Oxygenated Hydrogel Promotes Re-Epithelialization and Reduces Inflammation in a Perturbed Wound Model in Rat.

Chronic wounds can take months or even years to heal and require proper medical intervention. Normal wound healing processes require adequate oxygen supply. Accordingly, destroyed or inefficient vasculature leads to insufficient delivery to peripheral tissues and impair healing. Oxygen is critical for vital processes such as proliferation, collagen synthesis and antibacterial defense. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) is commonly used to accelerate healing however, this can be costly and requires specialized training and equipment. Efforts have turned to the development of topical oxygen delivery systems. Oxysolutions has developed oxygenated gels (P407, P407/P188, nanocellulose based gel (NCG)) with high levels of dissolved oxygen. This study aims to evaluate the efficacy of these newly developed oxygenated products by assessing their impact on healing rates in a rat perturbed wound model. Here, P407/P188 oxygenated gels demonstrated greater re-epithelialization distances compared to its controls at Day 3. In addition, all oxygenated gels had a higher proportion of wounds with complete wound closure. All three oxygenated gels also minimized further escalation in inflammation from Day 3 to Day 10. This highlights the potential of this newly-developed oxygenated gels as an alternative to existing oxygen therapies.

Fecal microbiota profiles in treatment-naïve pediatric inflammatory bowel disease - associations with disease phenotype, treatment, and outcome.

PURPOSE: Imbalance in the microbiota, dysbiosis, has been identified in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). We explored the fecal microbiota in pediatric patients with treatment-naïve IBD, non-IBD patients with gastrointestinal symptoms and healthy children, its relation to IBD subgroups, and treatment outcomes. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Fecal samples were collected from 235 children below 18 years of age. Eighty children had Crohn's disease (CD), 27 ulcerative colitis (UC), 3 IBD unclassified, 50 were non-IBD symptomatic patients, and 75 were healthy. The bacterial abundance of 54 predefined DNA markers was measured with a 16S rRNA DNA-based test using GA-Map™ technology at diagnosis and after therapy in IBD patients. RESULTS: Bacterial abundance was similarly reduced in IBD and non-IBD patients in 51 of 54 markers compared to healthy patients (P<0.001). Only Prevotella was more abundant in patients (P<0.01). IBD patients with ileocolitis or total colitis had more Ruminococcus gnavus (P=0.02) than patients with colonic CD or left-sided UC. CD patients with upper gastrointestinal manifestations had higher Veillonella abundance (P<0.01). IBD patients (58%) who received biologic therapy had lower baseline Firmicutes and Mycoplasma hominis abundance (P<0.01) than conventionally treated. High Proteobacteria abundance was associated with stricturing/penetrating CD, surgery (P<0.01), and nonmucosal healing (P<0.03). Low Faecalibacterium prausnitzii abundance was associated with prior antibiotic therapy (P=0.001), surgery (P=0.02), and nonmucosal healing (P<0.03). After therapy, IBD patients had unchanged dysbiosis. CONCLUSION: Fecal microbiota profiles differentiated IBD and non-IBD symptomatic children from healthy children, but displayed similar dysbiosis in IBD and non-IBD symptomatic patients. Pretreatment fecal microbiota profiles may be of prognostic value and aid in treatment individualization in pediatric IBD as severe dysbiosis was associated with an extensive, complicated phenotype, biologic therapy, and nonmucosal healing. The dysbiosis persisted after therapy, regardless of treatments and mucosal healing.

Bead-beating artefacts in the Bacteroidetes to Firmicutes ratio of the human stool metagenome.

We evaluated bead-beating cell-lysis in analysing the human stool metagenome, since this is a key step. We observed that two different bead-beating instruments from the same producer gave a three-fold difference in the Bacteroidetes to Firmicutes ratio. This illustrates that bead-beating can have a major impact on downstream metagenome analyses.

Meanings of existential uncertainty and certainty for people diagnosed with cancer and receiving palliative treatment: a life-world phenomenological study.

BACKGROUND: Many people around the world are getting cancer and living longer with the disease. Thanks to improved treatment options in healthcare, patients diagnosed with advanced gastrointestinal cancer can increasingly live for longer. Living with cancer creates existential uncertainty, but what does this situation mean for the individual? The purpose of the study is to interpret meanings of existential uncertainty and certainty for people diagnosed with advanced gastrointestinal cancer and receiving palliative treatment. METHODS: This study is part of a larger project in which 7 men and 7 women aged between 49 and 79 participated in a study of information and communication for people with advanced gastrointestinal cancer. A total of 66 interviews were conducted with participants who were followed up over time. The narrative interviews were transcribed verbatim and the texts were analysed in three steps: naive reading, structural analysis and interpreted whole by utilizing a phenomenological life-world approach. RESULTS: THIS STUDY HAS IDENTIFIED DIFFERENT SPHERES IN WHICH PEOPLE DIAGNOSED WITH ADVANCED GASTROINTESTINAL CANCER VACILLATE BETWEEN EXISTENTIAL UNCERTAINTY AND CERTAINTY: bodily changes, everyday situations, companionship with others, healthcare situations and the natural environment. Existing in the move between existential uncertainty and certainty appears to change people's lives in a decisive manner. The interview transcripts reveal aspects that both create existential certainty and counteract uncertainty. They also reveal that participants appear to start reflecting on how the new and uncertain aspects of their lives will manifest themselves -a new experience that lays the foundation for development of knowledge, personal learning and growth. CONCLUSIONS: People diagnosed with advanced gastrointestinal cancer and receiving palliative care expressed thoughts about personal learning initiated by the struggle of living with an uncertain future despite their efforts to live in the present. Their personal learning was experienced through a changed life for themselves and having to confront their own pending death and develop self-insight regarding finality of life. Healthcare professionals can try to support people receiving palliative treatment for cancer by diversifying avenues for their personal growth, thus helping them manage their existential uncertainty and gravitate towards greater existential certainty.

Found in transcription: accurate Parkinson's disease classification in peripheral blood.

BACKGROUND: A blood-based test for the early detection of Parkinson's disease (PD) would be an important diagnostic tool and useful for patient selection when developing novel drugs or treatments for the disease. OBJECTIVE: Here, we aimed to identify potential biomarkers associated with PD. METHODS: We applied gene expression profiling to the study of peripheral blood from 75 healthy control subjects and 79 PD patients at different stages of the disease. Healthy control subjects were matched for age and gender with PD subjects, and the diagnosis of patients was based on clinical evaluation by specialists in movement disorders. RNA was extracted from the blood samples and the gene expressions were measured using the Illumina HumanHT-12 v4.0 Expression BeadChip. RESULTS: Our results support previous studies that gene expression in blood may be instrumental in the search for molecular biomarkers for PD. Single cross-validation results show that PD can be correctly classified from healthy controls with an agreement of 88% to clinical diagnosis. De novo PD patients are classified with a sensitivity of 87%, which is close to what was achieved for the patients having a confirmed PD diagnosis with disease duration <5 and >5 years (93% and 88%). A double cross-validation procedure showed that using a selected set of around 650 informative genes, similar results are achieved. Functional analysis of the selected genes showed genes significantly associated to mitochondrial dysfunction, protein ubiquitination, gene expression and cell death. CONCLUSIONS: PD affects gene expression in blood, suggesting the potential for the development of a blood-based gene expression test.

Microarray-based prediction of Parkinson's disease using clinical data as additional response variables.

Recent discoveries and developments in the field of genomics have led to the commercialization of novel diagnostic devices for studying disease or estimating therapeutic outcomes in individual patients. With this emerging field, the emphasis is shifting to integration of clinical research into product development. Data acquisition is primary in the initial exploratory phase of product development, and during the process of sample collection and data generation in clinical microarray studies, great amounts of additional information, such as demographic, clinical, and study design variables associated with the data, are often accumulated and made available. Including additional information in classification has been addressed in many different ways. However, in previous studies, the additional information have consistently been treated as extra predictors, which can be a problem for future prediction if such information are not available or collectable for the new samples. We instead propose to adopt a method called canonical partial least squares, which for our purpose, only uses the additional information at the model building stage to stabilize the construction of a classifier for disease status from microarray data. The canonical partial least squares method is compared with regular partial least squares for the classification of Parkinson's disease from gene expression in peripheral blood samples and also through computer simulations. The present study showed that including clinical data in the model building produces simpler and more stable models for prediction of Parkinson's disease from gene expression data.