Nontuberculous mycobacterium (NTM) is an infrequent cause of prosthetic knee joint infections. Simultaneous infection with different NTM species in a prosthetic knee joint has not been previously reported. A case of prosthetic knee joint infection caused by Mycobacterium abscessus and M. fortuitum is described in this report. The patient was successfully treated with adequate antibiotics and surgery. The clinical features of sixteen previously reported cases of prosthetic knee joint infection caused by NTM are reviewed.

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Veillonella parvula, an anaerobic, Gram-negative coccus is part of the normal flora of the oral, gastrointestinal, respiratory, and genitourinary tracts in humans and animals. We herein present a case of epidural abscess caused by V. parvula in a 68-year-old man with sinus squamous cell carcinoma who presented with a 3-week history of low back pain. Blood and pus cultures were positive for Veillonella spp. After sequencing of the 16S ribosomal DNA, the pathogen was identified as V. parvula. Surgical debridement was performed following which the patient received intravenous administration of amoxicillin/clavulanate. To our knowledge, there are only seven reported cases of spinal infection caused by Veillonella spp. and these are reviewed here.

Cerebrovascular atherosclerosis has been identified as a prominent pathological feature of Alzheimer’s disease (AD); the link between vessel pathology and AD risk may also extend to extracranial arteries. This study aimed to determine the effectiveness of using arterial pulse-wave measurements and multilayer perceptron (MLP) analysis in distinguishing between AD and control subjects. Radial blood pressure waveform (BPW) and finger photoplethysmography signals were measured noninvasively for 3 min in 87 AD patients and 74 control subjects. The 5-layer MLP algorithm employed evaluated the following 40 harmonic pulse indices: amplitude proportion and its coefficient of variation, and phase angle and its standard deviation. The BPW indices differed significantly between the AD patients (6247 pulses) and control subjects (6626 pulses). Significant intergroup differences were found between mild, moderate, and severe AD (defined by Mini-Mental-State-Examination scores). The hold-out test results indicated an accuracy of 82.86%, a specificity of 92.31%, and a 0.83 AUC of ROC curve when using the MLP-based classification between AD and Control. The identified differences can be partly attributed to AD-induced changes in vascular elastic properties. The present findings may be meaningful in facilitating the development of a noninvasive, rapid, inexpensive, and objective method for detecting and monitoring the AD status.

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