Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Autologous Haematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation And Systemic Sclerosis: Focus On Interstitial Lung Disease, Gianluca Bagnato, Antonio Giovanni Versace, Daniela La Rosa, Alberta De Gaetano, Egidio Imbalzano, Marianna Chiappalone, Carmelo Ioppolo, William Neal Roberts, Alessandra Bitto, Natasha Irrera, Alessandro Allegra, Giovanni Pioggia, Sebastiano Gangemi

Internal Medicine Faculty Publications

Autologous hematopoietic stem cells transplantation (AHSCT) has been employed as treatment for severe systemic sclerosis (SSc) with high risk of organ failure. In the last 25 years overall survival and treatment-related mortality have improved, in accordance with a better patient selection and mobilization and conditioning protocols. This review analyzes the evidence from the last 5 years for AHSCT-treated SSc patients, considering in particular the outcomes related to interstitial lung disease. There are increasing data supporting the use of AHSCT in selected patients with rapidly progressive SSc. However, some unmet needs remain, such as an accurate patient selection, pre-transplantation analysis to …

Management Of Infective Endocarditis In Pregnancy By A Multidisciplinary Team: A Case Series, Kayle S. Shapero, Varidhi Nauriyal, Christina Megli, Kathryn Berlacher, Sami El-Dalati

Internal Medicine Faculty Publications

Introduction: The incidence of infective endocarditis (IE) in pregnancy is rare and has been increasing during the opioid epidemic. IE in pregnancy is associated with high rates of maternal and fetal morbidity and mortality. Multidisciplinary endocarditis teams for management of IE have been shown to reduce in-hospital and 1-year mortality. We present a single-center experience managing IE in pregnancy utilizing a multidisciplinary endocarditis team.

Methods: Patients diagnosed with IE while pregnant or within 30 days post-partum were identified. All patients discussed at the institution's weekly multidisciplinary endocarditis meeting were included. Demographic and clinical data and outcome-related variables were retrospectively reviewed …

Emerging Evidence And Treatment Perspectives From Randomized Clinical Trials In Systemic Sclerosis: Focus On Interstitial Lung Disease, Caterina Oriana Aragona, Antonio Giovanni Versace, Carmelo Ioppolo, Daniela La Rosa, Rita Lauro, Maria Concetta Tringali, Simona Tomeo, Guido Ferlazzo, William Neal Roberts, Alessandra Bitto, Natasha Irrera, Gianluca Bagnato

Internal Medicine Faculty Publications

Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is a complex rare autoimmune disease with heterogeneous clinical manifestations. Currently, interstitial lung disease (ILD) and cardiac involvement (including pulmonary arterial hypertension) are recognized as the leading causes of SSc-associated mortality. New molecular targets have been discovered and phase II and phase III clinical trials published in the last 5 years on SSc-ILD will be discussed in this review. Details on the study design; the drug tested and its dose; the inclusion and exclusion criteria of the study; the concomitant immunosuppression; the outcomes and the duration of the study were reviewed. The two most common drugs used …

Recent Advances In Probiotic Application In Animal Health And Nutrition: A Review, Sarayu Bhogoju, Samuel Nahashon

Internal Medicine Faculty Publications

Biotechnological advances in animal health and nutrition continue to play a significant role in the improvement of animal health, growth, and production performance. These biotechnological advancements, especially the use of direct-fed microbials, also termed probiotics, those genetically modified and otherwise, have minimized many challenges facing livestock production around the world. Such advancements result in healthy animals and animal products, such as meat, for a growing population worldwide. Increasing demand for productivity, healthy animals, and consumer food safety concerns, especially those emanating from excessive use of antibiotics or growth promoters, are a driving force for investing in safer alternatives, such as …

Tracking Sentiments Toward Fat Acceptance Over A Decade On Twitter, Sadie Bograd, Benjamin Chen, Ramakanth Kavuluru

Internal Medicine Faculty Publications

The fat acceptance (FA) movement aims to counteract weight stigma and discrimination against individuals who are overweight/obese. We developed a supervised neural network model to classify sentiment toward the FA movement in tweets and identify links between FA sentiment and various Twitter user characteristics. We collected any tweet containing either “fat acceptance” or “#fatacceptance” from 2010–2019 and obtained 48,974 unique tweets. We independently labeled 2000 of them and implemented/trained an Average stochastic gradient descent Weight-Dropped Long Short-Term Memory (AWD-LSTM) neural network that incorporates transfer learning from language modeling to automatically identify each tweet’s stance toward the FA movement. Our model …