Articles: function.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Efficacy and safety of diacerein and celecoxib combination therapy for knee osteoarthritis: A double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled prospective study.
Osteoarthritis is a degenerative disease with a growing burden in South Korea. Corresponding drugs are commonly used for pain relief and joint function improvement. Specifically, symptomatic slow-acting drugs for osteoarthritis are frequently used, with diacerein being the most common symptomatic slow-acting drugs for osteoarthritis in South Korea. In this study, we evaluated the efficacy and safety of diacerein and celecoxib combination therapy in patients with osteoarthritis. ⋯ Diacerein and celecoxib combination therapy is as safe and effective as corresponding monotherapies. A relatively early improvement in stiffness and physical function following treatment with this combination therapy indicates that physicians should consider this for the early-stage treatment of patients with symptomatic osteoarthritis.
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Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is the most common functional gastrointestinal disorder, characterized by abdominal pain, bloating, and changes in bowel habits. Huoxiang Drink (HD), derived from traditional Chinese medicine, has been reported to effectively treat digestive disorders caused by external cold and internal dampness. However, the pharmaceutical targets and mechanisms for HD against IBS remain unclear. ⋯ Molecular docking results confirmed that MOL000098 (Quercetin), MOL000006 (Luteolin), MOL005828 (Nobiletin), MOL005916 (Irisolidone), and MOL004328 (Naringenin), as key active ingredients in HD, bound to core targets (tumor protein P53, tumor necrosis factor, matrix metalloproteinases 9, and vascular endothelial growth factor-A) for topical treatment of IBS. This study suggested that HD offered a potential therapeutic strategy against IBS. Our findings may facilitate the efficient screening of active ingredients in HD and provide a theoretical basis for further validating the clinical therapeutic effects of HD on treating IBS.
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I-131 radioiodine (RAI) ablation removes postoperative residual tissue and facilitates follow-up in low- and intermediate-risk differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC). Although low doses have been reported to be as effective as higher doses for ablation, the doses administered still vary depending on the patient and the practitioner. We aimed to evaluate the ablation efficiency, complications, and length of stay (LOS) of patients with DTC treated with 3 different doses for ablation. ⋯ A lower rate of change in WBC counts was observed in the 30 to 50 mCi group compared to others. There was no dose-dependent difference regarding the early complaints questioned. Ablation with 30 to 50 mCi provides benefits such as shorter LOS, better patient comfort, less salivary gland dysfunction, and less WBC suppression, thus reducing costs without decreasing efficacy.
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U-Net has attained immense popularity owing to its performance in medical image segmentation. However, it cannot be modeled explicitly over remote dependencies. By contrast, the transformer can effectively capture remote dependencies by leveraging the self-attention (SA) of the encoder. ⋯ Simultaneously, the mixed loss function of the weighted cross-entropy loss and Dice loss is used to alleviate category imbalances and achieve better results when the sample number is unbalanced. We evaluated our proposed method on abdominal multiorgan segmentation and cardiac segmentation datasets, achieving Dice similarity coefficient and 95% Hausdorff distance metrics of 80.30 and 14.55%, respectively, on the Synapse dataset and Dice similarity coefficient metrics of 90.80 on the ACDC dataset. The experimental results show that our proposed method has good generalization ability and robustness, and it is a powerful tool for medical image segmentation.
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The present study aims to validate the methods of quantifying blood loss in arthroscopic rotator cuff repair and to investigate the correlation between blood loss and joint pain and joint function recovery. A total of 38 patients with unilateral rotator cuff injuries who underwent shoulder arthroscopy were analyzed in this study. Related information, including age, gender, blood pressure, body mass index (BMI), disease entity, comorbidity, joint release, and operating time, were collected into a spreadsheet. ⋯ The multivariate linear regression analysis showed that joint release was a potential risk factor for predicting blood loss 1 or 3 days postoperatively. The actual blood loss from shoulder arthroscopy may be underestimated. The joint release was regarded as the leading risk factor for blood loss.