Impaired gastric accommodation in patients with postprandial distress syndrome type of functional dyspepsia assessed by 2D ultrasonography.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: The pathophysiology of postprandial distress syndrome includes impaired gastric accommodation, hypersensitivity to gastric distension and delayed gastric emptying. 2D-ultrasonography is one of the methods to assess gastric accommodation by measuring proximal gastric area and we evaluated its role in calculating proximal gastric area and thus assessing gastric accommodation in Indian patients with postprandial distress syndrome. METHODS: In a hospital-based comparative analysis, proximal gastric area was measured with 2D-ultrasonography of postprandial distress syndrome (PDS) patients and compared with healthy controls. Five readings were measured every five minutes till 25 minutes after 400 mL of vegetable soup. The Patient Assessment of Upper Gastrointestinal Disorders-Quality of Life (PAGI-QOL score) and diets aggravating PDS symptoms were studied through detailed questionnaires. Sample size was calculated at 80% study power and alpha error of 0.05 to be 30 subjects in each group. RESULTS: The mean age of patients (18 males) vs. 30 healthy controls (25 males) was 40.8 ± 11.50 years vs. 36.37 ± 7.58, respectively, (p = 0.084). Proximal gastric area was significantly lower in patients versus healthy controls at five minutes (22.54 ± 2.77 vs. 30.66 ± 2.55 cm2), 10 minutes (23.03 ± 2.45 vs. 31.10 ± 2.06 cm2), 15 minutes (23.06 ± 2.27 vs. 30.31 ± 2.11 cm2), 20 minutes (22.21 ± 2.31 vs. 29.73 ± 1.71 cm2) and 25 minutes (22.02 ± 2.33 vs. 28.39 ± 1.55 cm2); p < 0.001 at all intervals of time, indicating impaired gastric accommodation. The QOL was poor in all patients with PDS with mean PAGI-QOL score of 31.30 ± 15.05, median of 30, minimum score of 12 and maximum score of 66. CONCLUSIONS: Measurement of proximal gastric area with 2D-ultrasonography is simple and non-invasive. Proximal gastric area in patients was lower than controls, indicating impaired gastric accommodation. Poor quality of life was universal in patients with postprandial distress syndrome.

Surface plasmon resonance based spectrophotometric determination of medicinally important thiol compounds using unmodified silver nanoparticles.

The determination of thiol based biological molecules and drugs, such as cysteine (Cys) (I), α-lipoic acid (II), and sodium 2-sulfanylethane sulphonate (Mesna (III)) in human plasma are becoming progressively more important due to the growing body of knowledge about their essential role in numerous biological pathways. Herein we demonstrate a sensitive colorimetric sensor for the determination of medicinally important thiol drugs based on aggregation of the citrate capped silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs). This approach exploited the high affinity of thiols towards the Ag NPs surface which could tempt replacement of the citrate shell by the thiolate shell of target molecules, resulting in aggregation of the NPs through intermolecular electrostatic interaction or hydrogen-bonding. Because of aggregation, the plasmon band at around 400nm decreases gradually, along with the appearance of a new band connoting a red shift. The calibration curves are derived from the intensity ratios of A530/A400, which display a linear relation in the range of 1µM-150µM, 5µM-200µM and 10µM-130µM, respectively. The obtained detection limits (3σ) were found to be 1.5µM, 5.6µM and 10.2µM for compound I-III, respectively. The proposed method has been successfully applied for the detection of thiol compounds in real samples.