CONFLICT OF INTEREST: None declared.
01 Jan 2013-
TL;DR: A rare case of hidradenitis suppurativa (HS), diagnosed by definition criteria, with multiple subcutaneous abscesses with spontaneous drainage of pus, sub cutaneousindurations and scars in bilateral inguinal areas, which had appeared 10 years prior and rapidly increased in number.
Abstract: lated (to a maximum of 40 mg/day) or tapered according toUC activity. She was taking 5 mg/day at the initial visit to us.Physical examination showed multiple subcutaneousabscesses with spontaneous drainage of pus, subcutaneousindurations and scars in bilateral inguinal areas (Fig. 1a), butneither axillae nor buttocks were involved. Bacterial culturesyielded Streptococcus anginosus. Histological examinationshowed increase of collagenous fibers and infiltration of inflam-matory cells such as lymphocytes and neutrophils in the deepdermis (Fig. 1b), containing a number of CD3-, 4- and interleu-kin (IL)-17-positive cells (Fig. 1c). She was treated with oral anti-biotics (minocycline 200 mg/day). Additionally, she hadbrownish dermal nodules scattered on her trunk and legs(Fig. 1d), which had appeared 10 years prior and rapidlyincreased in number. Physical examination revealed seven nod-ules in total, but she denied familial occurrence. Histology ofthose nodules showed an ill-defined proliferation of fibrohistio-cytic cells in the dermis, containing foamy histiocytes (Fig. 1e).Toluidine blue stain revealed a number of mast cells in theperipheral layers of the fibrotic lesions (Fig. 1f), correspondingto the IL-17-positive cells on serially cut sections (Fig. 1g).We herein described a rare case of hidradenitis suppurativa(HS), diagnosed by definition criteria,
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Journal Article•
TL;DR: The pathogenesis factors involved in Atherosclerosis have recently been cleared and the discovery of these factors has brought about new hopes for better prevention and treatment of atherosclerosis.
Abstract: Background: Atherosclerosis is the major cause of morbidities and mortalities worldwide. In this study we aimed to review the mechanism of atherosclerosis and its risk factors, focusing on new findings in atherosclerosis markers and its risk factors. Furthermore, the role of antioxidants and medicinal herbs in atherosclerosis and endothelial damage has been discussed and a list of important medicinal plants effective in the treatment and prevention of hyperlipidemia and atherosclerosis is presented. Methods: The recently published papers about atherosclerosis pathogenesis and herbal medicines effective in the treatment and prevention of hyperlipidemia and atherosclerosis were searched. Results: Inflammation has a crucial role in pathogenesis of atherosclerosis. The disease is accompanied by excessive fibrosis of the intima, fatty plaques formation, proliferation of smooth muscle cells, and migration of a group of cells such as monocytes, T cells, and platelets which are formed in response to inflammation. The oxidation of low density lipoprotein (LDL) to Ox‑LDL indicates the first step of atherosclerosis in cardiovascular diseases. Malondialdehyde factor shows the level of lipoperoxidation and is a sign of increased oxidative pressure and cardiovascular diseases. In special pathological conditions such as severe hypercholesterolemia, peroxynitrite concentration increases and atherosclerosis and vascular damage are intensified. Medicinal plants have shown to be capable of interacting these or other pathogenesis factors to prevent atherosclerosis.
542 citations
TL;DR: An ensemble of protein disorder predictors based on bidirectional recursive neural networks and trained on three different flavors of disorder, including a novel NMR flexibility predictor called ESpritz, which can be especially useful for high-throughput applications.
Abstract: Motivation: Intrinsically disordered regions are key for the function of numerous proteins, and the scant available experimental annotations suggest the existence of different disorder flavors. While efficient predictions are required to annotate entire genomes, most existing methods require sequence profiles for disorder prediction, making them cumbersome for high-throughput applications. Results: In this work, we present an ensemble of protein disorder predictors called ESpritz. These are based on bidirectional recursive neural networks and trained on three different flavors of disorder, including a novel NMR flexibility predictor. ESpritz can produce fast and accurate sequence-only predictions, annotating entire genomes in the order of hours on a single processor core. Alternatively, a slower but slightly more accurate ESpritz variant using sequence profiles can be used for applications requiring maximum performance. Two levels of prediction confidence allow either to maximize reasonable disorder detection or to limit expected false positives to 5%. ESpritz performs consistently well on the recent CASP9 data, reaching a Sw measure of 54.82 and area under the receiver operator curve of 0.856. The fast predictor is four orders of magnitude faster and remains better than most publicly available CASP9 methods, making it ideal for genomic scale predictions. Conclusions: ESpritz predicts three flavors of disorder at two distinct false positive rates, either with a fast or slower and slightly more accurate approach. Given its state-of-the-art performance, it can be especially useful for high-throughput applications. Availability: Both a web server for high-throughput analysis and a Linux executable version of ESpritz are available from: http://protein.bio.unipd.it/espritz/ Contact: silvio.tosatto@unipd.it
431 citations
TL;DR: The objective of this article is to introduce the primary care physicians about the concept of systematic reviews and meta-analysis, outlining why they are important, describing their methods and terminologies used, and helping them with the skills to recognize and understand a reliable review which will be helpful for their day-to-day clinical practice and research activities.
Abstract: Healthcare decisions for individual patients and for public health policies should be informed by the best available research evidence. The practice of evidence-based medicine is the integration of individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research and patient's values and expectations. Primary care physicians need evidence for both clinical practice and for public health decision making. The evidence comes from good reviews which is a state-of-the-art synthesis of current evidence on a given research question. Given the explosion of medical literature, and the fact that time is always scarce, review articles play a vital role in decision making in evidence-based medical practice. Given that most clinicians and public health professionals do not have the time to track down all the original articles, critically read them, and obtain the evidence they need for their questions, systematic reviews and clinical practice guidelines may be their best source of evidence. Systematic reviews aim to identify, evaluate, and summarize the findings of all relevant individual studies over a health-related issue, thereby making the available evidence more accessible to decision makers. The objective of this article is to introduce the primary care physicians about the concept of systematic reviews and meta-analysis, outlining why they are important, describing their methods and terminologies used, and thereby helping them with the skills to recognize and understand a reliable review which will be helpful for their day-to-day clinical practice and research activities.
431 citations
TL;DR: Microneedling fractional radiofrequency is efficacious for the treatment of moderate and severe acne scars.
Abstract: Background: Various treatment modalities including non-invasive methods such as chemical peels, topical retinoids, microdermabrasion, minimally invasive techniques such as microneedling, fractional lasers, microneedling radiofrequency devices and invasive procedures such as acne scar surgeries and ablative lasers are used for acne scars, each with its own unique advantages and disadvantages. This study is a retrospective assessment of efficacy and safety of microneedling fractional radiofrequency in the treatment of acne scars. Methods: Thirty one patients of skin types III-V with moderate and severe facial acne scarring received four sequential fractional radiofrequency treatments over a period of 6 months with an interval of 6 weeks between each session. Goodman & Baron's acne scar grading system was used for assessment by a side by side comparison of preoperative and post- operative photographs taken at their first visit and at the end of 3 months after the last session. Results: Estimation of improvement with Goodman and Baron's Global Acne Scarring System showed that by qualitative assessment of 31 patients with grade 3 and grade 4 acne scars, 80.64% showed improvement by 2 grades and 19.35% showed improvement by 1 grade. Quantitative assessment showed that 58% of the patients had moderate, 29% had minimal, 9% had good and 3% showed very good improvement. Adverse effects were limited to transient pain, erythema, edema and hyperpigmentation. Conclusion: Microneedling fractional radiofrequency is efficacious for the treatment of moderate and severe acne scars.
241 citations
TL;DR: The current review attempts to give an overview on the potential of such plant-derived natural products as antiprotozoal leads and/or drugs in the fight against NTDs.
Abstract: Infections with protozoan parasites are a major cause of disease and mortality in many tropical countries of the world. Diseases caused by species of the genera Trypanosoma (Human African Trypanosomiasis and Chagas Disease) and Leishmania (various forms of Leishmaniasis) are among the seventeen "Neglected Tropical Diseases" (NTDs) defined by the WHO. Furthermore, malaria (caused by various Plasmodium species) can be considered a neglected disease in certain countries and with regard to availability and affordability of the antimalarials. Living organisms, especially plants, provide an innumerable number of molecules with potential for the treatment of many serious diseases. The current review attempts to give an overview on the potential of such plant-derived natural products as antiprotozoal leads and/or drugs in the fight against NTDs. In part I, a general description of the diseases, the current state of therapy and need for new therapeuticals, assay methods and strategies applied in the search for new plant derived natural products against these diseases and an overview on natural products of terpenoid origin with antiprotozoal potential were given. The present part II compiles the current knowledge on natural products with antiprotozoal activity that are derived from the shikimate pathway (lignans, coumarins, caffeic acid derivatives), quinones of various structural classes, compounds formed via the polyketide pathways (flavonoids and related compounds, chromenes and related benzopyrans and benzofurans, xanthones, acetogenins from Annonaceae and polyacetylenes) as well as the diverse classes of alkaloids. In total, both parts compile the literature on almost 900 different plant-derived natural products and their activity data, taken from over 800 references. These data, as the result of enormous efforts of numerous research groups world-wide, illustrate that plant secondary metabolites represent an immensely rich source of chemical diversity with an extremely high potential to yield a wealth of lead structures towards new therapies for NTDs. Only a small percentage, however, of the roughly 200,000 plant species on earth have been studied chemically and only a small percentage of these plants or their constituents has been investigated for antiprotozoal activity. The repository of plant-derived natural products hence deserves to be investigated even more intensely than it has been up to present.
231 citations
References
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TL;DR: The evolving and new concepts of this dermatosis that are discussed include: Sweet's syndrome occurring in the clinical setting of a disease‐related malignancy, or medication, or both; detection of additional sites of extracutaneous Sweet's syndrome manifestations; discovery of additional Sweet'S syndrome‐associated diseases; variability of the composition and/or location of the cutaneous inflammatory infiltrate in Sweet' s syndrome lesions; and additional efficacious treatments for Sweet’s syndrome.
Abstract: Sweet's syndrome, also referred to as acute febrile neutrophilic dermatosis, is characterized by a constellation of symptoms and findings: fever, neutrophilia, erythematous and tender skin lesions that typically show an upper dermal infiltrate of mature neutrophils, and prompt improvement of both symptoms and lesions after the initiation of treatment with systemic corticosteroids. Hundreds of patients with this dermatosis have been reported. The manifestations of Sweet's syndrome in these individuals have not only confirmed those originally described by Dr Robert Douglas Sweet in 1964, but have also introduced new features that have expanded the clinical and pathologic concepts of this condition. The history, clinical characteristics, laboratory findings, associated diseases, pathology, and treatment options of Sweet's syndrome are reviewed. The evolving and new concepts of this dermatosis that are discussed include: (i) Sweet's syndrome occurring in the clinical setting of a disease-related malignancy, or medication, or both; (ii) detection of additional sites of extracutaneous Sweet's syndrome manifestations; (iii) discovery of additional Sweet's syndrome-associated diseases; (iv) variability of the composition and/or location of the cutaneous inflammatory infiltrate in Sweet's syndrome lesions; and (v) additional efficacious treatments for Sweet's syndrome.
347 citations
TL;DR: The skin involvement of the myelodysplastic syndrome can take the form of either a neoplastic infiltration or various non specific lesions, which may herald its progression to acute leukemia.
85 citations
TL;DR: Four-mitTon parallin-embedded sections were stained with an indirect immunolluorescent method using affinity-puriHed rahhii anti-.MllP o\'erlaid wilh lluorescein Isothiocyanale conjugated goat antirabhit IgCI to assess cellular staining and extracellular protein deposition.
Abstract: Four-mitTon parallin-embedded sections were stained with an indirect immunolluorescent method using affinity-puriHed rahhii anti-.MllP o\\'erlaid wilh lluorescein Isothiocyanale conjugated goat antirabhit IgCI.\"̂ The stained sections were examined and photographed wilh a Zeiss fluorescence microscope, and the tissues were assigned a grade from 0 to i for cellular staining and extracellular protein deposition based upon the intensity and extent of the tluorescence as follows. Cellular: 0. rare cells (0-5) observed; 1. few cells (5-2 5) observed: 2. moderate numhers of cells (about 2 5-50): 3. many cells On excess of 50). Hxlracellular; 0. no or falnl indeterminant extracellular protein deposition: 0 5. small focal areas; I. focal areas: 2, focal dense areas; 3, extensive deposition.
24 citations
TL;DR: A 59‐year‐old patient who initially was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome and developed a sudden onset of widespread pustulosis and erythematous indurated papules is reported to have disappeared completely after treatment with systemic corticosteroids.
Abstract: Neutrophilic panniculitis associated with myelodysplastic syndromes is rare. We report a 59-year-old patient who initially was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) and developed a sudden onset of widespread pustulosis and erythematous indurated papules. Examination of skin biopsies of a papule lesion showed dense neutrophilic infiltration limited to the subcutaneous tissue. The pustules and papules disappeared completely after treatment with systemic corticosteroids. To our knowledge, only one patient was identified by MEDLINE search of the English-language literature.
22 citations
9 citations