RESUMO
BACKGROUND: Ultrasound-guided thermal ablation (TA) has emerged as a robust therapeutic approach for treating solid tumors in multiple organs, including the thyroid. Yet, its efficacy and safety profile in the management of Graves' Disease (GD) remains to be definitively established. METHODS: A retrospective study was conducted on 50 GD patients treated with TA between October 2017 and December 2021. Key metrics like thyroid volume, volume reduction rate (VRR), thyroid hormones, and basal metabolic rate (BMR) were evaluated using paired Wilcoxon tests. RESULTS: The intervention of ultrasound-guided TA yielded a statistically significant diminution in total thyroid volume across all postoperative follow-up intervals-1, 3, 6, and 12 months-relative to pre-intervention baselines (p < 0.001). The median VRR observed at these time points were 17.5%, 26.5%, 34.4%, and 39.8%, respectively. Euthyroid status was corroborated in 96% of patients at the one-year follow-up milestone. Transient tachycardia and dysphonia were observed in three patients, while a solitary case of skin numbness was noted. Crucially, no instances of enduring injury to the recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) were documented. CONCLUSIONS: Our investigation substantiates ultrasound-guided TA as a pragmatic, well-tolerated, and safe therapeutic modality for GD. It effectively improves symptoms of hyperthyroidism, engenders a substantial reduction in thyroid volume, and restores thyroid hormone and BMR to physiological levels. Given its favorable safety profile, enhanced cosmetic outcomes, and minimally invasive nature, ultrasound-guided TA is a compelling alternative to thyroidectomy for GD patients.
RESUMO
MicroRNA-21 (miRNA-21) is a kind of RNA that exists in biological fluids such as blood, urine and saliva. It has over expression in liver cancer and has different expression in different stages of cancer. However, due to the characteristics of small base number, short length, low abundance and easy degradation of miRNA-21, the detection of miRNA-21 is a challenging subject. Visualization, sensitive, specific and stable detection of tumor suppressor or oncogene microRNAs (miRNAs) remains challenging and is highly significant for clinical diagnostics. To solve this problem, we have developed a target-triggered hybridization assembly DNA machine for intracellular miRNA imaging based on strand displacement amplification (SDA) and branched hybridization chain reaction (B-HCR). In this approach, the target miRNA could hybridize with the template probe to trigger the SDA, resulting in the formation of nicked fragments (NFs) that hybridized with hairpin probe1 (HP1). The opened HP1 could hybridize with hairpin probe2 (HP2), leading to the self-assembly of hyperbranched DNA nanostructures through B-HCR. As expected, the newly developed method exhibits a detection limit down to 11.3 pM miRNA-21 and achieves high selectivity toward miRNA-21 against other interfering miRNAs. Due to its superior sensitivity and selectivity, our method can be further used to detect miRNA-21 in human serum samples. By taking advantage of intelligent design, the proposed method was also used for image miRNA-21 expression levels in different cell lines. This method shows a broad application in clinical diagnosis.