Background: Caffeine has been commonly used for prevention and treatment of apnea-related symptoms in premature infants. However, its side effects have not been thoroughly studied. We investigated ...whether caffeine affects gastric motility in very-preterm (VP) neonates. Methods: The study is a randomized crossover clinical trial. Twenty-two neonates with mean birth weight (BW) (standard deviation—SD) 1077 (229) g and mean gestational age (GA) (SD) 28.6 (2.1) weeks were recruited. Each neonate had its gastric emptying time checked twice with ultrasound assessment of changes in antral cross sectional area (ACSA). All neonates were sequentially allocated to the caffeine group (A) and the control group (B). Complications from the gastrointestinal tract were documented throughout the study. Results: Statistically significant difference was found with regards to the gastric emptying time median, (range) between caffeine and control group (p = 0.040). Additionally, in the neonates with BW 1000–1500 g and GA ≥ 28 weeks, the gastric emptying time (minutes) was significantly longer during caffeine treatment 44.5 (36–68.2) and 40 (34.5–66.5) respectively, as compared to the gastric emptying time during no caffeine treatment 27 (24.2–30) (p = 0.002) and 27 (24.5–30) (p = 0.001). The incidence of gastrointestinal (GI) complications was significantly greater in neonates receiving caffeine 6 (27.%) as compared with those without caffeine treatment 1 (4.6%) (p = 0.039). Conclusions: During caffeine treatment, a significantly delayed gastric emptying time was noted in all study neonates, especially in these with BW 1000–1500 g and those with GA ≥ 28 weeks. Further larger studies are necessary in order to confirm this interesting finding.
We aimed to evaluate gastric volume changes during intermittent milk feeds (IMF) and continuous milk feeds (CMF) in very premature neonates (VPN), with gastric residual volume (GRV) based on antral ...cross-sectional area (ACSA) measurements and to examine if there were differences in GRV between the two feeding methods.
A randomized prospective clinical trial with crossover design was conducted in 31 preterm neonates (gestational age < 30 weeks). Gastric volume was assessed twice in each neonate (during IMF and CMF feeding), at 7 specific time points during a 2-h observation period by measuring ACSA changes via the ultrasound (U/S) method.
There was a significantly different pattern of gastric volume changes between the two feeding methods. GRV, expressed as the median percentage of ACSA measurement at 120 min relative to the higher ACSA measurement during IMF, was found to be 3% (range 0-25%) for IMF and 50% (range 15-80%) for CMF. Neonates fed with IMF had a shorter mean gastric emptying time compared to those fed with CMF (
= 0.0032). No signs of feeding intolerance were recorded in either group during the period of observation.
Our results showed that gastric volume changes and gastric emptying time in VPN, based on ACSA measurement changes, depend on the milk feeding method. No gastrointestinal complications/adverse events were noted with GRV up to 80% with CMF.
Introduction: The effects of “aggressive” neonatal feeding policies of very preterm neonates (VPN) and the risk of metabolic syndrome later in life remain questionable. We aimed to evaluate the ...effect of our “aggressive” nutrition policies of VPN during hospitalisation on body mass index (BMI) at ages 2 and 8 years. Materials and Methods: Eighty four VPN, who received “aggressive” nutrition during hospitalisation in an effort to minimise postnatal growth restriction (PGR) (group A), and 62 term neonates, as controls (group B), were enrolled in the study. Group A was further divided in four subgroups depending on the type (A1: fortified expressed breast milk and preterm formula; A2: exclusively preterm formula) and quantity of milk received (A3: maximum feeds 180–210 mL/kg/day; A4: maximum feeds 210 and up to 260 mL/kg/day). BMI was calculated at ages 2 and 8 years and plotted on the centile charts. Results: There was no significant difference in BMI between groups A and B at 2 and 8 years, respectively, in both absolute BMI values and their centile chart distribution. There was no significant difference in BMI at 2 and 8 years either between subgroups A1 and A2 or between subgroups A3 and A4. Conclusions: “Aggressive” and individualised feeding policy for VPN did not affect the BMI and obesity rates at ages of 2 and 8 years in our study population. The type and quantity of milk feeds had no impact on their BMI at school age. Further larger studies are needed to confirm our results.
Comment on Toftlund et al Gounaris, Antonios; Sokou, Rozeta; Panagiotounakou, Polytimi ...
Pediatric allergy and immunology,
August 2020, Letnik:
31, Številka:
6
Journal Article
The impact of the consistent implementation of "aggressive" nutrition by means of intensive early neonatal nutritional support up to 40-44 weeks postmenstrual age and the use of nasal continuous ...positive airway pressure (nCPAP) within the first hour of life on the respiratory function of very premature neonates (VPN) at school age is unclear.
Respiratory function was evaluated in 108 VPN and 70 term controls. Growth, frequency of lower respiratory tract infections, re-hospitalization, and spirometry were recorded up to 8-10 years of age. Comparison was carried out between the two study groups.
There was no significant difference in forced expiratory volume in 1 s and forced vital capacity at 8 years of age, and also in lower respiratory tract infections and re-hospitalization due to them, up to 8 years of age between preterm and term neonates. No significant difference was found in spirometry measurements neither between premature neonates with and without BPD nor between the two subgroups of preterms and term neonates.
"Aggressive" nutrition, persistent nCPAP use, and their impact on early postnatal growth probably positively affect the respiratory function of our study population. These very encouraging results need to be confirmed by larger studies.
Anomaly detection is considered an important data mining task, aiming at the discovery of elements (also known as outliers) that show significant diversion from the expected case. More specifically, ...given a set of objects the problem is to return the suspicious objects that deviate significantly from the typical behavior. As in the case of clustering, the application of different criteria lead to different definitions for an outlier. In this work, we focus on distance-based outliers: an object x is an outlier if there are less than k objects lying at distance at most R from x. The problem offers significant challenges when a stream-based environment is considered, where data arrive continuously and outliers must be detected on-the-fly. There are a few research works studying the problem of continuous outlier detection. However, none of these proposals meets the requirements of modern stream-based applications for the following reasons: (i) they demand a significant storage overhead, (ii) their efficiency is limited and (iii) they lack flexibility. In this work, we propose new algorithms for continuous outlier monitoring in data streams, based on sliding windows. Our techniques are able to reduce the required storage overhead, run faster than previously proposed techniques and offer significant flexibility. Experiments performed on real-life as well as synthetic data sets verify our theoretical study.
Background
Thyroid disorders, including thyroid cancer and autoimmune thyroid diseases, have been closely associated with inflammation.
Objective
This study aims to investigate the role of ...inflammation in thyroid disease by assessing serum cytokine levels in patients with malignant and benign thyroid conditions.
Methods
Serum levels of ten interleukins (IL-1β, IL-2, IL-4, IL-5, IL-6, IL-7, IL-8, IL-10, IL-12 and IL-13) were quantitatively determined in 20 patients with thyroid cancer, 38 patients with benign thyroid disease and 50 healthy controls by multiplex technology.
Results
Serum IL-1β, IL-2, IL-4, IL-5 and IL-6 levels were strongly associated with each other. IL-10 and IL-12 correlated with IL-1β, IL-5, IL-6, and with each other. Age was inversely correlated with serum levels of IL-2, IL-4 and IL-13. A positive correlation between T3 and IL-13 levels was also observed. Significantly higher levels of IL-6, IL-7, IL-10 and IL-13, as well as significantly lower levels of IL-8 were observed in patients with benign and malignant thyroid disease compared to controls. The combination of IL-13 and IL-8 in a two-marker panel was highly efficient in discriminating thyroid disorders (AUC 0.90).
Conclusions
Malignant and benign thyroid conditions are associated with altered expression levels of interleukins, supporting the association between thyroid disease and underlying inflammatory processes.
A hybrid neural network model is presented for the simulation of the performance of industrial HDS reactors. This model can be used in estimating the catalyst deactivation rate and the impact of feed ...quality on catalyst activity. A deterministic mathematical code simulating the reactor performance for hydrodesulphurization and hydrogen consumption reactions was used. The deterministic code was coupled with a neural network used to correlate the evaluated kinetic parameters from the industrial data with feed quality and catalyst life time. The neural network is also used to predict the kinetic parameters needed for simulation from the feed quality and the catalyst time on stream. A part of the necessary kinetic parameters were obtained from kinetic experiments performed with the industrial catalyst and with representative feeds in a small scale reactor.
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