Medicine
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Cancer-related fatigue (CRF) is one of the most common adverse events of anticancer therapies, with an incidence of up to 90%, which seriously affects the quality of life in cancer patients. Complementary and alternative therapies for CRF include acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, Tai Chi, Qigong, and massage therapy. Several studies have shown that traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) exercise therapies, such as Tai Chi, Ba Duan Jin, the classics of tendon changing, Six Healing Sounds, and Wu Qin Xi, can improve CRF, anxiety symptoms, and sleep quality in cancer patients. However, their specific efficacy and which TCM exercise therapy is the best remain controversial. In this study, we assess and compare the effects of different TCM exercise therapies on CRF, anxiety, and sleep quality in cancer patients by network meta-analysis (NMA). ⋯ DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/MJ8DA.
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This retrospective study aimed to explore the effect of enteral nutrition (EN) on immune and inflammatory factors after liver cancer surgery (LCS). It was retrospectively conducted on enrolled LCS patients between January 2017 and May 2020. The medical records of 528 patient case records were collected and reviewed. ⋯ As for complications, there were not significant differences between 2 groups (P > .05). The results of this study found that EN may benefit for patients after LCS during the recovery period. Future high quality prospective studies are needed to warrant the present conclusion.
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Case Reports
Quadrantanopia as the only symptom of post-COVID stroke in the occipital pole: Case report.
This is a case report describing delayed complications of COVID-19 pneumonia, which evolved into the vascular-ischemic complications leading to quadrantanopia and MRI findings consistent with recent ischemic event in the occipital pole of the brain. ⋯ An MRI should be considered as a long term follow up for post-COVID-19 patients reporting ophthalmic or neurologic complains.
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Sarcopenia, characterized by a decline of skeletal muscle mass, has emerged as an important prognostic factor for cancer patients. Trunk computed tomography (CT) is a commonly used modality for assessment of cancer disease extent and treatment outcome. CT images can also be used to analyze the skeletal muscle mass filtered by the appropriate range of Hounsfield scale. ⋯ The efficacies of the proposed methodology based on w/ and w/o data augmentation and different feature maps are compared in the experiments. We show that the Jaccard score is approximately 95.0% based on the proposed data augmentation method with only 16 feature maps used in U-Net. The stability and efficiency of the proposed U-Net are verified in the experiments in a cross-validation manner.
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Hip fractures are common in elderly patients and prone to serious morbidity and mortality particularly when the treatment is delayed. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect Coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on the early mortality rates of geriatric patients with hip fractures.281 patients who were followed and operated on with the diagnosis of proximal femur fracture were included in this retrospective study. Patients were divided into 2 groups, that is, 180 patients presenting between March and June 2018 to 2019 (prepandemic period) and 101 patients presenting between March and June 2020 (pandemic period). ⋯ Attending outpatient visits and the length of hospital stay were the main significant differences in multivariate analysis. The early mortality rates in patients with hip fractures were similar during the pandemic period to before in Turkey. However, the length of hospital stay was prolonged and more patients refused the treatment and fewer of them attended regular outpatient controls in the pandemic.