Reviews in Clinical Medicine
Volume:2 Issue: 3, Summer 2015

Human T-cell lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV-1) associated myelopathy/tropical spastic paraparesis is a chronic progressive neurologic disease which might be associated by brain and spinal cord atrophy and lesions. Here we systematically reviewed the brain and spinal cord abnormalities reported by using magnetic resonance imaging modality on HTLV-1 associated myelopathy/tropical spastic paraparesis patients. PubMed was searched for all the relevant articles which used magnetic resonance imaging for patients with human HTLV-1 associated myelopathy/tropical spastic paraparesis disease. Included criteria were all the cohort and case series on with at least 10 patients. We had no time limitation for searched articles, but only English language articles were included in our systematic review. Exclusion criteria were none-English articles, case reports, articles with less than 10 patients, spastic paraparesis patients with unknown etiology, and patients with HTLVII. Total of 14 relevant articles were extracted after studying title, abstracts, and full text of the irrelevant articles. Only 2/14 articles, reported brain atrophy incidence. 5/14 articles studied the brain lesions prevalence. Spinal cord atrophy and lesions, each were studied in 6/14 articles. According to the extracted data, brain atrophy does not seem to happen frequently in patients with HTLV-1 associated myelopathy/tropical spastic paraparesis. None-specific brain lesions identified in articles are indicative of low specificity of magnetic resonance imaging technique despite its high sensitivity. Prevalence of spinal cord lesions and atrophy in these patients might be due to the degenerative processes associated with aging phenomenon. Further larger studies in endemic areas can more accurately reveal the specificity of magnetic resonance imaging for these patients.

Ischemic heart disease is caused mainly by obstruction of coronary arteries. The ischemic assessment through echocardiography is dependent on wall motion abnormality detection during systole. In patients with ischemic heart disease the diastolic function is impaired before systolic function and measurement of regional diastolic dysfunction if possible will be most sensitive for assessment of obstructed coronary artery region. This study was designed to determine whether regional left ventricular delayed relaxation diagnosis could be detected with strain imaging derived from two-dimensional speckle-tracking echocardiography in patients with coronary artery disease. All the articles reviewed were obtained using MEDLINE & ScienceDirect (up to October 2014). All data extracted by speckle tracking echocardiography. The index which is used is strain imaging diastolic index which is calculated as: (A-B) A×100. A is the amount of strain at the time Aortic value closure and B is the amount of strain in first one-third point of diastolic duration. Four articles were reviewed. Three articles assessed patients with echocardiography at rest and one with stress echocardiography. All articles showed the coronary artery tracking with significant stenosis is possible by regional deformation analysis through two-dimensional strain. The usage of strain images obtained through two-dimensional speckle tracking has been validated for the quantitation assessment of regional dysfunction in ischemic heart disease. Regional LV delayed relaxation diagnosis with strain imaging is a reliable method after treadmill stress test. Strain imaging is reasonable for evaluation of ischemia as a low cost noninvasive test with high accuracy.

Mental health disorders are prevalent in children in all societies. The onset of most mental disorders is in youth (12–24 years of age), but most of the time they are first detected later in life. Poor mental health is strongly related to other health and development concerns so it is common to show high grade of stress, substance use, violence, and depression. The effectiveness of some interventions has been strongly established, although more researches are needed to improve the range of affordable and feasible interventions. The shortage of educational and fiscal policies and the fairly low attention to this subject is the main challenge addressing mental-health needs. Therefore, universal or early intervention programs are needed to develop protective factors by increasing competence or skills, to reduce existing negative behaviors. Moreover child discipline problems can be reduced by school multicomponent intervention strategies and as a result promotion in student’s achievement becomes evident.

The management of injured patients is a critical issue in pre-hospital and emergency departments. Trauma victims are usually young and the injuries may lead to mortality or severe morbidities. The severity of injury can be estimated by observing the anatomic and physiologic evidences. Scoring systems are used to present a scale of describing the severity of the injuries in the victims.We reviewed the evidences of famous scoring systems, the history of their development, applications and their evolutions. We searched electronic database PubMed and Google scholar with keywords: (trauma OR injury) AND (severity OR intensity) AND (score OR scale).In this paper, we are going to present a definition of scoring systems and discuss the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) and Injury Severity Score (ISS), the most acceptable systems, their applications and their advantages and limitations.Several injury-scoring methods have been introduced. Each method has specific features, advantages and disadvantages. The AIS is an anatomical-based scoring system, which provides a standard numerical scale of ranking and comparing injuries. The ISS was established as a platform for trauma data registry. ISS is also an anatomically-based ordinal scale, with a range of 1-75. Several databases and studies are formed based on ISS and are available for trauma management research.Although the ISS is not perfect, it is established as the basic platform of health services and public health researches. The ISS registering system can provide many opportunities for the development of efficient data recording and statistical analyzing models.

Breast cancer is one of the most prevalent cancers that oncologists are faced with in their clinics. The varieties of clinical features of the disease result to very different scenarios in the processes of treatment decision making. While classic factors of stage, grade, age and hormone receptor status are still the criterion for choosing treatment, a very delicate list of other prognostic and predictive factors have been entered to this field over recent two decades. The evidence-based medicine rules to treat patients based on the best evidences that have been found by powered randomized clinical trials. Different panels and guidelines gathering these evidences try to help oncologists to find the best treatment methods through the variable and sometimes contradicting results. As it is always the main objective, increasing the survival rates in addition to the ideal aim of curing the disease is usually the target. Finding the best and the most practical chemotherapy regimen against breast cancer needs to notice the biology of this disease and its varieties along with each individual patient condition. It is clear that not all patients need the most complicated and expensive treatment.

Pre-gestational diabetes mellitus affects less than 1% of all pregnancies and is a significant cause of fetal morbidity and mortality. It is hypothesized that impaired placental function, in the form of abnormal placental weight and/or abnormal placental histology, may be responsible for this event in such pregnancies. Delayed villous maturation of placental villi, which is one of the findings associated with pre-gestational diabetes increases the rate of perinatal mortality. There is limited literature regarding the delayed maturation of placental villous. This review included trials (randomized and non-randomized), cohort and case-control studies registered in Medline/PubMed database, from January 2001 to September 2012 that evaluated the clinical significance of delayed villous maturation and its prevalence in pre-gestational diabetic cases compared to normal pregnancies.It emphasizes that further studies with focus on possible clinical or ultrasound markers of placental delayed villous maturation, especially in a high risk-group such as women with pre-gestational diabetes mellitus are highly recommended.

Cancer is a worldwide problem that is caused by a variety of different factors increasing over a number of years. Oral cancer is a very prevalent disease and one of the most 10 common causes of death. It is important that the risk factors can be controlled. Selecting the correct health behaviors and preventing exposure to convinced environmental risk factors can help to prevent the expansion of cancer. Scientists guess that as many as 30-40 percent of all cancer-related deaths are caused by human behaviors such as smoking, consumption of alcohol, poor diet quality and physical inactivity. This result explains the tendency in the following behaviors that can influence the possibility of getting cancer, especially oral cancer in addition to providing information and classes about healthy eating habits and a subsequent healthy lifestyle at home. In fact, a diet rich in fresh fruits, whole grains and vegetables can decrease the risk of the oral cancer because of certain compounds such as vitamin C, E, carotenoids and lycopene. Moreover, limit consumption of meat, particularly processed meat, and replace it with vegetable proteins and fish (rich of omega 3) are helpful and effective.

Heroin has physical effects on many parts of the body, for example, respiratory and digestive system, muscles, and nervous system. Neurologic complications include brain abscess, neuropathy, transverse myelitis, and leukoencephalopathy.Magnetic resonance image is more sensitive in detecting lesions with low signal on T1W and high signal on T2W, and FLAIR images in the white matter and other areas of brain. Imaging findings are similar to other leukoencephalopathies (hereditary diseases, abnormal metabolic diseases, and intoxications).In the course of finding ways to differentiate heroin-induced spongiform leukoencephalopathy from other leukoencephalopathies, attention has been changed to diffusion magnetic resonance imaging in recent years.Nevertheless, studies do not verify that diffusion-weighted image is a valuable tool in establishing the diagnosis.

Due to the important role of thyroid disorders on reproductive health of the women of childbearing age, pregnancy outcome, fetal health, and neurodevelopment of the infant, providing comprehensive assessment of the treatments used for preventing hyperthyroidism and hypothyroidism seems to be essential. Therefore, evaluating the efficacy of different treatments of the thyroid disorders would be beneficial in better managing and controlling the disease during pregnancy. Hypothyroidism (a deficiency of thyroid hormone) is a common thyroid disorder, which might increase the incidence rate of miscarriage, pre-eclampsia, placental abruption, and preterm delivery. Hyperthyroidism, which is not a common disorder during the pregnancy not only leads to similar adverse effects as hypothyroidism but also can result in stillbirth and intrauterine growth restriction. Levothyroxine is the preferred treatment of hypothyroidism and the only drug therapy recommended for treating hyperthyroidism during pregnancy. In this study, we aimed to briefly review the adverse effects of hyperthyroidism and hypothyroidism during pregnancy and review the effects of recent suggested treatments for controlling thyroid disorders on pregnancy outcomes.

Morphine is one of the most potent alkaloid in opium, which has substantial medical uses and needs and it is the first active principle purified from herbal source. Morphine has commonly been used for relief of moderate to severe pain as it acts directly on the central nervous system; nonetheless, its chronic abuse increases tolerance and physical dependence, which is commonly known as opiate addiction. Morphine withdrawal syndrome is physiological and behavioral symptoms that stem from prolonged exposure to morphine. A majority of brain regions are hypofunctional over prolonged abstinence and acute morphine withdrawal. Furthermore, several neural mechanisms are likely to contribute to morphine withdrawal. The present review summarizes the literature pertaining to neural mechanisms underlying morphine withdrawal. Despite the fact that morphine withdrawal is a complex process, it is suggested that neural mechanisms play key roles in morphine withdrawal.

Central venous line is one of a creative instrument that saves human’s life in critical medical situation. Central venous line access is frequently involved in the disease management. It is used for rapid fluid therapy, transvenous pacemakers, infusion of some medications, hemodialysis or plasmapheresis and etc. Most of the emergency departments have some staffs that are trained for central venous line insertion but related complications occur during central venous line placement.Central venous line might have some complications and complication follow-up should be considered. Thromboembolism and infection are two important medical complications. Arterial puncture, hematoma, pneumothorax and hemothorax are mechanical Central venous line complications. Chest X-ray and some other techniques should be used for detecting these complications.Central venous line tip misplace is a considerable problem for emergency department staffs, previously chest X-ray has been used for central venous line misplace detection. In some recent studies, contrast-enhanced ultrasonography and intravascular electrocardiography have been used for central venous line misplace.

Renal transplantation was considered as an efficient and ideal method for end stage renal disease treatment of the patients, by accomplishment of the first successful transplantation in 1954 (Boston USA). Renal transplantation has transmuted the treatment of choice in end stage renal disease, along with prolonging survival; it offers high quality with low morbidity. Imaging modalities play an important role in the diagnosis of complications arising in renal transplant. Color Doppler ultrasound is the first-line imaging modality for evaluation of renal graft. Computed tomography scan in parallel with magnetic resonance imaging and digital subtraction angiography are used as problem-solving tools in indetermination of cases. Interventional radiology such as transluminal angioplasty has an important role in management of complications. Use of real time ultrasound guidance for percutaneous biopsy is almost universal.