Migraine Barnett, Richard
The Lancet (British edition),
11/2019, Letnik:
394, Številka:
10212
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In the aftermath of World War 2, the spread of state-funded health care, the growing power of the pharmaceutical industry, and the emergence of patient campaign groups all drew attention to the ...prevalence of migraine across genders and age groups. According to WHO data, migraine is, in the 21st century, the third most prevalent medical condition in the world. In many high-income nations, specialist migraine physicians and nurses have made long-term management more personalised and more consistent, but middle-income and low-income countries face the problem of access to and cost of treatment.
A chemically defined anti‐CXCR4–auristatin antibody–drug conjugate (ADC) was synthesized that selectively eliminates tumor cells overexpressing the CXCR4 receptor. The unnatural amino acid ...p‐acetylphenylalanine (pAcF) was site‐specifically incorporated into an anti‐CXCR4 immunoglobulin G (IgG) and conjugated to an auristatin through a stable, non‐cleavable oxime linkage to afford a chemically homogeneous ADC. The full‐length anti‐CXCR4 ADC was selectively cytotoxic to CXCR4+ cancer cells in vitro (half maximal effective concentration (EC50)≈80–100 pM). Moreover, the anti‐CXCR4 ADC eliminated pulmonary lesions from human osteosarcoma cells in a lung‐seeding tumor model in mice. No significant overt toxicity was observed but there was a modest decrease in the bone‐marrow‐derived CXCR4+ cell population. Because CXCR4 is highly expressed in a majority of metastatic cancers, a CXCR4–auristatin ADC may be useful for the treatment of a variety of metastatic malignancies.
Hitting the mark(er): A chemically defined anti‐CXCR4–auristatin antibody–drug conjugate (ADC) was produced that selectively targets and eliminates CXCR4+ metastatic cancer cells in vitro and in vivo with no significant overt toxicity. Because the CXCR4 receptor is highly expressed in the majority of metastatic cancers, a CXCR4–auristatin ADC may be useful for the treatment of a variety of metastatic malignancies.
Thalassaemia Barnett, Richard
The Lancet (British edition),
09/2019, Letnik:
394, Številka:
10204
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In 1858 the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow described leukaemia as a disorder of white blood cell proliferation. In the early decades of the 20th century, European and American clinicians were ...beginning to engage with the new synthesis of mendelian genetics and population statistics, and the English physician Alfred Garrod showed that Mendel's notion of dominant and recessive genes offered a powerful explanatory frame for some inherited diseases. Thalassaemia patients in high-income nations generally enjoy longer lives of greater quality than in the past, but the cost of treatments and diagnostic technologies, the need for health-care infrastructure and continuity of care, and social and religious attitudes to screening programmes are all reflected in the quality of care in low-income and middle-income countries.
Syphilis Barnett, Richard
The Lancet (British edition),
04/2018, Letnik:
391, Številka:
10129
Journal Article
Recenzirano
An outcry over venereal disease among soldiers and sailors in the Crimean War led the UK Government to pass a series of Contagious Diseases Acts in the second half of the 1860s.The dermatologist ...Erich Hoffmann and the zoologist Fritz Schaudinn identified a bacterium, Treponema pallidum, as the causative agent of syphilis in 1905, and a year later the bacteriologist August von Wassermann developed a diagnostic test for infection.Public health campaigns through both World Wars continued to portray “loose women” as the source of the disease, and the exposure of the ethically unjustified Tuskegee syphilis study in 1972 revealed the complicity of the US Public Health Service in depriving hundreds of black American men of treatment for their syphilis, even after penicillin had been introduced.
Schistosomiasis Barnett, Richard
The Lancet (British edition),
12/2018, Letnik:
392, Številka:
10163
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Underlying medicine's new claim to humanitarian authority was a collection of ideas and techniques developed in metropolitan centres like Paris, Berlin, and London: the laboratory, the microscope, ...the logic of specific causation, and most of all germ theory. In the past decade, schistosomiasis has gained fresh attention as a neglected tropical disease, particularly as it has been associated with an increased risk of HIV infection. Globally, though, the disease is closely associated with poverty and poor public health—a connection that highlights the legacies of imperialism, and the pressing need for social and infrastructural reconstruction alongside public health interventions.
Ovarian cancer Barnett, Richard
The Lancet (British edition),
03/2016, Letnik:
387, Številka:
10025
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Born in 1771, McDowell studied medicine in Virginia and Edinburgh, where he might have read John Hunter's discussion of surgery for ovarian cancer. Since 1795 he had worked as a jobbing surgeon in ...Danville--a remote American town on the western frontier, where he could practise free from the conservatism and restraint of metropolitan surgery. The story of ovarian cancer in the 20th century, like that of so many other cancers, is a war on many fronts, as new disciplines such as genetics, virology, and endocrinology have framed and studied what Patrice Pinell has called different "cancer objects". Since the work of the Scottish surgeon George Beatson in 1895, clinicians have recognised a connection between some forms of ovarian and breast cancer, and more recent genetic research has highlighted the role of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes in both diseases.
Acute myocardial infarction Barnett, Richard
The Lancet (British edition),
06/2019, Letnik:
393, Številka:
10191
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Valiant has a point, and not just the obvious one: our contemporary concept of an acute myocardial infarction (AMI) makes little sense outside a series of historical frames in which we have come to ...understand the function of the heart, the connection between symptoms and underlying pathologies, and the tensions between abstract analyses of risk and the experience of a heart attack. The Framingham Heart Study, begun in 1948 in Massachusetts, USA, identified a set of “cardiovascular risk factors” such as high blood pressure, smoking, and obesity. Coronary artery bypass grafting, along with percutaneous techniques like angiography, balloon angioplasty, and stenting, offered the prospect of repairing damage to the heart vessels themselves, while statins and antihypertensives could be used for prevention and to protect the heart after an attack.
Cerebral palsy Barnett, Richard
The Lancet (British edition),
08/2018, Letnik:
392, Številka:
10147
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Little framed the condition—what would now be called spastic diplegia, from the Greek spastikos, “pulling”—as an obstetric problem, the result of “asphyxia neonatorum, and mechanical injury to the ...foetus immediately before or during parturition”. The treatment of those with cerebral palsy reflected a set of prejudices built into the institutional culture of late 19th-century western medicine: that intellectual impairment went along with physical disability, and that lifelong segregation and care were more humane than exposure to the working world outside. Social care has come to emphasise quality of life over specialised physiotherapy, though it still faces the difficulty, common to many developmental disorders, of moving patients successfully from childhood to adult services.
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