BSHI and BTS UK guideline on the detection of alloantibodies in solid organ (and islet) transplantation.

Solid organ transplantation represents the best (and in many cases only) treatment option for patients with end-stage organ failure. The effectiveness and functioning life of these transplants has improved each decade due to surgical and clinical advances, and accurate histocompatibility assessment. Patient exposure to alloantigen from another individual is a common occurrence and takes place through pregnancies, blood transfusions or previous transplantation. Such exposure to alloantigen's can lead to the formation of circulating alloreactive antibodies which can be deleterious to solid organ transplant outcome. The purpose of these guidelines is to update to the previous BSHI/BTS guidelines 2016 on the relevance, assessment, and management of alloantibodies within solid organ transplantation.

BSHI guideline: HLA matching and donor selection for haematopoietic progenitor cell transplantation.

A review of the British Society for Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics (BSHI) Guideline 'HLA matching and donor selection for haematopoietic progenitor cell transplantation' published in 2016 was undertaken by a BSHI appointed writing committee. Literature searches were performed and the data extracted were presented as recommendations according to the GRADE nomenclature.

Traumatic brain injury results in altered physiologic, but not subjective responses to emotional stimuli.

BACKGROUND: While the cognitive sequelae of traumatic brain injury (TBI) are well known, emotional impairments after TBI are suboptimally characterized. Lack of awareness of emotional difficulties can make self-report unreliable. However, individuals with TBI demonstrate involuntary changes in heart rate variability which may enable objective quantification of emotional dysfunction. METHODS: Sixteen subjects with chronic TBI and 10 age-matched controls were tested on an emotional function battery during which they watched a series of film clips normed to elicit specific positively and negatively valenced emotions: amusement, sexual amusement, sadness, fear and disgust. Subjective responses to the emotional stimuli were also obtained. Additionally, surface electrodes measured cardiac and respiratory signals to compute heart rate variability (HRV), from which measures of parasympathetic activity, the respiratory frequency area (RFA) and sympathetic activity, the low frequency area (LFA), of the HRV frequency spectrum were derived. The Neurobehavioral Rating Scale-Revised (NRS-R) and the King-Devick (KD) test were administered to assess neurobehavioral dysfunction. RESULTS: The two groups showed no differences in subjective ratings of emotional intensity. Subjects with TBI showed significantly decreased sympathetic activity when viewing amusing stimuli and significantly increased sympathetic activity when viewing sad stimuli compared to controls. Most of the subjects did not show agitation, anxiety, depression, blunted affect, emotional withdrawal, decreased motivation or mental fatiguability on the NRS-R. However, 13/16 subjects with TBI demonstrated attention difficulty on the NRS-R which was positively correlated with the increased sympathetic activity during sad stimuli. Both attention difficulty and abnormal autonomic responses to sad stimuli were correlated with the timing on the KD test, which reflected difficulty with visual attention shifting. CONCLUSIONS: The HRV spectrum may be useful to identify subclinical emotional dysfunction in individuals with TBI. Attention difficulites, specifically impairment in visual attention shifting, may contribute to abnormal reactivity to sad stimuli that may be detected and potentially treated to improve emotional function.

A randomized clinical trial on comparison of corticosteroid injection with or without splinting versus saline injection with or without splinting in patients with lateral epicondylitis.

BACKGROUND: Lateral epicondylitis is a common problem affecting 1-3% of the population. There has been much debate about the best treatment modality for this condition. There is, however, no conclusive evidence in support of any of the proposed treatment modalities. In this trial, we have studied the effect of corticosteroid injection (with or without splinting) with normal saline injection (with or without splinting). MATERIALS AND METHODS: In this double-blind, randomized clinical trial, individuals were randomly assigned to either of four treatment groups and received either 40 mg depomedrol injection alone, 40 mg depomedrol injection with splinting, normal saline injection alone, or normal saline injection with splinting. They were evaluated using the visual analog scale (VAS) at weeks 2, 4 and 24 and with the Oxford elbow scale (OES) at 24 weeks. RESULTS: A total of 79 patients were participated in the study. The corticosteroid injection groups had better pain relief as measured by VAS at 2 and 4 weeks compared with the two saline injection groups. Mean VAS difference at week 0 versus week 2 was 4.5 ± 0.9 and 2.8 ± 0.6 in corticosteroid injection groups and saline injection groups respectively (P < 0.01) but at 24 weeks, there was only moderate benefit reported for the group which received steroid injection and splinting (P < 0.01) compared to the saline injection groups. The saline injection groups reported better improvement in OES scores (20.1 ± 3.7) at the end of the trial compared corticosteroid injection groups (16.1 ± 2.9) (P < 0.05). CONCLUSION: Our results indicate that despite the clear pain reduction benefit associated with steroid injection in short term, this benefit in comparison with normal saline injection fades by the 24(th) week of follow-up.

The Role of Robotic Path Assistance and Weight Support in Facilitating 3D Movements in Individuals With Poststroke Hemiparesis.

Background. High-intensity repetitive training is challenging to provide poststroke. Robotic approaches can facilitate such training by unweighting the limb and/or by improving trajectory control, but the extent to which these types of assistance are necessary is not known. Objective. The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which robotic path assistance and/or weight support facilitate repetitive 3D movements in high functioning and low functioning subjects with poststroke arm motor impairment relative to healthy controls. Methods. Seven healthy controls and 18 subjects with chronic poststroke right-sided hemiparesis performed 300 repetitions of a 3D circle-drawing task using a 3D Cable-driven Arm Exoskeleton (CAREX) robot. Subjects performed 100 repetitions each with path assistance alone, weight support alone, and path assistance plus weight support in a random order over a single session. Kinematic data from the task were used to compute the normalized error and speed as well as the speed-error relationship. Results. Low functioning stroke subjects (Fugl-Meyer Scale score = 16.6 ± 6.5) showed the lowest error with path assistance plus weight support, whereas high functioning stroke subjects (Fugl-Meyer Scale score = 59.6 ± 6.8) moved faster with path assistance alone. When both speed and error were considered together, low functioning subjects significantly reduced their error and increased their speed but showed no difference across the robotic conditions. Conclusions. Robotic assistance can facilitate repetitive task performance in individuals with severe arm motor impairment, but path assistance provides little advantage over weight support alone. Future studies focusing on antigravity arm movement control are warranted poststroke.

The omission of the "wet" pre-transplant crossmatch in renal transplant centres in Scotland.

The methods used for assessment of immunological risk for a patient receiving a kidney from a deceased donor have undergone significant change in the last few years. Many centres now proceed to transplant without any additional laboratory-based HLA testing for patients who are well defined as HLA antibody negative. Using rapid HLA antibody tests at the time of donor offer, such as Luminex, it is also possible to omit wet crossmatches in many sensitised patients. This virtual crossmatch (vXM) approach provides benefits in reducing cold ischaemia time (CIT), but also carries risks such as missing clinically relevant non-HLA reactivity or allelic HLA antibody reactivity. A number of factors need to be in place in a laboratory to enable a vXM policy to be extended to both sensitised and non-sensitised patients including access to complete donor HLA typing, ability to undertake Luminex-based HLA antibody testing out of working hours, and access to senior H&I Scientist expertise to assess and interpret results. Other approaches, such as using peripheral blood lymphocytes for crossmatching, may also enable a reduction in CIT and transplant units need to assess the risks of extending vXM processes for their patients against potential benefits.

Adenoviral gene therapy in gastric cancer: a review.

Gastric cancer is one of the most common malignancies worldwide. With current therapeutic approaches the prognosis of gastric cancer is very poor, as gastric cancer accounts for the second most common cause of death in cancer related deaths. Gastric cancer like almost all other cancers has a molecular genetic basis which relies on disruption in normal cellular regulatory mechanisms regarding cell growth, apoptosis and cell division. Thus novel therapeutic approaches such as gene therapy promise to become the alternative choice of treatment in gastric cancer. In gene therapy, suicide genes, tumor suppressor genes and anti-angiogenesis genes among many others are introduced to cancer cells via vectors. Some of the vectors widely used in gene therapy are Adenoviral vectors. This review provides an update of the new developments in adenoviral cancer gene therapy including strategies for inducing apoptosis, inhibiting metastasis and targeting the cancer cells.

Objectifying eye movements during rapid number naming: Methodology for assessment of normative data for the King-Devick test.

OBJECTIVE: Concussion is a major public health problem and considerable efforts are focused on sideline-based diagnostic testing to guide return-to-play decision-making and clinical care. The King-Devick (K-D) test, a sensitive sideline performance measure for concussion detection, reveals slowed reading times in acutely concussed subjects, as compared to healthy controls; however, the normal behavior of eye movements during the task and deficits underlying the slowing have not been defined. METHODS: Twelve healthy control subjects underwent quantitative eye tracking during digitized K-D testing. RESULTS: The total K-D reading time was 51.24 (±9.7) seconds. A total of 145 saccades (±15) per subject were generated, with average peak velocity 299.5°/s and average amplitude 8.2°. The average inter-saccadic interval was 248.4 ms. Task-specific horizontal and oblique saccades per subject numbered, respectively, 102 (±10) and 17 (±4). Subjects with the fewest saccades tended to blink more, resulting in a larger amount of missing data; whereas, subjects with the most saccades tended to make extra saccades during line transitions. CONCLUSIONS: Establishment of normal and objective ocular motor behavior during the K-D test is a critical first step towards defining the range of deficits underlying abnormal testing in concussion. Further, it sets the groundwork for exploration of K-D correlations with cognitive dysfunction and saccadic paradigms that may reflect specific neuroanatomic deficits in the concussed brain.