Labor augmentation strategies: What's the evidence?

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 151219
Author(s):  
Moeun Son
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (41) ◽  
pp. 5698-5711 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonardo F. Fontenelle ◽  
Maiara Zeni-Graiff ◽  
Julliana N. Quintas ◽  
Murat Yücel

Many of the currently available treatments for obsessive-compulsive and related disorders (OCRDs) such as pharmacotherapy augmentation strategies, partial hospitalization programs, deep brain stimulation, and neurosurgery are efficacious for individuals suffering from more severe forms of these conditions. Unfortunately, the application of these treatments in milder forms of illness and subclinical samples, which affect a substantial portion of the population, is not justifiable by their costs (e.g. cognitivebehavioral therapy) and/or potential for side effects (serotonin-reuptake inhibitors associated sexual side effects). As such, there is an urgent need to develop simple yet effective treatments, such as modifiable lifestyle interventions, that can be employed on a broader scale. Here, we review the current state of evidence that supports or refutes the efficacy of lifestyle approaches for OCRDs. We focus on dimensions of lifestyle that are deemed important for cardiovascular diseases; namely, physical activity, stress, sleep, diet and eating behaviors, alcohol consumption, and smoking. Despite the relative scarcity of welldesigned randomized controlled trials targeting unhealthy life styles in OCRDs, we found meditation-based therapies and interventions focusing on eliminating sedentarism to be promising approaches. In the future, these strategies may represent valid alternative for subjects with subthreshold symptoms or at risk for OCRDs or other “compulsive” disorders.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-227
Author(s):  
Yi-Hang Chiu ◽  
Chia-Yueh Hsu ◽  
Mong-Liang Lu ◽  
Chun-Hsin Chen

Background: Clozapine has been used in treatment-resistant patients with schizophrenia. However, only 40% of patients with treatment-resistant schizophrenia have response to clozapine. Many augmentation strategies have been proposed to treat those clozapine-resistant patients, but the results are inconclusive. In this review, we intended to review papers dealing with the augmentation strategies in the treatment of clozapineresistant patients with schizophrenia. Method: We reviewed randomized, double-blind, placebo- or sham-controlled trials (RCT) for clozapine-resistant patients with schizophrenia in Embase, PsycINFO, Cochrane, and PubMed database from January 1990 to June 2019. Results: Antipsychotics, antidepressants, mood stabilizers, brain stimulation, such as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, and other strategies, were used as an augmentation in clozapine-resistant patients with schizophrenia. Except for better evidence in memantine with 2 RCTs and cognitive behavior therapy in 2 studies to support its effectiveness, we found that all the other effective augmentations, including sulpiride, ziprasidone, duloxetine, mirtazapine, ECT, sodium benzoate, ginkgo biloba, and minocycline, had only one RCT with limited sample size. Conclusion: In this review, no definite effective augmentation strategy was found for clozapine-resistant patients. Some potential strategies with beneficial effects on psychopathology need further studies with a larger sample size to support their efficacy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 1128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yundong Li ◽  
Wei Hu ◽  
Han Dong ◽  
Xueyan Zhang

Using aerial cameras, satellite remote sensing or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) equipped with cameras can facilitate search and rescue tasks after disasters. The traditional manual interpretation of huge aerial images is inefficient and could be replaced by machine learning-based methods combined with image processing techniques. Given the development of machine learning, researchers find that convolutional neural networks can effectively extract features from images. Some target detection methods based on deep learning, such as the single-shot multibox detector (SSD) algorithm, can achieve better results than traditional methods. However, the impressive performance of machine learning-based methods results from the numerous labeled samples. Given the complexity of post-disaster scenarios, obtaining many samples in the aftermath of disasters is difficult. To address this issue, a damaged building assessment method using SSD with pretraining and data augmentation is proposed in the current study and highlights the following aspects. (1) Objects can be detected and classified into undamaged buildings, damaged buildings, and ruins. (2) A convolution auto-encoder (CAE) that consists of VGG16 is constructed and trained using unlabeled post-disaster images. As a transfer learning strategy, the weights of the SSD model are initialized using the weights of the CAE counterpart. (3) Data augmentation strategies, such as image mirroring, rotation, Gaussian blur, and Gaussian noise processing, are utilized to augment the training data set. As a case study, aerial images of Hurricane Sandy in 2012 were maximized to validate the proposed method’s effectiveness. Experiments show that the pretraining strategy can improve of 10% in terms of overall accuracy compared with the SSD trained from scratch. These experiments also demonstrate that using data augmentation strategies can improve mAP and mF1 by 72% and 20%, respectively. Finally, the experiment is further verified by another dataset of Hurricane Irma, and it is concluded that the paper method is feasible.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 2318
Author(s):  
Lyes Toualbi ◽  
Maria Toms ◽  
Mariya Moosajee

Inherited retinal diseases (IRDs) are a heterogeneous group of disorders causing progressive loss of vision, affecting approximately one in 1000 people worldwide. Gene augmentation therapy, which typically involves using adeno-associated viral vectors for delivery of healthy gene copies to affected tissues, has shown great promise as a strategy for the treatment of IRDs. However, the use of viruses is associated with several limitations, including harmful immune responses, genome integration, and limited gene carrying capacity. Here, we review the advances in non-viral gene augmentation strategies, such as the use of plasmids with minimal bacterial backbones and scaffold/matrix attachment region (S/MAR) sequences, that have the capability to overcome these weaknesses by accommodating genes of any size and maintaining episomal transgene expression with a lower risk of eliciting an immune response. Low retinal transfection rates remain a limitation, but various strategies, including coupling the DNA with different types of chemical vehicles (nanoparticles) and the use of electrical methods such as iontophoresis and electrotransfection to aid cell entry, have shown promise in preclinical studies. Non-viral gene therapy may offer a safer and effective option for future treatment of IRDs.


2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rehab Abdelhamid Aboshama ◽  
Ahmed Mohamed Abdelhakim ◽  
Mohammad Abrar Shareef ◽  
Abdulhadi A. AlAmodi ◽  
Mohammad Sunoqrot ◽  
...  

AbstractObjectivesTo compare the safety and efficacy between high dose and low dose oxytocin administration for labor augmentation.MethodsWe searched for the available studies during March 2020 in PubMed, Cochrane Library, Scopus, and ISI Web of science. All randomized clinical trials (RCTs) that assessed safety and efficacy of high dose vs. low dose oxytocin for labor augmentation were considered. The extracted data were entered into RevMan software. Dichotomous and continuous data were pooled as odds ratio (OR) and mean difference (MD) respectively, with the corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CI). Our main outcomes were cesarean delivery rate, spontaneous vaginal delivery rate, uterine hyperstimulation and tachysystole, and labor duration from oxytocin infusion.ResultsEight RCTs with 3,154 patients were included. High dose oxytocin did not reduce cesarean delivery rate compared to low dose oxytocin (OR=0.76, 95% CI [0.52, 1.10], p=0.15). After solving the reported heterogeneity, high dose oxytocin did not increase the rate of spontaneous vaginal deliveries vs. low dose oxytocin (OR=1.06, 95% CI [0.84, 1.32], p=0.64). Low dose oxytocin was linked to a significant decline in uterine hyperstimulation and tachysystole (p>0.001). A reduction in labor duration was found in high dose oxytocin group over low oxytocin regimen (MD=−1.02 h, 95% CI [−1.77, −0.27], p=0.008).ConclusionsWe found no advantages for high dose oxytocin over low dose oxytocin in labor augmentation except in reducing labor duration. Low dose oxytocin is safer as it decreases the incidence of uterine hyperstimulation and tachysystole. More trials are needed to confirm our findings.


2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (S1) ◽  
pp. S407-S407
Author(s):  
S. Bise ◽  
B. Kurtovic ◽  
D. Begic ◽  
O. Cemalovic

Augmentation strategies for the treatment of Major depressive disorder (MDD) are needed when patients with MDD have a partial, or not responded to antidepressant monotherapy. The focus of augmentation therapy has been combining an antidepressant (AD) medication with another AD. Atypical antipsychotics (AAP) are becoming commonly used to augment antidepressants. Beyond AD and AAP, alternative augmentation strategies include mood stabilizers (MS).AimTo analyze the characteristics of therapy in patients with diagnosis of MDD and to investigate the frequency of augmentation therapy.MethodStudy included 28 patients hospitalized during one year with MDD diagnosis. Statistical analysis was performed with x2 and t-test.ResultAmong patients with MDD there were 18 (64.28%) women with an average age 57.5 and 10 (35.71%) men with an average age 53.5. Of the 28 patients with MDD, 25 (89.28%) were treated with a combination therapy, and monotherapy in the remaining 3 patients (10.71%). Of 25 patients with augmentation strategy treatment, 22 (88%) used two medications and the remaining 3 (12%) tree psychotropic medications (AAP, AD, MS). The most frequent combinations were a combination of AD and AAP (17 patients, 68%). Beyond that frequent combination were AD and MS (6 patients, 24%). Two patients used combination two AAP, and one patient with two AD and one patients used AAP and MS.ConclusionAugmentation strategy is often used in patients with MDD. There is no significant difference in the use combination therapy based on gender and age.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.


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