The persisting high incidence of peptic ulcer disease is a superimposing of two trends: a higher incidence in the growing population of elderly patient with a higher intake of NSAIDs and a lower incidence among younger patients due to a decrease in incidence and improved medical treatment.
The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of intra-articular injections of autologous conditioned serum on human hip osteoarthritis and to test whether a potential treatment effect might be increased by additional injections of steroids and the recombinant interleukin-1 receptor antagonist protein anakinra. We compared the effects of autologous conditioned serum 46 hip osteoarthritis patients), autologous conditioned serum+cortisone (56 patients), and autologous conditioned serum+cortisone+recombinant interleukin-1 receptor antagonist protein (17 patients) in a retrospective clinical study by means of the Visual Analogue Scale for pain (pre- vs posttreatment). Over 14 months, treatment resulted in a large, statistically significant improvement for patients in all three groups, independent of the severity of osteoarthritis. Neither cortisone nor cortisone+recombinant interleukin-1 receptor antagonist protein increased the beneficial treatment effect over and above the effect of autologous conditioned serum alone. Autologous conditioned serum successfully reduces pain in hip osteoarthritis. In severe hip osteoarthritis, the sole application of autologous conditioned serum can be even more beneficial than the combination of autologous conditioned serum with steroids.
Despite the progress
made in developmental toxicology, there is
a great need for in vitro tests that identify developmental toxicants
in relation to human oral doses and blood concentrations. In the present
study, we established the hiPSC-based UKK2 in vitro test and analyzed
genome-wide expression profiles of 23 known teratogens and 16 non-teratogens.
Compounds were analyzed at the maximal plasma concentration (
C
max
) and at 20-fold
C
max
for a 24 h incubation period in three independent experiments. Based
on the 1000 probe sets with the highest variance and including information
on cytotoxicity, penalized logistic regression with leave-one-out
cross-validation was used to classify the compounds as test-positive
or test-negative, reaching an area under the curve (AUC), accuracy,
sensitivity, and specificity of 0.96, 0.92, 0.96, and 0.88, respectively.
Omitting the cytotoxicity information reduced the test performance
to an AUC of 0.94, an accuracy of 0.79, and a sensitivity of 0.74.
A second method, which used the number of significantly deregulated
probe sets to classify the compounds, resulted in a specificity of
1; however, the AUC (0.90), accuracy (0.90), and sensitivity (0.83)
were inferior compared to those of the logistic regression-based procedure.
Finally, no increased performance was achieved when the high test
concentrations (20-fold
C
max
) were used,
in comparison to testing within the realistic clinical range (1-fold
C
max
). In conclusion, although further optimization
is required, for example, by including additional readouts and cell
systems that model different developmental processes, the UKK2-test
in its present form can support the early discovery-phase detection
of human developmental toxicants.
LLLT shows potential as an effective, noninvasive, safe and cost-efficient means to treat and prevent a variety of acute and chronic musculoskeletal conditions. Further randomized controlled studies, however, are required to confirm this positive assessment.
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