Peritoneal dialysis (PD) is a treatment modality for end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients. Dextrose is a common osmotic agent used in PD solutions and its absorption may exacerbate diabetes mellitus, a common complication of ESRD. PD solutions also contain glucose degradation products (GDPs) that may lead to encapsulating peritoneal sclerosis (EPS), a severe complication of PD. A previous study showed that far-infrared (FIR) therapy improved a patient’s gastrointestinal symptoms due to EPS. Due to limited literature on the matter, this study aims to investigate dialysate GDPs and peritoneal function in diabetic patients on PD. Thirty-one PD patients were enrolled and underwent 40 min of FIR therapy twice daily for six months. We demonstrated the effect of FIR therapy on the following: (1) decrease of methylglyoxal (p = 0.02), furfural (p = 0.005), and 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (p = 0.03), (2) increase of D/D0 glucose ratio (p = 0.03), and (3) decrease of potassium levels (p = 0.008) in both DM and non-DM patients, as well as (4) maintenance and increase of peritoneal Kt/V in DM and non-DM patients, respectively (p = 0.03). FIR therapy is a non-invasive intervention that can decrease dialysate GDPs in PD patients by improving peritoneal transport rate and solute removal clearance, while also maintaining dialysis adequacy.
IntroductionSpindle cell oncocytoma (SCO) of the pituitary gland is increasingly established with improvements in histological and immunohistochemical examination. However, the diagnosis was often mistaken based on imaging studies and nonspecific clinical manifestations.PurposeThis case is presented to provide an overview of the characteristics of the rare tumor as well as to demonstrate the difficulties in diagnosis and current treatments.Clinical discussionThe pathogenesis of SCO remains unclear, and a possible origin was described. Further research is needed to optimize pre-operative diagnosis and surgical strategy.ConclusionSCO should be considered when images indicate some features. Gross total resection (GTR) after surgery seems to have better long-term tumor control, and radiotherapy may help decrease tumor progression in patients with non-GTR. Regular follow-up is advised because of the higher recurrence rate.
This study proposes a concept extraction and clustering method, which
improves Topic Keyword Clustering by using Log Likelihood Ratio for semantic
correlation and Bisection K-Means for document clustering. Two value-added
services are proposed to show how this approach can benefit information
retrieval (IR) systems. The first service focuses on the organization and
visual presentation of search results by clustering and bibliographic
coupling. The second one aims at constructing virtual research communities
and recommending significant papers to researchers. In addition to the two
services, this study conducts quantitative and qualitative evaluations to
show the feasibility of the proposed method; moreover, comparison with the
previous approach is also performed. The experimental results show that the
accuracy of the proposed method for search result organization reaches 80%,
outperforming Topic Keyword Clustering. Both the precision and recall of
virtual community construction are higher than 70%, and the accuracy of paper
recommendation is almost 90%.
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