRC patients\nwho initially received bevacizumab with FOLFIRI were eligible for this study. Thirty-four patients were analyzed at baseline and\non the 4th, 8th, and 12th cycles of chemotherapy. Results. There were 19 male and 15 female patients. Baseline characteristics of the\ngroups were similar, but women had better overall survival than men (14 months versus 12 months,P = 0.044). D-dimer levels\ndecreased significantly after the 12th cycle compared with baseline in men but not in women.Men and women had increased levels\nof serum fibrinogen at the early cycles, but these increased fibrinogen levels continued after the 4th cycle of chemotherapy only\nin women. In addition, serum fibrinogen levels did not significantly change, but aPTT levels decreased in men. Discussion. The\nmajor finding of this study is that bevacizumab-FOLFIRI chemotherapy does not promote changes in the coagulation system. If\nchemotherapy treatment and the possible side effects of FOLFIRI-bevacizumab treatment are well managed, then alterations of the\ncoagulation cascade will not have an impact on overall survival and mortality....
Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), still represent a certain mystery in biology, have a unique property of dividing into equal cells\nand repopulating the hematopoietic tissue. This potential enables their use in transplantation treatments. The quality of the HSC\ngrafts for transplantation is evaluated by flow cytometric determination of the CD34+ cells, which enables optimal timing of the first\napheresis and the acquisition of maximal yield of the peripheral blood stem cells (PBSCs). To identify a more efficient method for\nevaluating CD34+ cells, we compared the following alternative methods with the reference method: hematopoietic progenitor cells\n(HPC) enumeration (using the Sysmex XE-2100 analyser), detection of CD133+ cells, and quantification of aldehyde dehydrogenase\nactivity in the PBSCs. 266 aphereses (84 patients) were evaluated. In the preapheretic blood, the new methods produced data that\nwere in agreement with the reference method. The ROC curves have shown that for the first-day apheresis target, the optimal\npredictive cut-off value was 0.032 cells/mL for the HPC method (sensitivity 73.4%, specificity 69.3%). HPC method exhibited a\ndefinite practical superiority as compared to other methods tested. HPC enumeration could serve as a supplementary method for\nthe optimal timing of the first apheresis; it is simple, rapid, and cheap....
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