Corrigendum to "Myocardial Infarction in Neonates: A Diagnostic and Therapeutic Challenge".

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1155/2019/7203407.].

Finding Similar Tweets in Health Related Topics.

Social networks have become a very important means to facilitate the creation and sharing of information. They also provide real-time information on sales, marketing, politics, natural disasters, and crisis situations, among others. In this work, we investigate neural models for text similarity that can be used to: 1) determine if messages are related or not with a disease, 2) group similar messages to those that we have already captured, analyzed or stored, and 3) find similarity indices between messages using different learning algorithms. Our results show that we can achieve 90% accuracy on the task of classifying which of two tweets is more similar to a sample tweet.

Additional evidence that the rat renal interstitium contracts in vivo.

We recently provided highly suggestive preliminary evidence that the renal interstitium contracts reactively in vivo. We demonstrated that renal medullary direct interstitial volume expansion (rmDIVE = 100 µl bolus infusion of 0.9% saline (SS)/30 s) brought about a biphasic renal interstitial hydrostatic pressure (RIHP) response which was abolished when dibutyryl-cAMP was concomitant and interstitially infused. To assess more deeply the feasibility of the concept that the renal interstitium contracts in vivo, two experimental series (S1, S2) were performed in hydropenic rats subjected to acute left renal-denervation, hormonal clamping, and control of renal arterial pressure. In S1, RIHP and renal outer medullary blood flow (RoMBF) were continuously measured before and after a sudden micro-bolus (5µl) injection, into the renal medullary interstitium, of SS containing α-trinositol (α-TNS, anti-inflammatory drug) to either two doses 2 or 4 mM (SS + 2 α-TNS and SS + 4 α-TNS groups). No overall differences between groups in either ΔRIHP or %ΔRoMBF time courses were found; however, in the SS + 2 α-TNS group the data were less scattered and the ΔRIHP time course tended to peak faster and then persisted there, so that, this α-TNS dose was selected for S2. In S2, RIHP and RoMBF were similarly measured in rats randomly assigned to three groups: the CTR group (sham time-control), SS group (SS alone), and SS + α-TNS group. The micro-bolus injection of SS alone (SS group) was unable to increase ΔRIHP. The group with no micro-bolus injection (CTR group) experienced a decrease in ΔRIHP. The micro-bolus injection of SS + 2 α-TNS was accompanied by a differential increase in ΔRIHP (vs. CTR and SS groups). These responses were not associated with differential changes among groups in %ΔRoMBF or hemodilution parameters. These results provide additional evidence that the renal interstitium contracts in vivo.

Myocardial Infarction in Neonates: A Diagnostic and Therapeutic Challenge.

Neonatal acute myocardial infarction is an uncommon entity. We describe the case of a 4-day-old term baby who presented with respiratory distress and distal acrocyanosis. The chest radiograph demonstrated cardiomegaly without pleural effusion, and examination revealed hepatomegaly. An electrocardiogram revealed QS pattern in leads I, aVL, and V6, suggestive of ischemia. Cardiac enzymes were elevated, and echocardiogram revealed moderate left ventricular dysfunction with a thrombus at the level of the left atrial appendage. The patient required hemodynamic stabilization, vasodilatation to avoid congestive heart failure, and anticoagulation with heparin and aspirin. In the context of this unusual diagnosis, we reviewed our experience over the last 17 years as well as the existing literature on neonatal myocardial infarction.

Twitter Health Surveillance (THS) System.

We present the Twitter Health Surveillance (THS) application framework. THS is designed as an integrated platform to help health officials collect tweets, determine if they are related with a medical condition, extract metadata out of them, and create a big data warehouse that can be used to further analyze the data. THS is built atop open source tools and provides the following value added services: Data Acquisition, Tweet Classification, and Big Data Warehousing. In order to validate THS, we have created a collection of roughly twelve thousands labelled tweets. These tweets contain one or more target medical terms, and the labels indicate if the tweet is related or not to a medical condition. We used this collection to test various models based on LSTM and GRU recurrent neural networks. Our experiments show that we can classify tweets with 96% precision, 92% recall, and 91% F1 score. These results compare favorably with recent research on this area, and show the promise of our THS system.

Experiences with the Twitter Health Surveillance (THS) System.

Social media has become an important platform to gauge public opinion on topics related to our daily lives. In practice, processing these posts requires big data analytics tools since the volume of data and the speed of production overwhelm single-server solutions. Building an application to capture and analyze posts from social media can be a challenge simply because it requires combining a set of complex software tools that often times are tricky to configure, tune, and maintain. In many instances, the application ends up being an assorted collection of Java/Scala programs or Python scripts that developers cobble together to generate the data products they need. In this paper, we present the Twitter Health Surveillance (THS) application framework. THS is designed as a platform to allow end-users to monitor a stream of tweets, and process the stream with a combination of built-in functionality and their own user-defined functions. We discuss the architecture of THS, and describe its implementation atop the Apache Hadoop Ecosystem. We also present several lessons learned while developing our current prototype.

Highly suggestive preliminary evidence that the renal interstitium contracts in vivo.

To learn more about controlling renal interstitial hydrostatic pressure (RIHP), we assessed its response to renal medullary direct interstitial volume expansion (rmDIVE = 100 µL bolus infusion/30 sec). Three experimental series (S) were performed in hydropenic, anesthetized, right-nephrectomized, acute left renal-denervated and renal perfusion pressure-controlled rats randomly assigned to groups in each S. S1: Rats without hormonal clamp were contrasted before and after rmDIVE induced via 0.9% saline solution bolus (SS group) or 2% albumin in SS bolus (2% ALB + SS group). Subcapsular ΔRIHP rose slowly, progressively and similarly in both groups by ~3 mmHg. S2: Rats under hormonal clamp were contrasted before and after sham rmDIVE (time CTR group) and real rmDIVE induced via either SS bolus (SS group) or SS bolus containing the subcutaneous tissue fibroblast relaxant dibutyryl-cAMP (SS + db-cAMP group). ΔRIHP showed time, group, and time*group interaction effects with a biphasic response (early: ~1 mmHg; late: ~4 mmHg) in the SS group that was absent in the SS + db-cAMP group. S3: Two groups of rats (SS and SS + db-cAMP) under hormonal clamp were contrasted as in S2, producing similar ΔRIHP results to those of S2 but showing a slow, progressive, and indistinct decrease in renal outer medullary blood flow in both groups. These results provide highly suggestive preliminary evidence that the renal interstitium is capable of contracting reactively in vivo in response to rmDIVE with SS and demonstrate that such a response is abolished when db-cAMP is interstitially and concomitantly infused.

Gingivitis and periodontitis as antagonistic modulators of gingival perfusion.

BACKGROUND: We explore the possible association between the extent of gingivitis or periodontitis and an index of gingival microvascular perfusion response to compression of alveolar mucosa, called the gingival perfusion index (GIPI). METHODS: A cross-sectional analytical study was done in a sample of 60 adults, including healthy and non-insulin-dependent diabetic subjects of either gender, with teeth in the anteromandibular sextant with or without gingivitis and with or without periodontitis at the lower-left lateral incisor (LLLI). A sample was selected by convenience non-probability sampling. Gingival perfusion was evaluated at labial LLLI attached gingiva. Two perfusion recordings were done 5 minutes apart, each one consisting of a 40-second control phase, a 22-second compression phase, and a 40-second postcompression phase. LLLI alveolar mucosa was compressed with a wood-mounted cotton swab until reaching about one-fifth of the control perfusion value. GIPI was used as response dependent variable. The gingival index and probing depth were used as measures of the extent of gingivitis and periodontitis, respectively. RESULTS: By analysis of covariance and multiple regression analysis, it was found that only the probing depth (negatively) and gingival index (positively) predicted GIPI (R(2) adjusted = 0.5194, P <0.0001). CONCLUSIONS: The data strongly suggest that, at least in the studied sample, gingivitis and periodontitis operate as antagonistic modulators of gingival perfusion. The major practical implication of our findings is that an increase or decrease in this index (GIPI) at a given attached gingiva site could indicate, respectively, the clinical predominance of gingivitis or periodontitis in such a site.

A novel procedure for evaluating gingival perfusion status using laser-Doppler flowmetry.

OBJECTIVES: To systematize a procedure that allows one to characterize the perfusion response pattern of attached gingiva to the topical and transitory compression of alveolar mucose, using laser-Doppler flowmetry. MATERIAL AND METHODS: A cross-sectional study was carried out, in 20 healthy adult subjects of either sex, with teeth in antero-mandibular sextant but without periodontitis at the lower left lateral incisor (LLLI). Sample was selected by convenience non-probability sampling. Gingival perfusion was evaluated at labial LLLI attached gingiva using a specially designed gingival tray. Two perfusion recordings were carried out 5 min. apart, each one consisting of a 40 s control phase, a 22 s compression phase and a 40 s post-compression phase. During compression phase, LLLI alveolar mucose was compressed with a wood-mounted cotton swab until the perfusion decreased to about 1/5 of its control perfusion value. RESULTS: Integrated primary basal flow (IPBF) during control phase was of 14,210+/-1075 perfusion units (PU), whereas integrated flow during compression phase was of 1651+/-202 PU (p<0.05). After compression was released, integrated total secondary real flow was 13,322+/-1513 PU (p<0.05) which represented a 91.3+/-3.8% of IPBF. Gingival compression propitiated an induced flow debt (IFD) of 6478+/-781 PU, which increased in 980+/-482 PU after compression was released, representing 18% of the IFD (Debt index). CONCLUSIONS: A hypoaemic response in reaction to topical and transitory LLLI alveolar mucose compression was observed. Debt index and the ITSRF% are reproducible indices of microvascular perfusion response whose validation under pathological circumstances remains to be evaluated.

Fluoride-induced disruption of reproductive hormones in men.

Fluoride-induced reproductive effects have been reported in experimental models and in humans. However, these effects were found in heavily exposed scenarios. Therefore, in this work our objective was to study reproductive parameters in a population exposed to fluoride at doses of 3-27 mg/day (high-fluoride-exposed group-HFEG). Urinary fluoride levels, semen parameters, and reproductive hormones in serum (LH, FSH, estradiol, prolactin, inhibin-B, free and total testosterone) were measured. Results were compared with a group of individuals exposed to fluoride at lower doses: 2-13 mg/day (low-fluoride-exposed group-LFEG). A significant increase in FSH (P<0.05) and a reduction of inhibin-B, free testosterone, and prolactin in serum (P<0.05) were noticed in the HFEG. When HFEG was compared to LFEG, a decreased sensitivity was found in the FSH response to inhibin-B (P<0.05). A significant negative partial correlation was observed between urinary fluoride and serum levels of inhibin-B (r=-0.333, P=0.028) in LFEG. Furthermore, a significant partial correlation was observed between a chronic exposure index for fluoride and the serum concentrations of inhibin-B (r=-0.163, P=0.037) in HFEG. No abnormalities were found in the semen parameters studied in the present work, neither in the HFEG, nor in the LFEG. The results obtained indicate that a fluoride exposure of 3-27 mg/day induces a subclinical reproductive effect that can be explained by a fluoride-induced toxic effect in both Sertoli cells and gonadotrophs.