Influence of Basic Life Support on Donor Organs in Uncontrolled Donors After Cardiac Death.

BACKGROUND: The aim of this study was to determine whether the application of basic life support (BLS) in patients who have experienced cardiac arrest and are subsequently referred to as uncontrolled asystole donors has any influence on the achievement of organs for subsequent transplantation. METHODS: Demographic data, BLS, cause of death, emergency response times, and organ donations were collected. The analysis of quantitative variables following normal distribution is shown as mean (SD), and Student t distribution was used for comparison purposes. The analysis of variables that did not follow the normal distribution is shown as median (IQR), and Wilcoxon test was applied for comparison purposes. RESULTS: A total of 91 cases of possible uncontrolled donor transfers were analyzed. Basic life support was provided to 61 patients (67.7%), whereas no BLS was provided to 27 patients (23.3%). Of the group that received BLS, 39 (73.6%) were effective donors compared with the non-BLS group, in which 22 (62.9%) were effective donors (P = .28). CONCLUSIONS: We did not find an association between performing BLS compared with non-BLS and organ donation.

Poppers maculopathy: A quantitative review of previous literature.

AIM: To review the available literature on poppers maculopathy (PM). MATERIAL AND METHODS: Sixty-four patients (60 with bilateral and 4 with unilateral involvement), for a total of 124 eyes were reported in PubMed, Google Scholar and Embase. Patterns were analyzed according to country, age, gender, sexual orientation, HIV status, consumption habits, visual acuity at presentation (VAP), final visual acuity (VAF) and optical coherence tomography (OCT). RESULTS: Most cases (110 eyes) of PM were reported in European countries and affected middle-aged men (only 8 eyes from female users). The median age was 38.7 years (SD = 10.5 years). Final visual acuity (Median = 0.8; Interquartile range: 0.67-1) was higher than visual acuity at presentation (Median = 0.67; Interquartile range: 0.4-0.8). Many articles lack data on sexual orientation and HIV status as this is considered very personal information. One third of the eyes (40 eyes) developed PM after a single exposure. No significant differences were found between eyes that developed PM after a single exposure and those which developed the condition after several exposures. The most commonly reported pattern was an interruption of the ellipsoid line (68 eyes). CONCLUSION: PM is more prevalent in Europe or European ophthalmologists are more likely to diagnose PM. PM usually affects middle-aged men given that this condition generally appears with chronic exposure to poppers. VAF was higher than VAP, suggesting that this toxicity is in part reversible. Information about HIV status was not provided in most recent articles, thus it is not possible to make inferences about the possible implication of HIV drugs as cofactors for the development of this retinal toxicity.

Open-source discovery of chemical leads for next-generation chemoprotective antimalarials.

To discover leads for next-generation chemoprotective antimalarial drugs, we tested more than 500,000 compounds for their ability to inhibit liver-stage development of luciferase-expressing Plasmodium spp. parasites (681 compounds showed a half-maximal inhibitory concentration of less than 1 micromolar). Cluster analysis identified potent and previously unreported scaffold families as well as other series previously associated with chemoprophylaxis. Further testing through multiple phenotypic assays that predict stage-specific and multispecies antimalarial activity distinguished compound classes that are likely to provide symptomatic relief by reducing asexual blood-stage parasitemia from those which are likely to only prevent malaria. Target identification by using functional assays, in vitro evolution, or metabolic profiling revealed 58 mitochondrial inhibitors but also many chemotypes possibly with previously unidentified mechanisms of action.