Eighty‐four HCV/HIV‐coinfected and 252‐matched HCV‐monoinfected liver transplant recipients were included in a prospective multicenter study. Thirty‐six (43%) HCV/HIV‐coinfected and 75 (30%) ...HCV‐monoinfected patients died, with a survival rate at 5 years of 54% (95% CI, 42–64) and 71% (95% CI, 66 to 77; p = 0.008), respectively. When both groups were considered together, HIV infection was an independent predictor of mortality (HR, 2.202; 95% CI, 1.420–3.413 p < 0.001). Multivariate analysis of only the HCV/HIV‐coinfected recipients, revealed HCV genotype 1 (HR, 2.98; 95% CI, 1.32–6.76), donor risk index (HR, 9.48; 95% CI, 2.75–32.73) and negative plasma HCV RNA (HR, 0.14; 95% CI, 0.03–0.62) to be associated with mortality. When this analysis was restricted to pretransplant variables, we identified three independent factors (HCV genotype 1, pretransplant MELD score and centers with <1 liver transplantation/year in HIV‐infected patients) that allowed us to identify a subset of 60 (71%) patients with a similar 5‐year prognosis (69%95% CI, 54–80) to that of HCV‐monoinfected recipients. In conclusion, 5‐year survival in HCV/HIV‐coinfected liver recipients was lower than in HCV‐monoinfected recipients, although an important subset with a favorable prognosis was identified in the former.
Taken as a whole, HCV/HIV‐coinfected liver transplant recipients have lower posttransplant survival than matched HCV‐monoinfected liver transplant recipients, although an important subset of coinfected patients with survival similar to that of HCV‐monoinfected patients can be identified retrospectively.
To assess the inflammatory state in patients with persistent atrial fibrillation and to determine the predictive value in the success of cardioversion and recurrence at 30 days.
Prospective ...observational case-control study.
We included consecutively 49 patients with atrial fibrillation previously to scheduled electrical cardioversion in Coronary Care Unit. Clinical and echocardiographic variables were registered and High-sensivity C-reactive protein, interleukin-1beta, interleukin-6 and Tumour Necrosis Factor-alpha were measured. At 30-days follow-up, rhythm and biomarkers were reassessed. As control groups, we recruited 27 healthy volunteers and 16 patients matched for age, gender and cardiovascular risk factors.
Median age was 66 +/- 10 years and 38% were women. All the markers were higher in patients than in both control groups (p < 0.05). FNT-alpha and Interleukin-6 levels were higher in non-cardiovertors but only an enlarged atria was related to unsuccessful cardioversion (p = 0.036). High-sensivity C-reactive protein values in the higher cuartile tended to be related to recurrence of persistent atrial fibrillation (p = 0.06).
There is an increased inflammatory state in patients with atrial fibrillation. FNT-alpha and Interleukin-6 levels were increased in non-cardiovertors, but no biomarker was associated with success of cardioversion or rhythm state at 30-days. However, higher levels of hs-CRP showed a trend to be related to recurrence of atrial fibrillation.
The actual usefulness of cardiovascular (CV) risk factor assessment in the prognostic evaluation of cancer patients treated with cardiotoxic treatment remains largely unknown. Prospective multicentre ...study in patients scheduled to receive anticancer therapy related with moderate/high cardiotoxic risk.
A total of 1324 patients underwent follow-up in a dedicated cardio-oncology clinic from April 2012 to October 2017. Special care was given to the identification and control of CV risk factors. Clinical data, blood samples, and echocardiographic parameters were prospectively collected according to protocol, at baseline before cancer therapy and then at 3 weeks, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 1.5 years, and 2 years after initiation of cancer therapy. At baseline, 893 patients (67.4%) presented at least one risk factor, with a significant number of patients newly diagnosed during follow-up. Individual risk factors were not related with worse prognosis during a 2-year follow-up. However, a higher Systemic Coronary Risk Estimation (SCORE) was significantly associated with higher rates of severe cardiotoxicity (CTox) and all-cause mortality hazard ratio (HR) 1.79 (95% confidence interval, CI 1.16-2.76) for SCORE 5-9 and HR 4.90 (95% CI 2.44-9.82) for SCORE ≥10 when compared with patients with lower SCORE (0-4).
This large cohort of patients treated with a potentially cardiotoxic regimen showed a significant prevalence of CV risk factors at baseline and significant incidence during follow-up. Baseline CV risk assessment using SCORE predicted severe CTox and all-cause mortality. Therefore, its use should be considered in the evaluation of cancer patients.
The aim of this study was to determine the predictive capacity of response at treatment week (TW) 4 for the achievement of sustained virological response 12 weeks after the scheduled end of therapy ...date (SVR12) to treatment against hepatitis C virus (HCV) genotype 3 (GT3) infection with all-oral direct-acting antiviral (DAA) -based regimens.
From a prospective multicohort study, HCV GT3-infected patients who completed a course of currently recommended DAA-based therapy at 33 Spanish hospitals and who had reached the SVR12 evaluation time-point were selected. TW4 HCV-RNA levels were categorized as target-not-detected (TND), below the lower limit of quantification (LLOQTD) and ≥LLOQ.
A total of 123 patients were included, 86 (70%) received sofosbuvir/ daclatasvir±ribavirin, 27 (22%) received sofosbuvir/ ledipasvir/ ribavirin and 10 (8.1%) received sofosbuvir/ ribavirin, respectively. In all, 114 (92.7%) of the 123 patients presented SVR12 in an on-treatment approach, but nine (7.3%) patients relapsed, all of them had presented cirrhosis at baseline. In those who achieved TND, LLOQTD and ≥LLOQ, SVR12 was observed in 81/83 (98%; 95% CI 91.5%–99.7%), 24/28 (85.7%; 95% CI 67.3%–96%) and 9/12 (75%; 95% CI 42.8%–94.5%), respectively; p(linear association) 0.001. Corresponding numbers for subjects with cirrhosis were: 52/54 (96.3%; 95% CI 87.3%–95.5%), 14/18 (77.8%; 95% CI 52.4%–93.6%) and 7/10 (70%; 95% CI 34.8%–93.3%); p 0.004.
TW4-response indicates the probability of achieving SVR12 to currently used DAA-based therapy in HCV genotype 3-infected individuals with cirrhosis. This finding may be useful to tailor treatment strategy in this setting.
Lung ultrasound (LUS) allows for the detection of a series of manifestations of COVID-19, such as B-lines and consolidations. The objective of this work was to study the inter-rater reliability (IRR) ...when detecting signs associated with COVID-19 in the LUS, as well as the performance of the test in a longitudinal or transverse orientation. Thirty-three physicians with advanced experience in LUS independently evaluated ultrasound videos previously acquired using the ULTRACOV system on 20 patients with confirmed COVID-19. For each patient, 24 videos of 3 s were acquired (using 12 positions with the probe in longitudinal and transverse orientations). The physicians had no information about the patients or other previous evaluations. The score assigned to each acquisition followed the convention applied in previous studies. A substantial IRR was found in the cases of normal LUS (κ = 0.74), with only a fair IRR for the presence of individual B-lines (κ = 0.36) and for confluent B-lines occupying < 50% (κ = 0.26) and a moderate IRR in consolidations and B-lines > 50% (κ = 0.50). No statistically significant differences between the longitudinal and transverse scans were found. The IRR for LUS of COVID-19 patients may benefit from more standardized clinical protocols.
Change detection is an important problem in the analysis of optical remote sensing images. The usual way of approaching this problem is by thresholding a difference image in order to obtain a ...detection mask, but the choice of this threshold is not always easy as the distribution of the values of changed and unchanged pixels may overlap. Therefore, an automatic detector can lead to a high number of false alarms. In this paper, we propose to improve this technique by designing a nonlinear filtering step that highlights the changes in the difference image. In order to better accomplish this process, a previous segmentation stage using texture information from the original images is required. This information can also be used to dismiss areas that do not contain changes with a high likelihood. We show that the process separates the distribution of values in the changed region from the unchanged region and make the choice of the threshold more robust. This results in a significantly lower error than obtaining the mask from the difference image without previous nonlinear filtering. The proposed technique has been used with success in the detection of new constructions on non-urban soil from very-high-resolution aerial images.
Vibrio cholerae 638 is a living candidate cholera vaccine strain attenuated by deletion of the CTXPhi prophage from C7258 (O1, El Tor Ogawa) and by insertion of the Clostridium thermocellum ...endoglucanase A gene into the hemagglutinin/protease coding sequence. This vaccine candidate was previously found to be well tolerated and immunogenic in volunteers. This article reports a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial conducted to test short-term protection conferred by 638 against subsequent V. cholerae infection and disease in volunteers in Cuba. A total of 45 subjects were enrolled and assigned to receive vaccine or placebo. The vaccine contained 10⁹ CFU of freshly harvested 638 buffered with 1.3% NaHCO₃, while the placebo was buffer alone. After vaccine but not after placebo intake, 96% of volunteers had at least a fourfold increase in vibriocidal antibody titers, and 50% showed a doubling of at least the lipopolysaccharide-specific immunoglobulin A titers in serum. At 1 month after vaccination, five volunteers from the vaccine group and five from the placebo group underwent an exploratory challenge study with 10⁹ CFU of DeltaCTXPhi attenuated mutant strain V. cholerae 81. Only two volunteers from the vaccine group shed strain 81 in their feces, but none of them experienced diarrhea; in the placebo group, all volunteers excreted the challenge strain, and three had reactogenic diarrhea. An additional 12 vaccinees and 9 placebo recipients underwent challenge with 7 x 10⁵ CFU of virulent strain V. cholerae 3008 freshly harvested from a brain heart infusion agar plate and buffered with 1.3% NaHCO₃. Three volunteers (25%) from the vaccine group and all from the placebo group shed the challenge agent in their feces. None of the 12 vaccinees but 7 volunteers from the placebo group had diarrhea, and 2 of the latter exhibited severe cholera (>5,000 g of diarrheal stool). These results indicate that at 1 month after ingestion of a single oral dose (10⁹ CFU) of strain 638, volunteers remained protected against cholera infection and disease provoked by the wild-type challenge agent V. cholerae 3008. We recommend that additional vaccine lots of 638 be prepared under good manufacturing practices for further evaluation.
To evaluate feasibility, safety, and efficacy of peripheral blood stem cell collection (PBSCC) and autologous stem cell transplantation (ASCT), to treat patients diagnosed of high-risk or relapsed ...HIV-associated lymphoma (HIV
+ Ly), responding to highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART).
Prospective and multicentric study in patients with high-risk or relapsed chemosensitive HIV
+ Ly, candidate for consolidation with ASCT. Eligibility criteria were similar to those of HIV
− lymphoma. HAART was aimed to be maintained during the procedure.
Fourteen patients were admitted. Adequate PBSCC was obtained from all patients (median CD34
+ cells was 4.7 × 10
6/kg). Three patients died before ASCT; two had disease progression and one died from VHC-liver failure. Eleven transplanted patients showed neutrophil engraftment after a median time of 16 days (range, 9–33 days), and nine patients showed platelet engraftment after a median time of 20 days (range, 11–36 days). CD4
+ cell counts and HIV viral load (VL) were appropriately preserved along the procedure. No patients died from treatment-related complications. One patient died from lymphoma progression (day +19), and another died in complete remission (CR) with undetectable VL, 15 months after transplant, due to infection. One patient relapsed at 32 months after ASCT. The remaining eight patients are alive in CR with an event-free survival of 65% and a median follow-up of 30 months after ASCT (range, 7–36 months).
These results show that feasibility, safety, and efficacy of PBSCC and ASCT in HIV
+ Ly patients responding to HAART are similar to those observed in the HIV
− lymphoma setting.
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