COVID-19 is a severe infectious disease that has claimed >150,000 lives and infected millions in the United States thus far, especially the elderly population. Emerging evidence has shown the virus ...to cause hemorrhagic and immunologic responses, which impact all organs, including lungs, kidneys, and the brain, as well as extremities. SARS-CoV-2 also affects patients', families', and society's mental health at large. There is growing evidence of re-infection in some patients. The goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of SARS-CoV-2-induced disease, its mechanism of infection, diagnostics, therapeutics, and treatment strategies, while also focusing on less attended aspects by previous studies, including nutritional support, psychological, and rehabilitation of the pandemic and its management. We performed a systematic review of >1,000 articles and included 425 references from online databases, including, PubMed, Google Scholar, and California Baptist University's library. COVID-19 patients go through acute respiratory distress syndrome, cytokine storm, acute hypercoagulable state, and autonomic dysfunction, which must be managed by a multidisciplinary team including nursing, nutrition, and rehabilitation. The elderly population and those who are suffering from Alzheimer's disease and dementia related illnesses seem to be at the higher risk. There are 28 vaccines under development, and new treatment strategies/protocols are being investigated. The future management for COVID-19 should include B-cell and T-cell immunotherapy in combination with emerging prophylaxis. The mental health and illness aspect of COVID-19 are among the most important side effects of this pandemic which requires a national plan for prevention, diagnosis and treatment.
Corneal impression cytology is usually performed with mixed cellulose ester membranes and a limited array of stains. A method using polycarbonate membrane air-dried preparations led to the discovery ...of fluorescein staining in cells from patients with and without dry eye disease and a membrane-induced defect that was not due to cell removal.
Impressions after fluorescein installation were performed using polycarbonate and mixed cellulose ester membranes with rapid staining protocols for Diff-Quick as well as haematoxylin and eosin stains. Prior to staining the air-dried material was examined for fluorescence.
Epithelia of both normal and dry eye corneas retained fluorescence from clinical instillation of fluorescein. Corneal defects created by the polycarbonate membrane could not be explained by membrane-induced cell removal. After rapid staining, polycarbonate membranes revealed less background, dissolved easily prior to coverslip application, but showed lower cellular yield compared with the mixed cellulose membranes.
Polycarbonate membrane impression cytology enables immediate assessment with rapid stains. Topically applied fluorescein penetrates corneal epithelial cells in both normal and dry eye patients. Cells fluoresce on the cytology membranes. The impression-induced defect on the cornea is not due to cell stripping and may represent removal of mucins.
A 69-year-old man developed stromal edema and a pocket of fluid in the laser in situ keratomileusis (LASIK) interface wound in the left eye after acute endothelial cell loss from complicated ...trabeculectomy. He eventually required penetrating keratoplasty along with cataract surgery. Histologic examination of the corneal button showed an edematous 720 microm central residual stromal bed, a 54 microm empty space at the level of the central interface wound, and a 154 microm LASIK flap. The endothelial cell count was 0 to 2 cells per high-power field, corresponding to a cell density of 450 to 500 cells/mm(2). Four years after LASIK, the central interface wound was susceptible to forming a pocket of serous fluid after the corneal endothelial function was compromised.
To report a case of corneal copper deposition associated with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL).
Case report.
A 65-year-old woman with a history of CLL was diagnosed with bilateral corneal ...opacification. Slit-lamp examination revealed dense, central yellow-brown pigmentation of Descemet’s membrane in each cornea. The presence of a bilateral pigmented deposition at the level of Descemet’s membrane led to a presumptive clinical diagnosis of corneal copper deposition.
Serologic investigations revealed a markedly elevated copper (hypercupremia) and IgG levels with a normal ceruloplasmin. Wilson’s disease was excluded as a possible cause based on liver function tests and a liver biopsy. Thus, the patient was diagnosed with corneal copper deposition secondary to hypercupremia associated with CLL.
Corneal copper deposition may be associated with systemic malignancy, most commonly myeloproliferative disorders, including CLL. Recognition of the characteristic clinical features associated with corneal copper deposition allows the clinician to confirm the diagnosis with appropriate serologic studies.
Tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) has been used to treat severe postcataract and vitrectomy fibrinous membranes, but intraocular bleeding has occurred with doses of 25 μg or higher. We report three ...patients, one with nonclearing total hyphema and uncontrollable intraocular pressure and two with severe fibrinous membrane formation, who had treatment with lowdose (4 μg to 6 μg) intraocular tPA. Although the fibrinous membranes or hyphema resolved in all three patients, they recurred and bleeding that required additional treatment occurred in one patient. Intraocular low-dose tPA may minimize the risk of corneal and retinal toxicity and may be considered an alternative treatment in intractable cases. However, secondary intraocular hemorrhage can occur, and the timing between the initial vascular injury, treatment with tPA, and subsequent bleeding may reduce the risk of further hemorrhaging.
The induction of ornithine decarboxylase by normal rat urine in bladder cancer cell cultures was tested in view of recent observations that urine acts as a tumor promoter. Addition of urine up to 15% ...in final concentration to culture medium resulted in a 10-fold increase in ornithine decarboxylase activity over the control. The stimulatory factor(s) contained in urine appears heat stable and may be multiple. 12-O-Tetradecanoylphorbol-13-acetate, a potent promoter in mouse skin carcinogenesis, induced a 39-fold increase in ornithine decarboxylase activity, the best response among the various substances tested. This suggests that it may act as a promoter of bladder cancer.
Abstract
We describe the survey design, calibration, commissioning, and emission-line detection algorithms for the Hobby–Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX). The goal of HETDEX is to ...measure the redshifts of over a million Ly
α
emitting galaxies between 1.88 <
z
< 3.52, in a 540 deg
2
area encompassing a comoving volume of 10.9 Gpc
3
. No preselection of targets is involved; instead the HETDEX measurements are accomplished via a spectroscopic survey using a suite of wide-field integral field units distributed over the focal plane of the telescope. This survey measures the Hubble expansion parameter and angular diameter distance, with a final expected accuracy of better than 1%. We detail the project’s observational strategy, reduction pipeline, source detection, and catalog generation, and present initial results for science verification in the Cosmological Evolution Survey, Extended Groth Strip, and Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey North fields. We demonstrate that our data reach the required specifications in throughput, astrometric accuracy, flux limit, and object detection, with the end products being a catalog of emission-line sources, their object classifications, and flux-calibrated spectra.
Abstract
The Hobby–Eberly Telescope (HET) Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) is undertaking a blind wide-field low-resolution spectroscopic survey of 540 deg
2
of sky to identify and derive redshifts ...for a million Ly
α
-emitting galaxies in the redshift range 1.9 <
z
< 3.5. The ultimate goal is to measure the expansion rate of the universe at this epoch, to sharply constrain cosmological parameters and thus the nature of dark energy. A major multiyear Wide-Field Upgrade (WFU) of the HET was completed in 2016 that substantially increased the field of view to 22′ diameter and the pupil to 10 m, by replacing the optical corrector, tracker, and Prime Focus Instrument Package and by developing a new telescope control system. The new, wide-field HET now feeds the Visible Integral-field Replicable Unit Spectrograph (VIRUS), a new low-resolution integral-field spectrograph (LRS2), and the Habitable Zone Planet Finder, a precision near-infrared radial velocity spectrograph. VIRUS consists of 156 identical spectrographs fed by almost 35,000 fibers in 78 integral-field units arrayed at the focus of the upgraded HET. VIRUS operates in a bandpass of 3500−5500 Å with resolving power
R
≃ 800. VIRUS is the first example of large-scale replication applied to instrumentation in optical astronomy to achieve spectroscopic surveys of very large areas of sky. This paper presents technical details of the HET WFU and VIRUS, as flowed down from the HETDEX science requirements, along with experience from commissioning this major telescope upgrade and the innovative instrumentation suite for HETDEX.
This paper describes the data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II (SDSS-II) Supernova Survey conducted between 2005 and 2007. Light curves, spectra, classifications, and ancillary data are ...presented for 10,258 variable and transient sources discovered through repeat ugriz imaging of SDSS Stripe 82, a 300 deg2 area along the celestial equator. This data release is comprised of all transient sources brighter than r 22.5 mag with no history of variability prior to 2004. Dedicated spectroscopic observations were performed on a subset of 889 transients, as well as spectra for thousands of transient host galaxies using the SDSS-III BOSS spectrographs. Photometric classifications are provided for the candidates with good multi-color light curves that were not observed spectroscopically, using host galaxy redshift information when available. From these observations, 4607 transients are either spectroscopically confirmed, or likely to be, supernovae, making this the largest sample of supernova candidates ever compiled. We present a new method for SN host-galaxy identification and derive host-galaxy properties including stellar masses, star formation rates, and the average stellar population ages from our SDSS multi-band photometry. We derive SALT2 distance moduli for a total of 1364 SN Ia with spectroscopic redshifts as well as photometric redshifts for a further 624 purely photometric SN Ia candidates. Using the spectroscopically confirmed subset of the three-year SDSS-II SN Ia sample and assuming a flat ΛCDM cosmology, we determine M = 0.315 0.093 (statistical error only) and detect a non-zero cosmological constant at 5.7 .
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