Activity

  • Herring Kang posted an update 1 week ago

    Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a leading cause of cancer deaths both globally and in Australia. Surveillance for HCC in at-risk populations allows diagnosis at an early stage, when potentially curable. However, most Australians diagnosed with HCC die of the cancer or of liver disease. In the changing landscape of HCC management, unique challenges may lead to clinical practice variation. As a result, there is a need to identify best practice management of HCC in an Australian context. This consensus statement has been developed for health professionals involved in the care of adult patients with HCC in Australia. It is applicable to specialists, general medical practitioners, nurses, health coordinators and hospital administrators.

    This statement has been developed by specialists in hepatology, radiology, surgery, oncology, palliative care, and primary care, including medical practitioners and nurses. The statement addresses four main areas relevant to HCC management epidemiology and incidence, diagnosis, treatment, and patient management. A modified Delphi process was used to reach consensus on 31 recommendations. Principal recommendations include the adoption of surveillance strategies, use of multidisciplinary meetings, diagnosis, treatment options and patient management.

    This consensus statement will simplify HCC patient management and reduce clinical variation. Ultimately, this should result in better outcomes for patients with HCC.

    This consensus statement will simplify HCC patient management and reduce clinical variation. Ultimately, this should result in better outcomes for patients with HCC.Residuals in normal regression are used to assess a model’s goodness-of-fit (GOF) and discover directions for improving the model. However, there is a lack of residuals with a characterized reference distribution for censored regression. In this article, we propose to diagnose censored regression with normalized randomized survival probabilities (RSP). The key idea of RSP is to replace the survival probability (SP) of a censored failure time with a uniform random number between 0 and the SP of the censored time. We prove that RSPs always have the uniform distribution on (0, 1) under the true model with the true generating parameters. Therefore, we can transform RSPs into normally distributed residuals with the normal quantile function. We call such residuals by normalized RSP (NRSP residuals). We conduct simulation studies to investigate the sizes and powers of statistical tests based on NRSP residuals in detecting the incorrect choice of distribution family and nonlinear effect in covariates. JAK2 inhibitors clinical trials Our simulation studies show that, although the GOF tests with NRSP residuals are not as powerful as a traditional GOF test method, a nonlinear test based on NRSP residuals has significantly higher power in detecting nonlinearity. We also compared these model diagnostics methods with a breast-cancer recurrent-free time dataset. The results show that the NRSP residual diagnostics successfully captures a subtle nonlinear relationship in the dataset, which is not detected by the graphical diagnostics with CS residuals and existing GOF tests.Primary cutaneous anaplastic large-cell lymphoma and breast implant-associated ALCL (BIA-ALCL) are rare subtypes of anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK)-negative ALCLs originating from skin and breast implants, respectively. Herein, we report a unique case of cutaneous ALK-negative ALCL occurring in the skin of left medial breast from a patient with multiple rounds of bilateral breast implants and a history of breast carcinoma. The lymphoma cells are entirely confined to the lymphatic channels in the dermis, and the patient has no other areas of skin abnormality, no lymphadenopathy, peri-implant fluid accumulation, or masses from the bilateral capsules of implants. The differential diagnosis and its relationship with breast implants are further explored.A simple and sensitive preconcentration strategy using sequential electrokinetic and hydrodynamic injection modes in micellar electrokinetic chromatography with diode array detection was developed and applied for the separation and determination of anticancer agent, 5-fluorouracil and its metabolite, 5-fluoro-2′-deoxyuridine, in human plasma. Sequential injection modes with increased analyte loading capacity using the anionic pseudo-stationary phase facilitated collection of the dispersed neutral and charged analytes into narrow zones and improved sensitivity. Several important parameters affecting sample enrichment performance were evaluated and optimized in this study. Under the optimized experimental conditions, 614- and 643-fold and 782- and 803-fold sensitivity improvement were obtained for 5-fluorouracil and its metabolite when compared with normal hydrodynamic and electrokinetic injection, respectively. The method has good linearity (1-1,000 ng/ml) with acceptable coefficient of determination (r2  > 0.993), low limits of detection (0.11-0.14 ng/ml) and satisfactory analyte relative recovery (97.4-99.7%) with relative standard deviations of 4.6-9.3% (n = 6). Validation results as well as the application to analysis of human plasma samples from cancer patients demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method to clinical studies.Theileria parasites are classified in the phylum Apicomplexa that includes several genera of medical and veterinary importance such as Plasmodium, Babesia, Toxoplasma and Cryptosporidium. These protozoans have evolved subtle ways to reshape their intracellular niche for their own benefit and Theileria is no exception. This tick transmitted microorganism is unique among all eukaryotes in that its intracellular schizont stage is able to transform its mammalian host leukocytes into an immortalised highly disseminating cell that phenocopies tumour cells. Here, we describe what is known about secreted Theileria-encoded host cell manipulators.

    To summarize what facilitates patient-centred care for adult patients in acute healthcare settings from evidence-based patient-centred care guidelines.

    An integrative literature review.

    The following data sources were searched between 2002-2020 Citation databases CINAHL, Medline, Biomed Central, Academic Search Complete, Health Source Nursing/Academic Edition and Google Scholar. Guideline databases US National Guideline Clearinghouse, Guidelines International Network, and National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). Websites of guideline developers Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network, Royal College of Nurses, Registered Nurses Association of Ontario, New Zealand Guidelines Group, National Health and Medical Research Council, and Canadian Medical Association.

    Whittemore and Knafl’s five-step integrative literature review (1) identification of research problem; (2) search of the literature; (3) evaluation of data; (4) analysis of data; and (5) presentation of results.

    Following critical appraisal, nine guidelines were included for data extraction and synthesis.