Drug of choice

OBJECTIVE: Subacute thyroiditis(SAT) is an acute inflammatory, self-limited, and destructive disease of the thyroid gland. Although it is a temporary disease, it has permanent consequences. We aim to investigate the influences of the treatment choice on permanent hypothyroidism occurring after SAT and whether there are predictive factors for the development of permanent hypothyroidism. METHODS: We retrospectively investigated 57 SAT patients admitted to our tertiary hospital between 2017 and 2019...

PURPOSE: To quantify the preferences for an oral antidiabetic drug (OAD) among patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) in China. METHODS: A discrete choice experiment (DCE) with hypothetical OAD profiles was performed among patients with T2DM recruited from both online and offline sources. Each patient completed 12 DCE choice tasks. The attributes, elicited through mixed methods, include blood glucose level decrease, blood glucose level stability, frequency of medication, gastrointestinal side effects, dose adjustment and out-of-pocket expense...

SARS-CoV-2 pandemic affected lifestyle habits, and the mental health and wellbeing of people around the world. In this manuscript, two towns (Paulton and Radstock) and two cities (Bath and Bristol) in Southwest England (> 1 million people) were monitored for two years using Wastewater-Based Epidemiology to assess impacts of COVID (including management measures such as lockdowns and movement restrictions) on community lifestyle choices: illicit drugs, legal stimulants, abused pharmaceuticals and pain pharma usage...

This section aims to provide a concise and contemporary technical perspective and reference resource covering dry powder inhaler (DPI) formulations. While DPI products are currently the leading inhaled products in terms of sales value, a number of confounding perspectives are presented to illustrate why they are considered surprisingly, and often frustratingly, poorly understood on a fundamental scientific level, and most challenging to design from first principles. At the core of this issue is the immense complexity of fine cohesive powder systems...

Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) is a common disease in middle-aged and elderly men. It's first-line therapy is drugs. But with the progression of the disease or side effects of drugs, surgical treatment will become a better choice. However, either transurethral resection of the prostate, the standard procedure, or enucleation or resection of the prostate based on various laser platforms or plasma technologies cause a high incidence of retrograde ejaculation in their postoperative follow-up. In the past, retrograde ejaculation was usually regarded as the cost of benign prostatic hyperplasia surgery...

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the effectiveness of different acupuncture treatments for mammary gland hyperplasia (MGH) using a network meta-analysis. METHODS: Several databases were searched without language restrictions from 2000 to February 2023, including PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, China Science and Technology Journal Database, China Biology Medicine Database, Wanfang Database, China National Knowledge Infrastructure Database, and other professional websites and gray literature...

AIM: To identify different metabolites, proteins and related pathways to elucidate the causes of proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR) and resistance to anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) drugs, and to provide biomarkers for the diagnosis and treatment of PDR. METHODS: Vitreous specimens from patients with diabetic retinopathy were collected and analyzed by Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) analyses based on 4D label-free technology...

Plant-based food proteins are a promising choice for the preparation of nanoparticles (NPs) due to their high digestibility, low cost, and ability to interact with various compounds and nutrients. Moreover, nanoencapsulation offers a potential solution for protecting nutrients during processing and enhancing their bioavailability. This study aimed to develop and evaluate nanoparticles (NPs) based on legumin/vicilin (LV) proteins extracted from fava beans, with the goal of encapsulating and delivering a model nutraceutical compound, folic acid (FA)...

OBJECTIVES: Preventative services are required to address the risk factors for chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease. The National Health Service Health Checks in England were introduced to provide such services. One School of Pharmacy established a student-led clinic to provide this service to the local community. The clinic was provided by undergraduate pharmacy students and delivered free of charge within a central city locality. The aim was to explore the impact of the clinic on user thoughts and motivations around healthy living and investigate user experience...

Foraging decisions involve assessing potential risks and prioritizing food sources, which can be difficult when confronted with changing and conflicting circumstances. A crucial aspect of this decision-making process is the ability to actively overcome defensive reactions to threats and focus on achieving specific goals. The ventral pallidum (VP) and basolateral amygdala (BLA) are two brain regions that play key roles in regulating behavior motivated by either rewards or threats. However, it is unclear whether these regions are necessary in decision-making processes involving competing motivational drives during conflict...

BACKGROUND: Facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy is a hereditary progressive myopathy caused by aberrant expression of the transcription factor DUX4 in skeletal muscle. No approved disease-modifying treatments are available for this disorder. We aimed to assess the safety and efficacy of losmapimod (a small molecule that inhibits p38α MAPK, a regulator of DUX4 expression, and p38β MAPK) for the treatment of facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy. METHODS: We did a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 2b trial at 17 neurology centres in Canada, France, Spain, and the USA...

Inhaled corticosteroid (ICS) is a mainstay treatment for controlling asthma and preventing exacerbations in patients with persistent asthma. Many types of ICS drugs are used, either alone or in combination with other controller medications. Despite the widespread use of ICSs, asthma control remains suboptimal in many people with asthma. Suboptimal control leads to recurrent exacerbations, causes frequent ER visits and inpatient stays, and is due to multiple factors. One such factor is the inappropriate ICS choice for the patient...

AIM: This guideline (GL) is aimed at providing a clinical practice reference for the management of adult patients with overweight or obesity associated with metabolic complications who are resistant to lifestyle modification. METHODS: Surgeons, endocrinologists, gastroenterologists, psychologists, pharmacologists, a general practitioner, a nutritionist, a nurse and a patients' representative acted as multi-disciplinary panel. This GL has been developed following the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) approach...

The discovery of antivascular endothelial growth factor medications has resulted in a substantial change in diabetic retinopathy treatment. The most common cause of diabetic retinopathy blindness is Diabetic Macular Edema. The pathophysiology of Diabetic Macular Edema is thought to include the well-known pro-angiogenic and pro-permeability factor vascular endothelial growth factor. Over the past decade, drugs that impede the functions of vascular endothelial growth factors have established themselves as a standard-of-care treatment for a range of ocular ailments and improved patients' clinical results with diabetic retinopathy and Diabetic Macular Edema, and their frequency has grown exponentially with the introduction of these agents Pegaptanib, Ranibizumab, and Aflibercept which are approved for ophthalmic indications, while Bevacizumab is used off-label...

Drug repurposing, also referred to as drug repositioning or drug reprofiling, is a scientific approach to the detection of any new application for an already approved or investigational drug. It is a useful policy for the invention and development of new pharmacological or therapeutic applications of different drugs. The strategy has been known to offer numerous advantages over developing a completely novel drug for certain problems. Drug repurposing has numerous methodologies that can be categorized as target-oriented, drug-oriented, and problem-oriented...

INTRODUCTION: Smoking cessation is the best strategy for reducing tobacco-related morbimortality. The goal of this randomized controlled trial was to test whether using the genetically favorable markers to choose a smoking cessation drug treatment (precision medicine) was superior to using the most effective drug (varenicline) in terms of abstinence rates. Additionally, combination therapy was tested when monotherapy failed. METHODS: This partially blind, single-center study randomized (1:1) 361 participants into two major groups...

One of the worst long-term health issues of the past few decades is Alzheimer's disease (AD). Unfortunately, there are currently insufficient choices for treating and caring for AD, which makes it a popular subject for drug development research. Studies on the development of drugs for AD have primarily concentrated on the use of multitarget directed ligands. Following this strategy, we designed new ChE inhibitors with additional antioxidant and metal chelator effects. In this research, eight novel N'-(quinolin-4-ylmethylene)propanehydrazide derivatives were synthesized and characterized...

BACKGROUND: Widespread inappropriate use of antimicrobial substances drives resistance development worldwide. In long-term care facilities (LTCF), antibiotics are among the most frequently prescribed medications. More than one third of antimicrobial agents prescribed in LTCFs are for urinary tract infections (UTI). We aimed to increase the number of appropriate antimicrobial treatments for UTIs in LTCFs using a multi-faceted antimicrobial stewardship intervention. METHODS: We performed a non-randomized cluster-controlled intervention study...

OBJECTIVE: : Intramuscular medications are widely used to treat psychomotor agitation (PMA) in uncooperative patients. We evaluated knowledge and attitude towards guidelines and the prescribing patterns in a sample of Italian psychiatrists. METHODS: : A structured 28-item questionnaire was submitted to psychiatrists of Italian Departments of Mental Health. We considered 8 clinical scenarios of PMA. For comparing two qualitative variables Chi-square tests were performed...

Innovative silica nanomaterials have made the significant advancements in curative therapy against cancers with multidrug resistance (MDR). The study on different-nanostructured mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNs) with discrepant pore sizes affecting biomacromolecules in resisting cancer MDR hasn't been reported yet. In this study, a systematic comparison of 6 nm-pore sized hollow-structured MSNs (HMSNs) and 10 nm-pore sized dendrimers-structured MSNs (LMSNs) for delivering Bcl-2-functional converting peptide (N9) or doxorubicin (DOX) to overcome cancer MDR was comprehensively carried out both in in vitro and in vivo resistant tumor models...