Nanoparticles for a specific delivery are likely to be designed for cancer therapeutic effectiveness and improvement. In this study, a fucoidan-oleic acid conjugate was prepared and investigated in ...terms of loading capacity for poorly water-soluble anti-cancer drugs to maximize effectiveness of the treatment. Fucoidan was used as a hydrophilic portion of an amphiphilic structure for improving cancer therapeutic effects. Paclitaxel and curcumin were chosen as other model drugs loaded in the conjugates. The results showed that self-assembled nanoparticles with different sizes and morphologies could be prepared with two different concentrations of oleic acid as hydrophobic portion. Moreover, loading efficiency and release patterns of these drugs were mainly dependent on the hydrophobic interaction between drugs and oleic acid. It was also revealed that fucoidan and curcumin were released higher at pH 4.5 than at the physiological condition (pH 7.4), thus, facilitating the delivery and maximizing effects of the anticancer agents on cancer cells. On the contrary, paclitaxel from fucoidan nanoparticles was released faster at pH 7.4. The exploration of fucoidan-oleic acid conjugate could be considered as promising nanomedicines for cancer therapeutics.
Orbital ischemic syndrome is a rare entity. The clinical signs typically demonstrate acute loss of visual acuity, chemosis, proptosis, ptosis, and total ophthalmoparesis. We report a case of a man ...who suffered an acute internal carotid artery occlusion and developed orbital ischemic syndrome after a mechanical thrombectomy.
A 57-year-old Vietnamese (Kinh ethnicity) man was brought to the emergency room with complaints of a speech disturbance, facial palsy, and severe weakness of the left arm and leg, which had started 4 hours earlier, after waking up. The National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale 12 (NIHSS 12) revealed the neurological score at admission. A head computed tomography scan showed no intracranial bleeding and an Alberta Stroke Program Early Computed Tomography Score (ASPECTS) of 8 on the right brain. Computed tomography angiography showed an occlusion of the right internal carotid artery. After that, a mechanical thrombectomy was performed, and the internal carotid artery was completely reperfused. After 10 hours, he experienced orbital pain, proptosis, ptosis, chemosis, and ophthalmoplegia of the right orbit. He also had acute loss of visual acuity, and fundoscopic examination revealed papilledema, no retinal hemorrhage, and no bruit in orbital auscultation. Intraocular pressure in the right eye was measured at 50.5 mmHg. Computed tomography angiography showed no carotid-cavernous fistula, but slight enlargement of the right medial and lateral rectus muscles. He was treated with steroids and hyperosmolar agents and recovered 7 days later, but had persistent loss of visual acuity in the right eye.
Orbital ischemic syndrome is a rare complication after mechanical thrombectomy treatment in acute ischemic stroke that can lead to loss of visual acuity.
Background
Brugada syndrome (BrS) is a rare genetic disease that causes sudden cardiac death (SCD) and arrhythmia. SCN5A pathogenic variants (about 30% of diagnosed patients) are responsible for BrS.
...Aims
Lack of knowledge regarding molecular characteristics and the correlation between genotype and phenotype interfere with the risk stratification and finding the optimal treatment in Vietnam. Therefore, we identified SCN5A variants and evaluated the genotype–phenotype correlation of BrS on 117 Vietnamese probands.
Materials and Methods
The clinical characteristics and blood samples of BrS patients were collected. To determine SCN5A variants, Sanger sequencing was conducted, and subsequently, these variants were analyzed by bioinformatic tools.
Results
In this cohort, the overall rate of detected variants in SCN5A was 25.6%, which could include both pathogenic and benign variants. In genetic testing, 21 SCN5A variants were identified, including eight novels and 15 published variants. Multiple bioinformatic tools were used to predict variant effect with c.551A>G, c.1890+14G>A, c.3338C>T, c.3578G>A, and c.5484C>T as benign, while other variants were predicted as disease‐causing. The family history of SCD (risk ratio RR = 4.324, 95% CI: 2.290–8.269, p < 0.001), syncope (RR = 3.147, 95% CI: 1.668–5.982, p = 0.0004), and ventricular tachycardia/ventricular fibrillation (RR = 3.406, 95% CI: 1.722–5.400, p = 0.0035) presented a significantly higher risk in the SCN5A (+) group, consisting of individuals carrying any variant in the SCN5A gene, compared to SCN5A (−) individuals.
Conclusion
The results contribute to clarifying the impact of SCN5A variants on these phenotypes. Further follow‐up studies need to be carried out to understand the functional effects of these SCN5A variants on the severity of BrS.
This study aims to identify SCN5A variants and evaluate the genotype‐phenotype correlation of Brugada syndrome on 117 Vietnamese probands. Multiple bioinformatic tools were carried out to classify SCN5A variants as benign and disease‐causing. In addition, the genotype‐phenotype correlation was also revealed.
α-thalassemia is an autosomal recessive monogenic blood disorder, affecting up to 5% of the world's population. The occurrence rate of the disease in Vietnam varies up to up to 51.5%, with high rate ...of mutation carriers, of couples consisting of two carriers at risk of bearing a child with fetal Hb Bart, which can develop into hydrops fetalis syndrome, threatening the well-being of the mother and the child. Our study aims to facilitate birth of healthy/asymptomatic children of α-thalassemia carrier couples who received reproductive service at our centre during the period of 2019–2022.
89 couples at risks of having α-thalassemia offsprings requested IVF procedures and PGD at Post Hospital during 2019–2022 were recruited for investigation. Couple and additional family members’ peripheral blood samples of couples and additional family members were subjected to haemoglobin electrophoresis, DNA extraction for α-thalassemia gene mutation detection and STRs linkage analysis. Data were observed and analysed on GeneMarker software.
91 cycles of PGD for α-thalassemia were carried out for 89 couples. α-thalassemia large deletion (--SEA/αα) was the most common mutation identified in 88 couples, in which 4 cases also carried β-thalassemia point mutations. Combining results of PGS and PGD, 278/424 amplified embryos were transferable (HBA-mutation free or carriers of single heterozygous HBA mutation, without chromosomal abnormality). 64/89 couples have been transferred with the embryos (prioritizing mutation free ones over carriers), resulting in the birth of 36 α-thalassemia disease-free children, 17 ongoing pregnancies, and 11 with miscarriages.
Successful application of microsatellite-based method in PGD facilitated the birth of 36 healthy children and 17 ongoing pregnancies for 53/64 couples with embryo-transferred. All resulted clinical births displayed confirmation results in line with the PGD results, thus demonstrating the feasibility and credibility of the use of STR markers in PGD.
Retinoblastoma (RB), an intraocular malignancy commonly diagnosed in children, is mostly caused by inactivating mutations of both alleles of the RB1 gene. Early genetic screening for RB1 gene ...mutations would greatly improve treatment outcomes and patient management.
In this study, both somatic and germline mutations were detected in blood and tumour samples of 42 RB patients using direct sequencing and multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification.
In total, 34 different mutations were found in 36 patients, including 1 SNP, 4 large deletions, 5 splicing sites, 1 missense, 7 frameshifts and 17 nonsense mutations. There were five novel mutations and one unreported which have not been found in large databases such as Leiden Open Variation Database (LOVD) and ClinVar.
A higher rate of RB patients carrying heterozygous germline mutation and highly prevalent with pathogenic truncated mutation, hence, early detection of RB is essential for vision salvation and genetic counselling.
This study aimed to evaluate the effects of hydrophobic and hydrophilic Film-Forming Gels (FFGs) on the controlled delivery of drugs with different levels of hydrophobicity.
This evaluation was ...carried out by employing zein and polyvinylpyrrolidone as hydrophobic and hydrophilic film-forming agents, respectively, in combination with hydroxypropyl methylcellulose functionalized as a hydrogel basement at a ratio that had been optimized to achieve the fastest drying time. Free curcumin or terbinafine hydrochloride was subsequently dispersed into blank FFGs to produce the final FFG formulations.
Although the extreme hydrophobicity of curcumin strongly limited its topical permeability compared to that of terbinafine hydrochloride, zein FFGs clearly resulted in a favourable sustained release system for highly hydrophobic drugs, such as curcumin. Moreover, polyvinylpyrrolidone would be highly effective for the sustained release of a less hydrophobic drug, such as terbinafine hydrochloride. Analyses of the wettability, surface morphology, chemical interactions and crystallinity of FFGs also helped to elucidate the mechanisms of their drug release profiles.
This fundamental finding is beneficial for further design studies on FFGs as sustained drug delivery systems for topical drugs with a wide range of hydrophobicities.
This paper pushes the envelope on decomposing camouflaged regions in an image into meaningful components, namely, camouflaged instances. To promote the new task of camouflaged instance segmentation ...of in-the-wild images, we introduce a dataset, dubbed CAMO++, that extends our preliminary CAMO dataset (camouflaged object segmentation) in terms of quantity and diversity. The new dataset substantially increases the number of images with hierarchical pixel-wise ground truths. We also provide a benchmark suite for the task of camouflaged instance segmentation. In particular, we present an extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art instance segmentation methods on our newly constructed CAMO++ dataset in various scenarios. We also present a camouflage fusion learning (CFL) framework for camouflaged instance segmentation to further improve the performance of state-of-the-art methods. The dataset, model, evaluation suite, and benchmark will be made publicly available on our project page.
Camouflaged objects are generally difficult to be detected in their natural environment even for human beings. In this paper, we propose a novel bio-inspired network, named the MirrorNet, that ...leverages both instance segmentation and bio-inspired attack stream for the camouflaged object segmentation. Differently from existing networks for segmentation, our proposed network possesses two segmentation streams: the main stream and the bio-inspired attack stream corresponding with the original image and its flipped image, respectively. The output from the bio-inspired attack stream is then fused into the main stream's result for the final camouflage map to boost up the segmentation accuracy. Extensive experiments conducted on the public CAMO dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed network. Our proposed method achieves 89% in accuracy, outperforming the state-of-the-arts.
We aimed to evaluate the microbiological characteristics and risk factors for mortality of infective endocarditis in two tertiary hospitals in Ho Chi Minh City, south Vietnam.
A retrospective study ...of 189 patients (120 men, 69 women; mean age 38 ± 18 years) with the diagnosis of probable or definite infective endocarditis (IE) according to the modified Duke Criteria admitted to The Heart Institute or Tam Duc Hospital between January 2005 and December 2014.
IE was related to a native valve in 165 patients (87.3%), and prosthetic valve in 24 (12.7%). Of the 189 patients in our series, the culture positive rate was 70.4%. The most common isolated pathogens were Streptococci (75.2%), Staphylococci (9.8%) followed by gram negative organism (4.5%). The sensitivity rate of Streptococci to ampicillin, ceftriaxone or vancomycin was 100%. The rate of methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus was 40%. There was a decrease in penicillin sensitivity for Streptococci over three eras: 2005-2007 (100%), 2008-2010 (94%) and 2010-2014 (84%). The in-hospital mortality rate was 6.9%. Logistic regression analysis found prosthetic valve and NYHA grade 3 or 4 heart failure and vegetation size of more than 15 mm as strong predictors of in-hospital mortality.
Streptococcal species were the major pathogen of IE in the recent years with low rates of antimicrobial resistance. Prosthetic valve involvement, moderate or severe heart failure and vegetation size of more than 15 mm were independent predictors for in-hospital mortality in IE.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
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