Scientific reports
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Meta Analysis
Decompressive craniectomy for the treatment of malignant infarction of the middle cerebral artery.
Early decompressive craniectomy (DC) has been shown to reduce mortality in malignant middle cerebral artery (MCA) infarction, whereas efficacy of DC on functional outcome is inconclusive. Here, we performed a meta-analysis to estimate the effects of DC on malignant MCA infarction and investigated whether age of patients and timing of surgery influenced the efficacy. We systematically searched PubMed, Medline, Embase, Cochrane library, Web of Science update to June 2014. ⋯ In the subgroup analysis stratified by age, early DC improved outcome both in younger and older patients. However, later DC (after 48h after stroke onset) might not have a benefit effect on lowering mortality or improving outcome in patients with malignant infarction. Together, this study suggested that decompressive surgery undertaken within 48 h reduced mortality and increased the number of patients with a favourable outcome in patients with malignant MCA infarction.
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Clinical Trial
Acupuncture modulates cortical thickness and functional connectivity in knee osteoarthritis patients.
In this study, we investigated cortical thickness and functional connectivity across longitudinal acupuncture treatments in patients with knee osteoarthritis (OA). Over a period of four weeks (six treatments), we collected resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans from 30 patients before their first, third and sixth treatments. ⋯ Resting state functional connectivity (rsFC) analysis using the left pMPFC as a seed showed that after longitudinal treatments, the rsFC between the left pMPFC and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), medial frontal pole (mFP) and periaquiduct grey (PAG) are significantly greater in the verum acupuncture group as compared with the sham group. Our results suggest that acupuncture may achieve its therapeutic effect on knee OA pain by preventing cortical thinning and decreases in functional connectivity in major pain related areas, therefore modulating pain in the descending pain modulatory pathway.
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The role of amyloid-β (Aβ) neuropathology and its significant changes in biofluids after traumatic brain injury (TBI) is still debated. We used ultrasensitive digital ELISA approach to assess amyloid-β1-42 (Aβ42) concentrations and time-course in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and in plasma of patients with severe TBI and investigated their relationship to injury characteristics, neurological status and clinical outcome. We found decreased CSF Aβ42 levels in TBI patients acutely after injury with lower levels in patients who died 6 months post-injury than in survivors. ⋯ A trend analysis showed that both CSF and plasma Aβ42 levels strongly correlated with mortality. A positive correlation between changes in CSF Aβ42 concentrations and neurological status as assessed by Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) was identified. Our results suggest that determination of Aβ42 may be valuable to obtain prognostic information in patients with severe TBI as well as in monitoring the response of the brain to injury.
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Surface chest motion can be easily monitored with a wide variety of sensors such as pressure belts, fiber Bragg gratings and inertial sensors, etc. The current applications of these sensors are mainly restricted to respiratory motion monitoring/analysis due to the technical challenges involved in separation of the cardiac motion from the dominant respiratory motion. The contribution of heart to the surface chest motion is relatively very small as compared to the respiratory motion. ⋯ Experimental validation of these proposed approaches is performed with chest displacement data and ECG obtained from healthy subjects under normal breathing and post-exercise conditions. The extracted component morphologically matches well with the collected ECG. Results show that the proposed methods perform better than conventional band pass filtering.
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Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a lethal progressive neurological disorder affecting the memory. Recently, US Food and Drug Administration mitigated the standard for drug approval, allowing symptomatic drugs that only improve cognitive deficits to be allowed to accelerate on to clinical trials. Our study focuses on taurine, an endogenous amino acid found in high concentrations in humans. ⋯ Taurine treatment rescued cognitive deficits in APP/PS1 mice up to the age-matching wild-type mice in Y-maze and passive avoidance tests without modifying the behaviours of cognitively normal mice. In the cortex of APP/PS1 mice, taurine slightly decreased insoluble fraction of Aβ. While the exact mechanism of taurine in AD has not yet been ascertained, our results suggest that taurine can aid cognitive impairment and may inhibit Aβ-related damages.