Positron emission tomography (PET) combined with computed tomography (CT) is an established diagnostic modality that has become an essential imaging tool in oncological practice. However, thanks to its noninvasive nature and its capability to provide physiological information, the main applications of this technique have significantly expanded.
18F-labelled fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) is the most commonly used radiopharmaceutical for PET scanning and demonstrates metabolic activity in various tissues. Since activated inflammatory cells, like malignant cells, predominantly metabolise glucose as a source of energy and increase expression of glucose transporters when activated, FDG-PET/CT can be successfully used to detect and monitor a variety of lung diseases, such as infections and several inflammatory conditions.The added value of FDG-PET/CT as a molecular imaging technique relies on its capability to identify disease in very early stages, long before the appearance of structural changes detectable by conventional imaging. Furthermore, by detecting the active phase of infectious or inflammatory processes, disease progression and treatment efficacy can be monitored. This review will focus on the clinical use of FDG-PET/CT in nonmalignant pulmonary diseases. @ERSpublications PET/CT is an imaging modality that could play a role in evaluation of inflammatory and infectious lung diseases
Normalization of blood glucose metabolism and improvement of blood pressure control obtained with KP transplant is associated with positive effects on survival, cardiovascular death rate, and left ventricular function.
This paper studies the relationship between medical compliance and health outcomeshospitalization and mortality rates -using a large panel of patients residing in a local health authority in Italy. These data allow us to follow individual patients through all their accesses to public health care services until they either die or leave the local health authority. We adopt a disease specific approach, concentrating on hypertensive patients treated with ACE-inhibitors. Our results show that medical compliance has a clear effect on both hospitalization and mortality rates: health outcomes clearly improve when patients become more compliant to drug therapy. At the same time, we are able to infer valuable information on the role that drug co-payment can have on compliance, and as a consequence on health outcomes, by exploiting the presence of two natural experiments during the period of analysis. Our results show that drug co-payment has a strong effect on compliance, and that this effect is immediate. * Financial support from Pfizer is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Alessandro Chinellato and Giulio Nati for many valuable comments and ideas regarding the clinical aspects of the research involved. We also thank Anne
RESULTS -The left ventricular ejection fraction was normal in all of the patients. However, kidney-pancreas transplant patients with 4 years of graft function had a higher ejection fraction (75.7 ± 1.8%) than kidney-alone patients with 4 years of graft function (65.3 ± 2.8%, P = 0.02) and type 1 diabetic patients (61.3 ± 3.7%, P = 0.004). In patients with 4 years of graft function, normal diastolic parameters were evident in kidney-pancreas but not in kidney-alone or in type 1 diabetic patients (peak filling rate: 4.46 ± 0.15 end diastolic volume (EDV)/s in kidney-pancreas patients vs. 2.73 ± 0.24 EDV/s [P Ͻ 0.01] and 3.39 ± 0.30 EDV/s [P Ͻ 0.01] in kidney-alone and type 1 diabetic patients, respectively; time-to-peak filling rate: 141.9 ± 7.8 ms in kidney-alone patients vs. 209.4 ± 13.5 ms in kidney-alone patients [P Ͻ 0.01]; peak filling rate/peak ejection rate ratio: 1.10 ± 0.04 in kidney-pancreas patients vs. 0.81 ± 0.08 in kidneyalone patients [P Ͻ 0.01]). A significant reduction in diastolic dysfunction rate was observed only in kidney-pancreas patients.CONCLUSIONS -Kidney-pancreas transplantation results in complete insulin independence, a better glycometabolic pattern and blood pressure control, an improvement of left ventricular function, and a reversal of diastolic dysfunction. E m e r g i n g T r e a t m e n t s a n d T e c h n o l o g i e s
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