Quantification of Plasma Cell-Free Circulating DNA at Different Stages of Colorectal Cancer.

Cell-free circulating DNAs (cfcDNAs) have been recognized as promising biomarkers for a number of cancers. This study aimed to quantify the cfcDNA in colorectal cancer to assess its potential value as biomarker. Quantification of baseline cfcDNA was determined as the amount of free glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH) in plasma, using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The calculated area under the curve (AUC) of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) for cfcDNA was 0.875 (95% CI, 0.811-0.94), which was indicative of a high discriminatory power (p < 0.001) and significant accuracy in distinguishing cancer patients from healthy individuals. The quantification of cfcDNA could be useful for clinical settings of CRC.

Efficacy of Probiotic Escherichia coli Nissle 1917 in Patients with Irritable Bowel Syndrome: a Double Blind Placebo-controlled Randomized Trial.

AIM: to evaluate potential improvement effect for probiotic E. coliNissle 1917 in the management of refractory IBS in an Iranian population. METHODS: a double blind placebo controlled approach has been used in the current clinical trial. 139 confirmed IBS patients were included into the study, and were given probiotic E.coli Nissle 1917 for 6 weeks. 11 items Birmingham IBS Symptom Questionnairehas been used for evaluation of changes in the symptoms every 2 weeks. RESULTS: sixty eight subjects (49%) were males. Mean±SD age of the participants was 38±13.3 years. 49(35.3%) of the patients were diarrhea-predominant. The total scores showed no significant difference between the intervention vs. control group(-6.7±6.8 vs. -6.7±6.5, respectively; p=0.95); neither did any of the questionnaire items any significant alterations in the two groups. After stratification of patients based on their IBS type, diarrhea-predominant patients showed a positive response to the probiotic improving their sleep (p=0.05 and 0.03 at weeks 2 and 6, respectively). Patients with constipation-predominant IBS showed no response to the probiotic; while patients with diarrhea-constipation mixed IBS showed unfavorable response to the probiotic in the need for strain to pass a motion compared to the placebo (p=0.03 and 0.02 at weeks 4 and 6, respectively). CONCLUSION: probiotic therapy with E.coli Nissle 1917 was not able to induce significant improvement in the symptoms of patients with non-categorized IBS. Nevertheless, when IBS patients were recategorized to subgroups according to their main symptoms, evaluation of the efficacy of the probiotic on some individual items in the symptom list reached the significance level. Prospective clinical trials are recommended to confirm our findings.

Observer-based output feedback control design for a fractional ODE and a fractional PDE cascaded system.

This paper considers a new bi-directional cascaded system of a fractional ordinary differential equation (FODE) and a fractional partial differential equation (FPDE) which interacts at an intermediate point. The space-dependent coefficients, interaction between the FODE and FPDE at an intermediate point and the presence of fractional calculus makes the FODE-FPDE cascaded system, representative. In this note, we first apply an invertible integral transformation to convert the system into a FODE-FPDE coupled system, as the target system, which is Mittag-Leffler stable. Using the backstepping method and under some assumptions of the space-dependent coefficients, we work out the kernel functions in the transformation and we design a boundary controller. Also, by the invertibility of the transformation, we show the Mittag-Leffler stability of the closed-loop system via the Lyapunov approach. Second, we propose an observer for which we prove that it can well estimate the original cascaded system. Then, we design an output feedback boundary control law and show that the closed-loop system is Mittag-Leffler stable under the designed output feedback control law. Finally, we present some numerical illustrations to show the correctness of the theoretical results.