Eptifibatide-induced thrombocytopenia leading to acute stent thrombosis.

A 71-year old female patient with inferior ST-elevation myocardial infarction underwent primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) within 3 h of symptom onset. She was preloaded with 300 mg aspirin and 600 mg clopidogrel before PCI. Coronary angiogram showed occlusion of the right coronary artery. During PCI, eptifibatide was initiated due to the large thrombus burden. Few hours after the procedure, on eptifibatide infusion, a severe drop in platelet count was observed (from 210,000/µl to 35,000/µl) and the infusion was discontinued. One hour later, still under eptifibatide effect and with severe thrombocytopenia, acute stent thrombosis developed. Lack of prior heparin exposure, quick onset of thrombocytopenia made heparin induced thrombocytopenia improbable that was later excluded by specific immunoassay. However, platelet function testing suggested that eptifibatide induced thrombocytopenia was mediated by activating autoantibodies since platelet reactivity was paradoxically very high at the time of stent thrombosis but decreased radically with eptifibatide washout. The patient was successfully managed without further complications on the basis of platelet function data obtained in the subsequent days. This rare subtype of thrombocytopenia highlights that not only platelet count but also platelet function should be closely monitored in case of severe thrombocytopenia to better balance bleeding and thrombosis.

A general text mining method to extract echocardiography measurement results from echocardiography documents.

BACKGROUND: In everyday medical practice, the results of cardiac ultrasound examinations are generally recorded in unstructured text, from which extracting relevant information is an important and challenging task. This paper presents a generally applicable language and corpus-independent text mining method for extracting and structuring numerical measurement results and their descriptions from echocardiography reports. METHOD: The developed method is based on generally applicable text mining preprocessing activities, it automatically identifies and standardizes the descriptions of the cardiac ultrasound measures, and it stores the extracted and standardized measurement descriptions with their measurement results in a structured form for later usage. The method does not contain any regular expression-based search and does not rely on information about the structure of the document. RESULTS: The method has been tested on a document set containing more than 20,000 echocardiographic reports by examining the efficiency of extracting 12 echocardiography parameters considered important by experts. The method extracted and structured the echocardiography parameters under the study with good sensitivity (lowest value: 0.775, highest value: 1.0, average: 0.904) and excellent specificity (for all cases 1.0). The F1 score ranged between 0.873 and 1.0, and its average value was 0.948. CONCLUSION: The presented case study has shown that the proposed method can extract measurement results from echocardiography documents with high confidence without performing a direct search or having detailed information about the data recording habits. Furthermore, it effectively handles spelling errors, abbreviations and the highly varied terminology used in descriptions. As it does not rely on any information related to the structure or the language of the documents or data recording habits, it can be applied for processing any free-text written medical texts.

Comparison of Cancer Survival Trends in Hungary in the Periods 2001-2005 and 2011-2015 According to a Population-Based Cancer Registry.

Background: Assessment of population-based cancer survival may provide the most valuable feedback about the effectiveness of oncological surveillance and treatment. Aims: Based on the database of the Hungarian National Cancer Registry, standardized incidence rates of lung, breast, colorectal, prostate and cervical cancer were compared to standardized mortality data of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office in the period between 2001 and 2015. Then survival analysis was performed on cleansed database. Results: The incidence of colorectal, breast and prostate cancer increased, while standardized rates of lung and cervical cancer declined. The survival of colorectal, breast and prostate cancer showed improvement. Contrarily, lung cancer exhibited a mild decline, while that of cervical cancer did not change significantly. In earlier stages survival was improved among almost every studied tumor type, while in advanced stages improvement was not observed. Comparison of stage distribution revealed that in the 2011-2015 period colorectal, breast and prostate cancer cases were diagnosed at earlier stages, while lung and cervical cancer patients were typically discovered at more advanced stages. Discussion: The outcome of advanced cancer treatments is better in earlier stages, which highlighted the importance of screening network. However, growth of oncological treatment costs with longer patient survival imposes a constantly increasing burden on society.

Preventing cancer therapy-related heart failure: the need for novel studies.

AIMS: After enhancing the survivorship of cancers, the impact of cardiovascular diseases on mortality is increasing among cancer patients. However, anticancer therapies pose a higher cardiovascular risk to patients. As prevention against cancer therapy-induced cardiomyopathy has yet to be explored, the preventive ability of concomitant cardiovascular medications against incident heart failure was assessed. METHODS: A retrospective, population-based study was run using anonymized integration of healthcare databases. All the Hungarian patients diagnosed with breast or colorectal carcinoma and undergoing chemotherapy or biological therapy were analysed. Participants were not treated with any anticancer therapy nor suffered from heart failure/dilated cardiomyopathy during the preceding observational period (≥6.5 years). The heart failure endpoint was established by I50 International Classification of Diseases codes upon discharge from hospital or issuance of an autopsy report. RESULTS: Among the 9575 patients who were enrolled, the cumulative incidence of heart failure over 4 years was 6.9%. The time until the first heart failure event in the propensity score-matched treated and untreated groups was compared using Cox proportional-hazards models. A significant association between lower heart failure risk and concomitant statin therapy was observed (hazard ratio: 0.748, P = 0.038); the preventive ability was more pronounced in the anthracycline/capecitabine/platinum-treated subgroup (hazard ratio: 0.660, P = 0.032). For angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor/angiotensin II receptor blocker therapy, a significantly lower heart failure risk was also observed (hazard ratio: 0.809, P = 0.032). Among beta blockers, nebivolol administered to anthracycline/capecitabine-treated patients was associated with a nonsignificant trend to lower heart failure risk (hazard ratio: 0.584, P = 0.069). CONCLUSION: Only concomitant statin and angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor/angiotensin II receptor blocker therapies were associated with significantly lower risk of anticancer therapy-related heart failure.

The Efficiency of Different Distance Metrics for Keyword-Based Search in Medical Documents: A Short Case Study.

BACKGROUND: Processing of free text written medical texts involves many difficulties arising from typographical errors, synonyms, and abbreviations occurring in the texts. METHODS: In this study, the applicability of the most common string similarity measures were analyzed and compared for the keyword-based medical text search. RESULTS: The usefulness of the similarity measures was studied in a set of medical documents containing more than 20,000 echocardiography reports. Experimental results showed that the Jaro-Winkler dissimilarity measure is the most capable measure to explore the content of the medical texts.

Analysing the risk factors of doxorubicin-associated heart failure by a retrospective study of integrated, nation-wide databases / A doxorubicinkezeléshez kapcsolódó szívelégtelenség kialakulásának rizikótényezoi a hazai országos adatbázisok integrált, retrospektív elemzése alapján

INTRODUCTION: The incidence of dilated cardiomyopathy after anthracycline chemotherapy is mainly influenced by anthracycline cumulative dose. Previous researches showed doxorubicin treatment under cumulative dose of 450 mg/m2 associated with a low incidence of heart failure. Nowadays, doxorubicin is administered with a lower dose, the development of heart failure is largely determined by other factors. AIM: Our purpose was to identify the risk factors for heart failure due to doxorubicin therapy. METHOD: With the use of the Hungarian financial healthcare databases merged with the National Cancer Registry, we performed a retrospective study. All the patients having confirmation for breast carcinoma between 2004 and 2015 were enrolled. The subjects with a preceding period characterized by any chemotherapy or diagnoses suggesting heart failure were excluded. Heart failure outcome event was defined by the assignment of I50 diagnosis code at hospital discharge or in autopsy reports. STATISTICAL ANALYSIS: We used multivariate binary logistic regression to calculate odds ratios for heart failure. Besides the baseline characteristics, oncological state and cumulative doses of the chemotherapies were also taken into account. RESULTS: Among the analysed 3288, doxorubicin-treated patients, heart failure cumulative incidence was 6.2%. Doxorubicin cumulative dose over 400 mg/m2 increased the risk. The heart failure incidence was essentially influenced by age, even over 50 years the risk rose. Diabetes mellitus and the treatments with pyrimidine-analogues, carboplatin or bevacizumab were also associated with higher risk. CONCLUSION: By the integration of national financial and clinical databases, we could identify the risk factors for doxorubicin-associated heart failure. Orv Hetil. 2020; 161(26): 1094-1102.

Application of Named Entity Recognition Methods to Extract Information from Echocardiography Reports.

As there is no consensus about how to store the results of echocardiography examinations, information extraction from them is a non-trivial task. Successful named entity recognition (NER) is key to getting access to the stored information and the process of identification has been recognized as a bottleneck in text mining. Our goal was to develop and compare such NER methods that are capable of achieving this task. Our practical results show that the text mining-based NER method is able to perform at a similar level in finding and identifying terms as the regular expression-based NER method. The paper highlights the advantages and disadvantages of both methods.

Risk prediction model for long-term heart failure incidence after epirubicin chemotherapy for breast cancer - A real-world data-based, nationwide classification analysis.

BACKGROUND: Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) incidence during and after anthracycline therapy is highly dependent on anthracycline cumulative dose (CD), but its detailed risk factors remained unexplored. Our aim was to assess heart failure (HF) incidence after epirubicin therapy and construct a HF risk-prediction score. METHODS AND RESULTS: A retrospective study was conducted by anonymized integration of nationwide healthcare databases. All the analysed patients were diagnosed with breast carcinoma confirmed by histology from 2007 to 2016. Participants did not undergo chemo- or radiotherapy or suffer HF/DCM during the preceding 3 years. The HF endpoint was established by assignment of I50 International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes upon discharge from hospital or issuance of an autopsy report. 8068 patients treated with epirubicin were analysed. The 3-10-year HF cumulative incidence was 6.9%. Using binomial logistic regression the independent predictors were identified. A CD-dependent and significant effect on HF was revealed for epirubicin (threshold dose: 709 mg/m2, odds ratio (OR): 1.76) and docetaxel (CD: >510 mg/m2, OR: 1.59; CD ≤510 mg/m2, OR: 1.28, respectively). HF risk increased with age, even over 40. A risk-prediction score derived from regression coefficients consisting of age, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, coronary artery disease, stroke, epirubicin CD, docetaxel CD, capecitabine, gemcitabine, bevacizumab and cancer stage was able to classify HF risk over a wide range (2-30%). CONCLUSION: Long-term HF risk for patients treated with epirubicin was stratified by our risk-prediction score with a nearly 15-fold difference between the lowest and highest groups.

Comparison of Control Group Generating Methods.

Retrospective studies suffer from drawbacks such as selection bias. As the selection of the control group has a significant impact on the evaluation of the results, it is very important to find the proper method to generate the most appropriate control group. In this paper we suggest two nearest neighbors based control group selection methods that aim to achieve good matching between the individuals of case and control groups. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is evaluated by runtime and accuracy tests and the results are compared to the classical stratified sampling method.

Successful sealing of a coronary artery perforation with a mesh-covered stent.

Coronary artery perforation is a rare, but particularly feared and sometimes life-threatening, complication of percutaneous coronary interventions. The incidence of coronary perforation has increased with newer, more invasive interventional devices and techniques like rotablation, excimer laser coronary angioplasty, routine high-pressure balloon dilatation, or chronic total occlusion interventions. Here we describe a case of Ellis grade 2 perforation following a balloon dilatation performed in an in-stent restenotic total occlusion. The perforation was successfully sealed with a recently introduced device, a mesh covered stent (MGuard stent, Inspire MD). This new stent is much more flexible than the polytetrafluoroethylene-covered stent, which is often implanted in Ellis 2 or 3 grade perforations.