RESUMEN
In this report, we describe a case of a 61-year-old male patient who had the bacterium Dolosigranulum pigrum growing in a blood culture. It was susceptible to ampicillin, ceftriaxone, levofloxacin, and vancomycin but was intermediately resistant to erythromycin. The patient did not have a negative outcome as a consequence of this bacterium, which retrospectively could have been predicted based on the epidemiological data within the patient's profile.
RESUMEN
Small cell variant of medullary thyroid carcinoma is an extremely rare histologic entity with a paucity of data. As such, there is a lack of literature and clinical experience regarding this disease. In this report, we examine a case of small cell variant of medullary thyroid carcinoma that presented with intractable nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. While these symptoms were essentially refractory to the standard symptomatic treatment, further laboratory analysis revealed dramatically elevated calcitonin levels and mildly raised thyroid-stimulating hormone levels. Interestingly, repletion of thyroid hormone and treatment with lanreotide resulted in an abatement of our patient's symptoms. This temporal clinical improvement highly suggests a potential role involving thyroid-stimulating hormone and calcitonin levels in the pathogenesis of this disease, and consequently suggests a role for thyroxine in treating the associated gastrointestinal symptoms.
RESUMEN
Human dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) manifests as a profound reduction in biventricular cardiac function that typically progresses to death or cardiac transplantation. There is no effective mechanism-based therapy currently available for DCM, in part because the transduction of mechanical load into dynamic changes in cardiac contractility (termed mechanotransduction) remains an incompletely understood process during both normal cardiac function and in disease states. Here we show that the mechanoreceptor protein integrin-linked kinase (ILK) mediates cardiomyocyte force transduction through regulation of the key calcium regulatory protein sarcoplasmic/endoplasmic reticulum Ca(2+)ATPase isoform 2a (SERCA-2a) and phosphorylation of phospholamban (PLN) in the human heart. A non-oncogenic ILK mutation with a synthetic point mutation in the pleckstrin homology-like domain (ILK(R211A)) is shown to enhance global cardiac function through SERCA-2a/PLN. Thus, ILK serves to link mechanoreception to the dynamic modulation of cardiac contractility through a previously undiscovered interaction with the functional SERCA-2a/PLN module that can be exploited to rescue impaired mechanotransduction in DCM.
