COVID-19 and Cardiac Arrhythmias

Since the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic spread unrelentingly all over the world, millions of cases have been reported. Despite a high number of asymptomatic cases, the course of the disease can be serious or even fatal. The affection of the myocardium, called myocardial injury, is caused by multiple triggers. The occurrence of cardiac arrhythmias in COVID-19 patients with myocardial involvement and a critical course is common. In this review, potential mechanisms, incidence, and treatment options for cardiac arrhythmias in COVID-19 patients will be provided by performing a literature research in MESH database and the National Library of Medicine. Common cardiac arrhythmias in COVID-19 patients were sinus tachycardia, atrial fibrillation (AF), ventricular tachycardia (VT), ventricular fibrillation (VF), atrioventricular block, sinusoidal block or QTc prolongation. AF was the most common heart rhythm disorder. About 10% of COVID-19 patients develop new-onset AF and 23 to 33% showed recurrence of AF in patients with known AF. One retrospective trial revealed the incidence of VT or VF to be 5.9% in hospitalized patients. Both AF and VT are clearly associated with worse outcome. Several mechanisms such as hypoxia, myocarditis, myocardial ischemia, or abnormal host immune response, which induce cardiac arrhythmias, have been described. The effect of QT-prolonging drugs in inducing cardiac arrhythmias has become mitigated as these medications are no longer recommended. Acute management of cardiac arrhythmias in COVID-19 patients is affected by the reduction of exposure of health care personnel. More prospective data are desirable to better understand pathophysiology and consecutively adapt management.

A Unique Case of Bilateral Thalamic High-Grade Glioma in a Pediatric Patient with LI-Fraumeni Syndrome: Case Presentation and Review of the Literature

Li-Fraumeni syndrome (LFS) is a rare high-penetrance and autosomal-dominant pathological condition caused by the germline mutation of the TP53 gene, predisposing to the development of tumors from pediatric age. We conducted a qualitative systematic review following the ENTREQ (Enhancing Transparency in Reporting the Synthesis of Qualitative Research) framework. A search was made in MEDLINE/Pubmed and MeSH Database using the terms “Li-Fraumeni” AND “pediatric high-grade glioma (HGG)”, identifying six cases of HGGs in pediatric patients with LFS. We added a further case with peculiar features such as no familiar history of LFS, association of embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma and bithalamic HGG, whose immunohistochemical profile was accurately defined by Next Generation Sequencing. Knowledge synthesis and case analysis grounded the discussion about challenges in the management of this pathology in pediatric age.

POSTOPERATIVE COMPLICATIONS IN HEMORRHOIDAL DISEASE AND SPECIAL CONDITIONS.

Background: Hemorrhoidal disease is still one of the most prevalent proctological diseases. Pain is the most common complication after surgery, but bleeding, urinary retention and perianal infection are also frequent. There is also an important group of patients, such as those with inflammatory bowel disease, pregnancy or immunosuppression, who can present an increased rate or more severe complications. Objective: To describe the complications following different surgical and instrumental techniques for hemorrhoids in a literature review. Special situations were reviewed to determine how they affect the management of the disease. Methods: During August 2019 a narrative review of hemorrhoid surgery complications and special situations was performed using the Pubmed MESH DATABASE. Conclusions: Pain, urinary retention and bleeding remain the most frequent complications after surgery for hemorrhoids; however, special situations must be taken into account in order to choose the best technique to prevent more severe complications.

Quality of Life for End-Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) PatientsUndergoing Peritoneal Dialysis (PD) Therapy: A Literature Review

Introduction: ESRD adalah diagnosis akhir yang membutuhkan terapi pengganti ginjal seumur hidup seperti hemodialisa, peritoneal dialysis (PD) dan transplantasi ginjal. Populasi di dunia dan prevalensi penyakit ginjal stadium akhir terus meningkat, pasien semakin dihadapkan dengan keputusan untuk memulai terapi pengganti ginjal. Penelitian dan literature review yang menilai dampak perawatan terapi PD pada pasien ESRD masih terbatas. Tujuan dari literature review ini untuk menganalisis terapi CAPD pada pasien ESRD. Pencarian terbatas pada database elektronik seperti Pubmed, Proquest, dan Google Scholar, dengan kata kunci “ESRD”,”CAPD”,“Peritoneal Dialysis”,“Quality of Life” disusun berdasarkan MeSH Database dari NCBI. Methods: Strategi review artikel menggunakan PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta Analyses) dan dianalisa menggunakan konten analisis. Studi yang diterbitkan antara tahun 2009-2019, artikel penelitian dengan bahasa inggris, dipertimbangkan sebagai kriteria inklusi dalam tinjauan ini. Results: Didapatkan 25 artikel; 15 kuantitatif, 7 kualitatif, 2 case report dan 1 mixed methods. Discussion: Domain fisik; PD memberikan kelebihan pada peran-fisik, vitalitas, energik, dan bebas nyeri. Domain psikologis; PD menimbulkan depresi dan kecemasan yang lebih rendah daripada HD, bahkan 1 studi menyebutkan HD dapat menyebabkan depresi berat. Hubungan sosial; PD memberikan kemandirian pada gaya hidup, efikasi diri, kebebasan beraktivitas, fleksibilitas, dan mempertahankan kehidupan normal. Hubungan terkait lingkungan; pasien dengan PD lebih mungkin untuk melanjutkan pekerjaan mereka sehingga mereka secara finansial lebih baik dan lebih bebas untuk bepergian daripada HD, penghasilan terus dapat secara signifikan berkontribusi pada kesejahteraan pasien CAPD. Conclusion: PD terbukti memberikan kualitas hidup yang lebih baik. Dengan demikian, penting untuk mengembangkan terapi PD pada pasien ESRD yang membutuhkan dialisis jangka panjang, bahkan seumur hidup.

Cancer Publication Portal: an online tool for summarizing and searching human cancer-genomic publications

A search of PubMed lists >582,000 citations with the keywords “cancer” and “gene”. The large volume of cancer genomic publications necessitates the development of text-mining tools to help cancer researchers navigate and summarize articles efficiently. We developed a Cancer Publication Portal (CPP) to help researchers efficiently search and summarize cancer genomic publications, based on one or more genes of interest. CPP integrates data from several sources, including PubTator, the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) database; the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee human gene name database; PubMed, a database of biomedical literature citations; and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Thesaurus. Following each query, results are summarized and include the publication frequency for each cancer type, as well as publication frequencies for cancer terms, pharmacological agents, genomic mutations, and additional genes stratified by cancer type. Cancer terms were identified by comparing titles and abstracts from cancer-related (N=851,868) and non-cancer related articles (N=2,607,020). CPP allows a user to quickly obtain publication statistics, such as the frequency of articles mentioning EGFR across cancer types, and to explore associations, such as the association between pharmacological agent and cancer type. Result summaries are interactive, so additional filters can be easily added as the literature is explored. After a search is completed, a PubTator collection can be quickly created, in order to view article titles and abstracts in PubTator. CPP currently includes information for ~1.1 million cancer-related publications associated with >23,000 human genes. Database URL: https://gdancik.github.io/bioinformatics/CPP/.

Randomized controlled trials in ophthalmology: a bibliometric study

Background: Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are situated at the top of hierarchy of evidence-based medicine, where its number and quality are important in the assessment of quality of evidence in a medical field. In this study, we aim to assess the status of RCTs in Ophthalmology. Methods: On 15th of May 2019, we performed a PubMed search for randomized controlled trials published in the field of ophthalmology using relevant filters and search terms. We categorized the results into specific topics in ophthalmology according to Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) database classification system. We used Altmetric explorer to identify journals and articles with the highest number of RCTs and highest citations. Results: We found a total of 540,427 publications in the field of ophthalmology, of which only 11,634 (2.15%) of them were RCTs. ‘Retinal diseases’ was the topic with the highest number of RCTs, followed by ‘glaucoma’ and ‘conjunctival diseases’. The trial with highest number of citations was on retinal diseases. Only around 18% of all ophthalmology RCTs are published in the top 10 ophthalmology journals, with a maximum percentage of RCTs was (5.53%) published in Ophthalmology. Conclusion: RCTs in ophthalmology primarily concern the retina, glaucoma, and a few other sub-topics, with little focus on sclera, orbit, and the eyelids. Most of the high impact RCTs are published in non-ophthalmology journals.

Errors in search strategies used in systematic reviews and their effects on information retrieval

Objectives: Errors in search strategies negatively affect the quality and validity of systematic reviews. The primary objective of this study was to evaluate searches performed in MEDLINE/PubMed to identify errors and determine their effects on information retrieval.Methods: A PubMed search was conducted using the systematic review filter to identify articles that were published in January of 2018. Systematic reviews or meta-analyses were selected from a systematic search for literature containing reproducible and explicit search strategies in MEDLINE/PubMed. Data were extracted from these studies related to ten types of errors and to the terms and phrases search modes.Results: The study included 137 systematic reviews in which the number of search strategies containing some type of error was very high (92.7%). Errors that affected recall were the most frequent (78.1%), and the most common search errors involved missing terms in both natural language and controlled language and those related to Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) search terms and the non-retrieval of their more specific terms.Conclusions: To improve the quality of searches and avoid errors, it is essential to plan the search strategy carefully, which includes consulting the MeSH database to identify the concepts and choose all appropriate terms, both descriptors and synonyms, and combining search techniques in the free-text and controlled-language fields, truncating the terms appropriately to retrieve all their variants.

Visual Saliency and Perceptual Quality Assessment of 3D Meshes

This chapter concerns the visual saliency and the perceptual quality assessment of 3D meshes. Firstly, the chapter proposes a definition of visual saliency and describes the state-of-the-art methods for its detection on 3D mesh surfaces. A focus is made on a recent model of visual saliency detection for 3D colored and non-colored meshes whose results are compared with a ground-truth saliency as well as with the literature's methods. Since this model is able to estimate the visual saliency on 3D colored meshes, named colorimetric saliency, a description of the construction of a 3D colored mesh database that was used to assess its relevance is presented. The authors also describe three applications of the detailed model that respond to the problems of viewpoint selection, adaptive simplification and adaptive smoothing. Secondly, two perceptual quality assessment metrics for 3D non-colored meshes are described, analyzed, and compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.