Chest
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Strong evidence exists for clinically relevant night-to-night variability of respiratory events in patients with suspected OSA. ⋯ One single night of in-hospital RP may miss relevant OSA. Multiple study nights, for example, using ambulatory oxygen saturation monitoring, increase accuracy for diagnosing moderate OSA.
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Whether eosinophilic pneumonitis represents a true manifestation of e-cigarette, or vaping, product use-associated lung injury remains uncertain, and this ambiguity stems from a lack of histopathological data. We present a previously healthy young woman whose asthma-like symptoms and histopathologic finding of eosinophilic pneumonitis were caused by inhalation of vaporized cannabis hash oil concentrates. This report provides compelling evidence that eosinophilic pneumonitis can result from cannabis hash oil inhalation.
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Cough is a defense mechanism that protects the airways and lungs in response to airway irritation. The sensory neurons involved in detecting airway irritants and the neural pathways mediating cough share similarities with those that encode pain from the body. Painful conditioning stimuli applied to one body site are known to reduce the perception of pain at another. However, whether the neural regulation of cough is influenced by painful stimuli is not known. ⋯ Pain-related decreases of cough and UTC are accompanied by widespread changes in brain activity during capsaicin inhalation, suggesting that pain can modify the central processing of inputs arising from the airways. A mechanistic understanding of how cough and pain processing interact within the brain may help develop more effective therapies to reduce unwanted coughing.
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Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a progressive disease for which two antifibrotic drugs recently were approved. However, an unmet need exists to predict responses to antifibrotic treatment, such as pirfenidone. Recent data suggest that upregulated expression of CXCR4 is indicative of outcomes in IPF. ⋯ CXCR4-targeted PET imaging identified disease activity and predicted outcome of IPF patients treated with pirfenidone. It may serve as a future biomarker for personalized guidance of antifibrotic treatment.
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A 40-year-old woman presented with recurrent syncope. She reported multiple (>20) episodes of non-prodromal loss of consciousness, periodically provoked by physical exertion. One episode resulted in a nasal fracture due to the abrupt nature of her syncope. ⋯ Initial workup, including complete blood count, comprehensive metabolic panel, cardiac enzymes, and ECG yielded normal results. The chest radiograph did not show any gross cardiac or pulmonary parenchymal pathologic condition (Fig 1). Telemetry did not demonstrate any malignant arrhythmias, and video-guided EEG did not document any seizure activity.