Plos One
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Health behaviours, important factors in cardiovascular disease, are increasingly a focus of prevention. We appraised whether stroke risk can be accurately assessed using self-reported information focused on health behaviours. ⋯ Incident stroke can be accurately predicted using self-reported information focused on health behaviours. Risk assessment can be performed with population health surveys to support population health planning or outside of clinical settings to support patient-focused prevention.
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Families in high mortality settings need regular contact with high quality services, but existing population-based measurements of contacts do not reflect quality. To address this, in 2012, we designed linked household and frontline worker surveys for Gombe State, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Uttar Pradesh, India. Using reported frequency and content of contacts, we present a method for estimating the population level coverage of high quality contacts. ⋯ Measuring content of care to reflect the quality of contacts can reveal missed opportunities to deliver best possible health care.
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To evaluate the effect of preoperative anaemia and blood transfusion on 30-day postoperative morbidity and mortality in patients undergoing gynecological surgery. ⋯ Preoperative anaemia is associated with adverse post-operative outcomes in women undergoing gynecological surgery. This risk associated with preoperative anaemia did not appear to be corrected by use of perioperative transfusion.
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Pancreatic cancer has the highest mortality rates of all cancer types. One potential explanation for the aggressiveness of this disease is that cancer cells have been found to communicate with one another using membrane-bound vesicles known as exosomes. These exosomes carry pro-survival molecules and increase the proliferation, survival, and metastatic potential of recipient cells, suggesting that tumor-derived exosomes are powerful drivers of tumor progression. ⋯ We demonstrate, using an in vitro cell culture model involving pancreatic adenocarcinoma cell lines PANC-1 and MIA PaCa-2, that curcumin is incorporated into exosomes isolated from curcumin-treated pancreatic cancer cells as observed by spectral studies and fluorescence microscopy. Furthermore, curcumin is delivered to recipient pancreatic cancer cells via exosomes, promoting cytotoxicity as demonstrated by Hoffman modulation contrast microscopy as well as AlamarBlue and Trypan blue exclusion assays. Collectively, these data suggest that the efficacy of curcumin may be enhanced in pancreatic cancer cells through exosomal facilitation.
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Organ dysfunction or failure after the first days of ICU treatment and subsequent mortality with respect to the type of intensive care unit (ICU) admission is poorly elucidated. Therefore we analyzed the association of ICU mortality and admission for medical (M), scheduled surgery (ScS) or unscheduled surgery (US) patients mirrored by the occurrence of organ dysfunction/failure (OD/OF) after the first 72h of ICU stay. ⋯ The dynamic evolution of OD/OF within 72h after ICU admission and mortality differed between patients depending on their types of admission. This has to be considered to exclude a systematic bias during multi-center trials.