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Several studies have shown that tapering or stopping disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs) in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients in sustained remission is feasible. However, tapering/stopping bears the risk of decline in physical function as some patients may relapse and face increased disease activity. Here, we analyzed the impact of tapering or stopping DMARD treatment on the physical function of RA patients. The study was a post hoc analysis of physical functional worsening for 282 patients with RA in sustained remission tapering and stopping DMARD treatment in the prospective randomized RETRO study. HAQ and DAS-28 scores were determined in baseline samples of patients continuing DMARD (arm 1), tapering their dose by 50% (arm 2), or stopping after tapering (arm 3). Patients were followed over 1 year, and HAQ and DAS-28 scores were evaluated every 3 months. The effect of treatment reduction strategy on functional worsening was assessed in a recurrent-event Cox regression model with a study-group (control, taper, and taper/stop) as the predictor. Two-hundred and eighty-two patients were analyzed. In 58 patients, functional worsening was observed. The incidences suggest a higher probability of functional worsening in patients tapering and/or stopping DMARDs, which is likely due to higher relapse rates in these individuals. At the end of the study, however, functional worsening was similar among the groups. Point estimates and survival curves show that the decline in functionality according to HAQ after tapering or discontinuation of DMARDs in RA patients with stable remission is associated with recurrence, but not with an overall functional decline.
Periodontitis is one of the most prevalent diseases worldwide. The degree of radiographic bone loss can be used to assess the course of therapy or the severity of the disease. Since automated bone loss detection has many benefits, our goal was to develop a multi-object detection algorithm based on artificial intelligence that would be able to detect and quantify radiographic bone loss using standard two-dimensional radiographic images in the maxillary posterior region. This study was conducted by combining three recent online databases and validating the results using an external validation dataset from our organization. There were 1414 images for training and testing and 341 for external validation in the final dataset. We applied a Keypoint RCNN with a ResNet-50-FPN backbone network for both boundary box and keypoint detection. The intersection over union (IoU) and the object keypoint similarity (OKS) were used for model evaluation. The evaluation of the boundary box metrics showed a moderate overlapping with the ground truth, revealing an average precision of up to 0.758. The average precision and recall over all five folds were 0.694 and 0.611, respectively. Mean average precision and recall for the keypoint detection were 0.632 and 0.579, respectively. Despite only using a small and heterogeneous set of images for training, our results indicate that the algorithm is able to learn the objects of interest, although without sufficient accuracy due to the limited number of images and a large amount of information available in panoramic radiographs. Considering the widespread availability of panoramic radiographs as well as the increasing use of online databases, the presented model can be further improved in the future to facilitate its implementation in clinics.
Objectives
Mechanisms of wound healing are often impaired in patients with osteonecrosis of the jaw (ONJ). According to the guidelines for the treatment of this disease, early surgical intervention is indicated. However, surgery often faces complications such as wound healing disorders. The application of platelet-rich fibrin (PRF) after necrosectomy between bone and mucosa may constitute a promising approach to improve surgical results. An aspect that was not investigated until now is that PRF acts as a “bio-carrier” for antibiotics previously applied intravenously.
Materials and methods
We investigated the antimicrobial properties of PRF in 24 patients presenting ONJ undergoing systemic antibiosis with ampicillin/sulbactam. We measured the concentration of ampicillin/sulbactam in plasma and PRF and performed agar diffusion tests. Ampicillin/sulbactam was applied intravenously to the patient 10 minutes for blood sampling for PRF. No further incorporation of patients’ blood or PRF product with antibiotic drugs was obtained. Four healthy patients served as controls.
Results
Our results revealed that PRF is highly enriched with ampicillin/sulbactam that is released to the environment. The antibiotic concentration in PRF was comparable to the plasma concentration of ampicillin/sulbactam. The inhibition zone (IZ) of PRF was comparable to the standard ampicillin/sulbactam discs used in sensitivity testing.
Conclusions
The results of our study demonstrated that PRF is a reliable bio-carrier for systemic applied antibiotics and exhibits a large antimicrobial effect.
Clinical relevance
We describe a clinically useful feature of PRF as a bio-carrier for antibiotics. Especially when applied to poorly perfused tissues and bone such as in ONJ, the local release of antibiotics can reduce wound healing disorders like infections.
Oroantral communication (OAC) is a common complication after tooth extraction of upper molars. Profound preoperative panoramic radiography analysis might potentially help predict OAC following tooth extraction. In this exploratory study, we evaluated n = 300 consecutive cases (100 OAC and 200 controls) and trained five machine learning algorithms (VGG16, InceptionV3, MobileNetV2, EfficientNet, and ResNet50) to predict OAC versus non-OAC (binary classification task) from the input images. Further, four oral and maxillofacial experts evaluated the respective panoramic radiography and determined performance metrics (accuracy, area under the curve (AUC), precision, recall, F1-score, and receiver operating characteristics curve) of all diagnostic approaches. Cohen's kappa was used to evaluate the agreement between expert evaluations. The deep learning algorithms reached high specificity (highest specificity 100% for InceptionV3) but low sensitivity (highest sensitivity 42.86% for MobileNetV2). The AUCs from VGG16, InceptionV3, MobileNetV2, EfficientNet, and ResNet50 were 0.53, 0.60, 0.67, 0.51, and 0.56, respectively. Expert 1–4 reached an AUC of 0.550, 0.629, 0.500, and 0.579, respectively. The specificity of the expert evaluations ranged from 51.74% to 95.02%, whereas sensitivity ranged from 14.14% to 59.60%. Cohen's kappa revealed a poor agreement for the oral and maxillofacial expert evaluations (Cohen's kappa: 0.1285). Overall, present data indicate that OAC cannot be sufficiently predicted from preoperative panoramic radiography. The false-negative rate, i.e., the rate of positive cases (OAC) missed by the deep learning algorithms, ranged from 57.14% to 95.24%. Surgeons should not solely rely on panoramic radiography when evaluating the probability of OAC occurrence. Clinical testing of OAC is warranted after each upper-molar tooth extraction.
Associations between periodontitis and COPD: An artificial intelligence-based analysis of NHANES III
(2022)
A number of cross-sectional epidemiological studies suggest that poor oral health is associated with respiratory diseases. However, the number of cases within the studies was limited, and the studies had different measurement conditions. By analyzing data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey III (NHANES III), this study aimed to investigate possible associations between chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and periodontitis in the general population. COPD was diagnosed in cases where FEV (1)/FVC ratio was below 70% (non-COPD versus COPD; binary classification task). We used unsupervised learning utilizing k-means clustering to identify clusters in the data. COPD classes were predicted with logistic regression, a random forest classifier, a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) classifier, k-nearest neighbors, a decision tree classifier, Gaussian naive Bayes (GaussianNB), support vector machines (SVM), a custom-made convolutional neural network (CNN), a multilayer perceptron artificial neural network (MLP), and a radial basis function neural network (RBNN) in Python. We calculated the accuracy of the prediction and the area under the curve (AUC). The most important predictors were determined using feature importance analysis. Results: Overall, 15,868 participants and 19 feature variables were included. Based on k-means clustering, the data were separated into two clusters that identified two risk characteristic groups of patients. The algorithms reached AUCs between 0.608 (DTC) and 0.953% (CNN) for the classification of COPD classes. Feature importance analysis of deep learning algorithms indicated that age and mean attachment loss were the most important features in predicting COPD. Conclusions: Data analysis of a large population showed that machine learning and deep learning algorithms could predict COPD cases based on demographics and oral health feature variables. This study indicates that periodontitis might be an important predictor of COPD. Further prospective studies examining the association between periodontitis and COPD are warranted to validate the present results.
Background
Medical resource management can be improved by assessing the likelihood of prolonged length of stay (LOS) for head and neck cancer surgery patients. The objective of this study was to develop predictive models that could be used to determine whether a patient's LOS after cancer surgery falls within the normal range of the cohort.
Methods
We conducted a retrospective analysis of a dataset consisting of 300 consecutive patients who underwent head and neck cancer surgery between 2017 and 2022 at a single university medical center. Prolonged LOS was defined as LOS exceeding the 75th percentile of the cohort. Feature importance analysis was performed to evaluate the most important predictors for prolonged LOS. We then constructed 7 machine learning and deep learning algorithms for the prediction modeling of prolonged LOS.
Results
The algorithms reached accuracy values of 75.40 (radial basis function neural network) to 97.92 (Random Trees) for the training set and 64.90 (multilayer perceptron neural network) to 84.14 (Random Trees) for the testing set. The leading parameters predicting prolonged LOS were operation time, ischemia time, the graft used, the ASA score, the intensive care stay, and the pathological stages. The results revealed that patients who had a higher number of harvested lymph nodes (LN) had a lower probability of recurrence but also a greater LOS. However, patients with prolonged LOS were also at greater risk of recurrence, particularly when fewer (LN) were extracted. Further, LOS was more strongly correlated with the overall number of extracted lymph nodes than with the number of positive lymph nodes or the ratio of positive to overall extracted lymph nodes, indicating that particularly unnecessary lymph node extraction might be associated with prolonged LOS.
Conclusions
The results emphasize the need for a closer follow-up of patients who experience prolonged LOS. Prospective trials are warranted to validate the present results.
All forms of restriction, from caloric to amino acid to glucose restriction, have been established in recent years as therapeutic options for various diseases, including cancer. However, usually there is no direct comparison between the different restriction forms. Additionally, many cell culture experiments take place under static conditions. In this work, we used a closed perfusion culture in murine L929 cells over a period of 7 days to compare methionine restriction (MetR) and glucose restriction (LowCarb) in the same system and analysed the metabolome by liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC-MS). In addition, we analysed the inhibition of glycolysis by 2-deoxy-D-glucose (2-DG) over a period of 72 h. 2-DG induced very fast a low-energy situation by a reduced glycolysis metabolite flow rate resulting in pyruvate, lactate, and ATP depletion. Under perfusion culture, both MetR and LowCarb were established on the metabolic level. Interestingly, over the period of 7 days, the metabolome of MetR and LowCarb showed more similarities than differences. This leads to the conclusion that the conditioned medium, in addition to the different restriction forms, substantially reprogramm the cells on the metabolic level.
(1) Background: Evaluation of impact of adjuvant radiation therapy (RT) in patients with oral squamous cell carcinoma of the oral cavity/oropharynx (OSCC) of up to 4 cm (pT1/pT2) and solitary ipsilateral lymph node metastasis (pN1). A non-irradiated group with clinical follow-up was chosen for control, and survival and quality of life (QL) were compared; (2) Methods: This prospective multicentric comprehensive cohort study included patients with resected OSCC (pT1/pT2, pN1, and cM0) who were allocated into adjuvant radiation therapy (RT) or observation. The primary endpoint was overall survival. Secondary endpoints were progression-free survival and QL after surgery; (3) Results: Out of 27 centers, 209 patients were enrolled with a median follow-up of 3.4 years. An amount of 137 patients were in the observation arm, and 72 received adjuvant irradiation. Overall survival did not differ between groups (hazard ratio (HR) 0.98 [0.55–1.73], p = 0.94). There were fewer neck metastases (HR 0.34 [0.15–0.77]; p = 0.01), as well as fewer local recurrences (HR 0.41 [0.19–0.89]; p = 0.02) under adjuvant RT. For QL, irradiated patients showed higher values for the symptom scale pain after 0.5, two, and three years (all p < 0.05). After six months and three years, irradiated patients reported higher symptom burdens (impaired swallowing, speech, as well as teeth-related problems (all p < 0.05)). Patients in the RT group had significantly more problems with mouth opening after six months, one, and two years (p < 0.05); (4) Conclusions: Adjuvant RT in patients with early SCC of the oral cavity and oropharynx does not seem to influence overall survival, but it positively affects progression-free survival. However, irradiated patients report a significantly decreased QL up to three years after therapy compared to the observation group.
In recent years, various forms of caloric restriction (CR) and amino acid or protein restriction (AAR or PR) have shown not only success in preventing age-associated diseases, such as type II diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, but also potential for cancer therapy. These strategies not only reprogram metabolism to low-energy metabolism (LEM), which is disadvantageous for neoplastic cells, but also significantly inhibit proliferation. Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is one of the most common tumour types, with over 600,000 new cases diagnosed annually worldwide. With a 5-year survival rate of approximately 55%, the poor prognosis has not improved despite extensive research and new adjuvant therapies. Therefore, for the first time, we analysed the potential of methionine restriction (MetR) in selected HNSCC cell lines. We investigated the influence of MetR on cell proliferation and vitality, the compensation for MetR by homocysteine, the gene regulation of different amino acid transporters, and the influence of cisplatin on cell proliferation in different HNSCC cell lines.
Objective: This study aims to critically evaluate the effectiveness and accuracy of a time safing and cost-efficient open-source algorithm for in-house planning of mandibular reconstructions using the free osteocutaneous fibula graft. The evaluation focuses on quantifying anatomical accuracy and assessing the impact on ischemia time.
Methods: A pilot study was conducted, including patients who underwent in-house planned computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) of free fibula flaps between 2021 and 2023. Out of all patient cases, we included all with postoperative 3D imaging in the study. The study utilized open-source software tools for the planning step, and three-dimensional (3D) printing techniques. The Hausdorff distance and Dice coefficient metrics were used to evaluate the accuracy of the planning procedure.
Results: The study assessed eight patients (five males and three females, mean age 61.75 ± 3.69 years) with different diagnoses such as osteoradionecrosis and oral squamous cell carcinoma. The average ischemia time was 68.38 ± 27.95 min. For the evaluation of preoperative planning vs. the postoperative outcome, the mean Hausdorff Distance was 1.22 ± 0.40. The Dice Coefficients yielded a mean of 0.77 ± 0.07, suggesting a satisfactory concordance between the planned and postoperative states. Dice Coefficient and Hausdorff Distance revealed significant correlations with ischemia time (Spearman's rho = −0.810, p = 0.015 and Spearman's rho = 0.762, p = 0.028, respectively). Linear regression models adjusting for disease type further substantiated these findings.
Conclusions: The in-house planning algorithm not only achieved high anatomical accuracy, as reflected by the Dice Coefficients and Hausdorff Distance metrics, but this accuracy also exhibited a significant correlation with reduced ischemia time. This underlines the critical role of meticulous planning in surgical outcomes. Additionally, the algorithm's open-source nature renders it cost-efficient, easy to learn, and broadly applicable, offering promising avenues for enhancing both healthcare affordability and accessibility.