Articles: chronic.
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Rupture of the Achilles tendon is a significant injury, and the likelihood of a good recovery is directly associated with early diagnosis and appropriate referral. Such injuries are commonly assessed and identified by practitioners working in 'minors' areas of emergency departments or urgent care settings. ⋯ However, research suggests that injuries in this patient population are more likely be missed on first examination. This article describes risk factors that should alert clinicians to the possibility of Achilles tendon rupture in 'atypical' patient populations.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Pentraxin-3 as a marker of disease severity and risk of death in patients with necrotizing soft tissue infections: a nationwide, prospective, observational study.
New biomarkers are needed to assess the severity of necrotizing soft tissue infection (NSTI) at an early stage and to individualize treatment strategies. We assessed pentraxin-3 (PTX3) as a marker of disease severity and risk of death in patients with NSTI. ⋯ High PTX3 level is associated with septic shock, amputation and risk of death in patients with NSTI, but it is not an independent predictor of 180-day mortality in this patient group.
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Stress hyperglycaemia (SHG) is a common complication in sepsis associated with poor outcome. Chemerin is an adipocytokine associated with inflammation and impaired glucose homeostasis in metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes (T2D). We aimed to investigate how alterations of circulating chemerin levels and corresponding visceral adipose tissue (VAT) expression are linked to glucose metabolism and prognosis in sepsis. ⋯ We show, for the first time to our knowledge, that chemerin is increased in sepsis and that it associates with impaired glucose metabolism and survival in these patients. It could be further evaluated as a biomarker to stratify mortality risk of patients with SHG.
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Anesthesia and analgesia · Feb 2016
Randomized Controlled TrialIntraoperative Noise Increases Perceived Task Load and Fatigue in Anesthesiology Residents: A Simulation-Based Study.
Operating rooms are identified as being one of the noisiest of clinical environments, and intraoperative noise is associated with adverse effects on staff and patient safety. Simulation-based experiments would offer controllable and safe venues for investigating this noise problem. However, realistic simulation of the clinical auditory environment is rare in current simulators. Therefore, we retrofitted our operating room simulator to be able to produce immersive auditory simulations with the use of typical sound sources encountered during surgeries. Then, we tested the hypothesis that anesthesia residents would perceive greater task load and fatigue while being given simulated lunch breaks in noisy environments rather than in quiet ones. As a secondary objective, we proposed and tested the plausibility of a novel psychometric instrument for the assessment of stress. ⋯ This study provides evidence that noise during surgery can increase feelings of stress, as measured by perceived task load and fatigue levels, in anesthesiologists and adds to the growing literature pointing to an overall adverse impact of clinical noise on caregivers and patient safety. The psychometric model proposed in this study for assessing perceived stress is plausible based on factor analysis and will be useful for characterizing the impact of the clinical environment on subject stress levels in future investigations.
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Accumulating evidence suggests an association between patient pretreatment expectations and numerous health outcomes. However, it remains unclear if and how expectations relate to outcomes after treatments in multidisciplinary pain programs. The present study aims at investigating the predictive association between expectations and clinical outcomes in a large database of chronic pain patients. ⋯ Similar patterns of relationships between variables were also observed in various subgroups of patients based on sex, age, pain duration, and pain classification. Such results emphasize the relevance of patient expectations as a determinant of outcomes in multimodal pain treatment programs. Furthermore, the results suggest that superior clinical outcomes are observed in individuals who expect high positive outcomes as a result of treatment.