Plos One
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In school-aged children with cystic fibrosis (CF) structural lung damage assessed using chest CT is associated with abnormal ventilation distribution. The primary objective of this analysis was to determine the relationships between ventilation distribution outcomes and the presence and extent of structural damage as assessed by chest CT in infants and young children with CF. ⋯ These findings suggest that in early CF lung disease there are weak associations between ventilation distribution and lung damage from chest CT. These finding are in contrast to those reported in older children. These findings suggest that assessments of LCI could not be used to replace a chest CT scan for the assessment of structural lung disease in the first two years of life. Further research in which both MBW and chest CT outcomes are obtained is required to assess the role of ventilation distribution in tracking the progression of lung damage in infants with CF.
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Since the early 2000s, aid organizations and developing country governments have invested heavily in AIDS treatment. By 2010, more than five million people began receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART)--yet each year, 2.7 million people are becoming newly infected and another two million are dying without ever having received treatment. As the need for treatment grows without commensurate increase in the amount of available resources, it is critical to assess the health and economic gains being realized from increasingly large investments in ART. ⋯ This investment is expected to save 18.5 million life-years and return $12 to $34 billion through increased labor productivity, averted orphan care, and deferred medical treatment for opportunistic infections and end-of-life care. Under alternative assumptions regarding the labor productivity effects of HIV infection, AIDS disease, and ART, the monetary benefits range from 81 percent to 287 percent of program costs over the same period. These results suggest that, in addition to the large health gains generated, the economic benefits of treatment will substantially offset, and likely exceed, program costs within 10 years of investment.
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The 'mirror neuron system' (MNS), located within inferior parietal lobe (IPL) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), creates an internal motor representation of the actions we see and has been implicated in imitation. Recently, the MNS has been implicated in non-identical responses: when the actions we must execute do not match those that we observe. However, in such conflicting situations non action-specific cognitive control networks also located in frontoparietal regions may be involved. ⋯ We discuss our findings in relation to recent work that has examined the role of frontoparietal brain structures in joint-actions and inter-actor cooperation. We conclude that the specific brain regions identified here to show increased activation during action observation conditions are likely to form part of a mechanism specifically involved in matching observed actions directly with internal motor plans. Conversely, observation of arrow cues recruited part of a wider cognitive control network involved in the rapid remapping of stimulus-response associations.
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Generic triage risk assessments are widely used in the emergency department (ED), but have not been validated for prediction of short-term risk among patients with acute heart failure (HF). Our objective was to evaluate the Canadian Triage Acuity Scale (CTAS) for prediction of early death among HF patients. ⋯ A semi-quantitative triage acuity scale assigned at ED presentation and based largely on respiratory factors predicted emergent death among HF patients.
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Allergic asthma is associated with airway eosinophilia, which is regulated by different T-effector cells. T cells express transcription factors T-bet, GATA-3, RORγt and Foxp3, representing Th1, Th2, Th17 and Treg cells respectively. No study has directly determined the relative presence of each of these T cell subsets concomitantly in a model of allergic airway inflammation. ⋯ Allergen exposure led to the accumulation of T-bet(+), GATA-3(+) and Foxp3(+) cells in peribronchial and alveolar tissue, GATA-3(+) and Foxp3(+) cells in perivascular tissue, and RORγt(+) cells in alveolar tissue. A total of 28 cytokines, chemokines and receptor genes were altered more than 3 fold upon allergen exposure, with expression of half of the genes claimed in all three microenvironments. Our study shows that allergen exposure affects all T effector cells in lung, with a dominant of Th2 cells, but with different local cell distribution, probably due to a distinguished local inflammatory milieu.