Transpedicular Screw fixation and Harrington distraction rod are effective means of managing unstable thoracolumbar fracture and fracture dislocation. The authors analysed the 52patients who were treated with above 2methods from March 1986 to February 1993. The results were as follows: 1. Most of patients were in 5th decade compare to younger group and most common cause of injury was fall down, but traffic accident is increasing. 2. The most commonly involved sites were T12and L1 vertebrae and most common type of injury is bursting fracture. 3. Postoperative anterior and posterior column of vertebrae body correction rate were 35.0%/34.4% in ISF group and 29.3%/27.9% in Harrington group. Postoperative correction loss rate were 0.13/0.04 in ISF group and 0.06/0.04 in Harrington group. 4. Postoperative correction of kyphosis angle were average 18 in ISF goup and average 15° in Harrington group. Loss of correction angle was average 23° in ISF group and average 4.4° in Harrington group. 5. Range of spinal fixation was average 3.1 segments in ISF group and average 6.2 segments in Harrington group. 6. There was no significant difference in neurologic recovery between ISF group and Harrington group. The patients who had been recovered neurologically more than 1 grade were 28.6% in Harrington group and 29.2% in ISF group. 7. ISF has some benefit in spnal vertebral body height correction and in maintenance of correction compare to Harrington group. Nevertheless disadvantages of ISF group such as long operative time and possibility of cord compression by pedicular screw, ISF has advantages of almost anatomical reduction and the least spinal fusion.
Accidents, Traffic ; Body Height ; Dislocations ; Humans ; Kyphosis ; Operative Time ; Spinal Fusion ; Spine

Dual antiplatelet therapy simultaneously blocks different platelet activation pathways and might thus be more potent at inhibiting platelet activation and more effective at reducing major ischemic vascular events compared to antiplatelet monotherapy. Aspirin plus clopidogrel dual therapy is now the standard therapy for patients with acute coronary syndrome and for those undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention. However, dual antiplatelet therapy carries an increased risk of bleeding. Patients with ischemic stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA) are generally older and likely to have a fragile cerebrovascular bed, which further increases the risk of systemic major bleeding events and intracranial hemorrhage. Clinical trials and meta-analyses suggest that in comparison to antiplatelet monotherapy, dual antiplatelet therapy initiated early after noncardioembolic ischemic stroke or TIA further reduces the rate of recurrent stroke and major vascular events without significantly increasing the rate of major bleeding events. In contrast, studies of long-term therapy in patients with noncardioembolic ischemic stroke or TIA have yielded inconsistent data regarding the benefit of dual antiplatelet therapy over monotherapy. However, the harm associated with major bleeding events, including intracranial hemorrhage, which is generally more disabling and more fatal than ischemic stroke, is likely to increase with dual antiplatelet therapy. Physicians should carefully assess the benefits and risks of dual antiplatelet therapy versus antiplatelet monotherapy when managing patients with ischemic stroke or TIA.
Acute Coronary Syndrome ; Aspirin ; Hemorrhage ; Humans ; Intracranial Hemorrhages ; Ischemic Attack, Transient* ; Percutaneous Coronary Intervention ; Platelet Activation ; Risk Assessment ; Stroke*

Primary transitional cell carcinoma of the bladder was treated with prophylactic and therapeutic Intravesical thiotepa in 7 cases. In 5 cases of stage A tumor, postoperative follow up was averaged 10.8 months and 4 cases were tumor free (80%). In 2 cases of infiltrating tumor, the instillation was not effective. Thiotepa can be given safely in the 7 days post-operative period and no leukopenia and bladder irritation symptoms were occurred.
Carcinoma, Transitional Cell ; Follow-Up Studies ; Leukopenia ; Thiotepa* ; Urinary Bladder Neoplasms* ; Urinary Bladder*

Elevated blood pressure (BP) is the leading modifiable risk factor for stroke and the benefit of BP lowering therapy on the stroke risk reduction is well established. The optimal BP target for preventing stroke and other vascular events have been controversial, but the evidences from epidemiological studies and randomized controlled trials (RCTs) support intensive BP lowering for greater vascular protection, particularly for stroke prevention. For secondary stroke prevention, the evidence of intensive BP lowering benefit is limited since only a single RCT for patients with lacunar infarctions was conducted and most data were driven by exploratory analyses. In acute intracerebral hemorrhage, immediate BP lowering targeting systolic BP<140 mm Hg is recommended by guidelines based on the results from RCTs. In contrast, in acute ischemic stroke, early BP lowering is not usually recommended because of no benefit on functional outcome and future vascular events and potential harm of stroke progression. This review aims to summarize the updated evidence for optimal BP management for primary and secondary stroke prevention and in patients with acute stroke.
Blood Pressure* ; Cerebral Hemorrhage ; Epidemiologic Studies ; Humans ; Risk Factors ; Risk Reduction Behavior ; Stroke* ; Stroke, Lacunar

No abstract available.
Trichothecenes

Stroke is a prototype disorder that disables as well as kills people. The disability-adjusted life years (DALY) metric developed by the World Health Organization to measure the global burden of disease integrates healthy life years lost due to both premature mortality and living with disability. Accordingly, it is well suited to stroke research. The DALY has previously been applied only to large but relatively crude population-level data analyses, but now it is possible to calculate the DALY lost in individual stroke patients. Measuring each patient's stroke outcome with DALY lost has expanded its application to the analysis of treatment effect in acute stroke trials, delineating the poststroke complication impact, the differential weighting of discrete vascular events, and estimating a more refined stroke burden in a specific population. The DALY metric has several advantages over conventional stroke outcome measures: 1) Since the DALY measures the burden of diverse health conditions with a common metric of life years lost, stroke burden and benefits of stroke interventions can be directly compared to other health conditions and their treatments. 2) Quantifying stroke burden or interventional benefits as the life years lost or gained makes the DALY metric more intuitively accessible for public and health system planners. 3) As a continuous, equal-interval scale, the DALY analysis might be statistically more powerful than either binary or ordinal rank outcome analyses in detecting the treatment effects of clinical trials. 4) While currently employed stroke outcome measures take one-time snapshots of disability or mortality and implicitly indicate long-term health impact, the DALY explicitly indicates the burdens of living with disability for an individual's remaining life.
Humans ; Mortality, Premature ; Outcome Assessment (Health Care) ; Statistics as Topic ; Stroke ; World Health Organization

In clinical trials, treatment response should be assessed with appropriate outcome measure and analytic methods. Selection of outcome measure is dependent on the characteristics of subjects and given therapy. For stroke prevention trials, the usual outcome measure is the composite of clinical events such as non-fatal stroke, non-fatal myocardial infarction, or vascular death. On the other hand, for acute stroke trials, stroke severity and functional outcome are essential outcome measures. Neuroimaging is an emerging tool of outcome measure as well as a means of optimizing patient selection in stroke trials. For the analysis of therapeutic efficacy, measured outcomes were usually dichotomized to "good" or "bad" according to arbitrary criteria. Although this approach makes the result of clinical trials easy to interpret, it may have the great chance of missing the clinically important, but modest therapeutic efficacy. To overcome this disadvantage, new analytic strategies such as sliding dichotomy and shift analysis have been proposed. Understanding of outcome measures and analytic methods is important to interpret or design the stroke clinical trials.
Hand ; Myocardial Infarction ; Neuroimaging ; Outcome Assessment (Health Care)* ; Patient Selection ; Stroke*

No abstract available.
Ureter*

BACKGROUND: Although surgical angioplasty for isolated coronary ostial stenosis is assumend as an alternative approach to CABG, the clinical features of isolated coronary ostial stenosis, postoperative complications and follow-up angiographic results would have not been well studied. METHODS: We retrospectively studied 24 patients (female : male = 20 : 4, mean age 50.0 +/- 12.3 yr) who underwent surgical angioplasty for isolated coronary ostial stenosis using patch ( 22 fresh autologous pericardium, 2 saphenous vein) during the period of March 1990 through February 1998. Repeat coronary angiography (16 patients) and echocardiography (24 patients) were performed. Aortic regurgitation was evaluated semiquantitatively (Grade I - Grade IV). RESULTS: There were 3 deaths after surgical angioplasty. One death was due to acute coronary dissection perioperatively, the second due to low cardiac output syndrome 2 weeks post-surgery, and the third due to traumatic panperitonitis 10 months post-procedure. Angina recurred in 4 patients and the remaning 18 patients were symptom-free. Repeat angiography (19.3 +/- 20.7 Mo) showed widely patent ostium with excellent run-off except 2 patients (1 distal patch stenosis, 1 ostial restenosis in Takayasu's arteritis). The third symptomatic patient was proven to have coronary spasm by ergonovine test. AR increased in the fourth patient (Grade II -> III) with patent ostium. CONCLUSION: Surgical angioplasty may be feasible and alternative operative method to CABG for isolated coronary ostial stenosis. It should however be noted that postop AR can develop and/or increase. Further investigation is needed to evaluate the clinical significance of the AR.
Angiography ; Angioplasty* ; Aortic Valve Insufficiency ; Cardiac Output, Low ; Constriction, Pathologic* ; Coronary Angiography ; Coronary Artery Disease ; Echocardiography ; Ergonovine ; Follow-Up Studies ; Humans ; Male ; Pericardium ; Postoperative Complications ; Retrospective Studies ; Spasm

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR) can be estimated by measuring the change of cerebral blood flow that occurs during vasostimulation. To estimate the cerebrovascular reactivity, we investigated the change of flow velocity of the internal carotid artery (ICA) and the middle cerebral artery (MCA) during hyperventilation and hypoventilation with the transcranial doppler. So we studied whether the CVR measured by this method could show a significant difference between the normal and the atherosclerotic subjects and whether the CVR may decrease with age in normal gubjects. METHODS: Using transcranial doppler, we measured the mean velocity (Vm), the pulsatility index (P.I.) at the resting state, the end of breath-holding and the end of hyperventilation in 30 normal and 10 atherosclerotic subjects, so we calculated the percentile change of mean velocity (% Vm) and P.I. (% P.I.) after the vasostimulation. We estimated the change of Vm, P.I., % Vm and % P.I. By the age group and compared those parameters between the age-matched normal control and atherosclerotic subjects. RESULTS: The Vm in ICA and MI significantly decreased with age (p<0.01), but there was no significant difference in Vm and P. I. Between normal and atherosclerotic subjects. The % Vm and % P.I. In response to hyperventilation significantly decreased with age in ICA, M1, M2 and there was significant difference in % Vm of ICA and M1 after breath-holding and % Vm of ICA after hyperventilation between the normal and atherosclerotic subjects. CONCLUSION: The breath-holding and hyperventilation tests could be non-invasive and useful methods in estimation of the cerebrovascular reactivity and could be applied in the basal and follow-up evaluation of the cerebrovascular reserve of the ischemic stroke patients.
Carotid Artery, Internal ; Humans ; Hyperventilation ; Hypoventilation ; Middle Cerebral Artery ; Stroke