Search

Objectives Our study investigated the impact of oesophageal cancer and its treatments on work productivity, leisure time, household chores and informal care in Switzerland. We assessed indirect costs for patients treated at different stages of adenocarcinoma or squamous cell carcinoma of the oesophagus.Design and setting A retrospective, non-interventional survey was conducted among patients diagnosed with early or advanced oesophageal cancer in Switzerland. Between January 2023 and October 2023, 126 patients participated from seven clinical centres across German, French and Italian language regions.Outcome measure Self-reported lost time over a 4-week period, which was monetised to estimate indirect costs using respondents’ approximate earnings derived from national statistics.Results Of the 126 patients, 24 (19.0%) were disease-free at the time of the study, while 15.1% of patients were in stage I, 13.5% in stage II, 27.0% in stage III and 25.4% in stage IV. Most patients, across age groups and disease stages, reported no impact on their leisure time (62.2%), household chores (70.3%) or informal care needs (78.4%) in the last 4 weeks. For those affected, the mean loss of time was 9.5 hours per week for leisure (n=28) and 13.3 hours for household chores (n=21). Additionally, patients received an average of 11.8 hours of informal care per week (n=16). Among the patients who were employed at the beginning of the 4-week recall period (n=25), 57.1% reduced the degree of employment and/or missed work due to the disease and its treatments during that time, while 46.7% experienced presentism (decreased productivity at work). The estimated mean indirect costs over a 4-week period was (Swiss Francs) CHF2005 (€1874) per patient, with loss of work productivity being the largest contributor.Conclusion Oesophageal cancer in Switzerland affects patients’ professional and personal lives, resulting in lost time and informal caregiving, leading to societal costs.

Author(s): Jesús Alberto Afonso Urich [sup.1] , Viktoria Marko [sup.1] , Katharina Boehm [sup.1] , Julia Karrer [sup.1] , Martin Koeberle [sup.2] , Sharareh Salar-Behzadi [sup.1] [sup.3] Author Affiliations: (1) [...], The ever-growing novel on-demand dose combinations require innovative and resourceful analytical methods for the simultaneous assay of combined doses. A novel and efficient stability-indicating reversed-phase high performance liquid chromatographic method was developed and validated for the determination of metformin, hydrochlorothiazide and acetylsalicylic acid in a combination oral dosage form. The method was developed by assessing the impact of ion-pairing reagent, chromatographic column and gradient elution and validated according to ICH (R1) Q2 guideline and following the acceptance criteria suggested from the FDA laboratory manual for method validation and verification. Forced degradation studies were performed by subjecting the standards and samples to hydrolysis (acid and base), oxidative and thermal stress conditions. The determination was achieved with a Waters Sunfire C18 (250 x 4.6 mm i.d., 5 [micro]m) column at ambient temperature using 5 mM sodium dihydrogen phosphate and 10 mM pentane-1-sulphonic acid sodium salt buffer pH 3.0 (solution A) and acetonitrile (solution B) as mobile phases in gradient elution at a flow rate of 0.7 mL/min and UV detection at 260 nm. The linearity was proven for the three active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) over a concentration range of 995-3240 [micro]g/mL (r.sup.2 = 0.9985), 50-160 [micro]g/mL (r.sup.2 = 0.9993) and 120-380 [micro]g/mL (r.sup.2 = 0.9997), respectively. The method was accurate within 5% of recovery, precise and reproducible with RSD below 2.0%. The robustness was achieved at recovery rate of 98.0 to 102.0%. The validated method is suitable for the quantitative analysis of bulk, stability, and oral dosage form. Furthermore, this work paves the way for providing a platform of robust analytical methods for the simultaneous assay of innovative on-demand new dose combinations.

Abstract Estimates of juvenile survival are critical for informing population dynamics and the ecology of fish, yet these demographic parameters are difficult to measure. Here, we demonstrate that advances in animal tracking technology provide opportunities to evaluate survival of juvenile tagged fish. We implemented a whole-lake telemetry array in conjunction with small acoustic tags (including tags

IntroductionNovel preventive strategies in periodontal disease target the bacterial-induced inflammatory host response to reduce associated tissue destruction. Strategies focus on the modulation of tissue-destroying inflammatory host response, particularly the reduction of inflammation and promotion of resolution. Thereby, nutrition is a potent immunometabolic non-pharmacological intervention. Human studies have demonstrated the benefit of olive oil-containing Mediterranean-style diets (MDs), the main component of which being mono-unsaturated fatty acid (FA) oleic acid (OA (C18:1)). Hence, nutritional OA strengthened the microarchitecture of alveolar trabecular bone and increased circulating pro-resolving lipid mediators following bacterial inoculation with periodontal pathogen Porphyromonas gingivalis, contrary to saturated FA palmitic acid (PA (C16:0)), which is abundant in Western-style diets. Additionally, the generalized distribution of inflammatory pathway mediators can occur in response to bacterial infection and compromise systemic tissue metabolism and bone homeostasis distant from the side of infection. Whether specific FA-enriched nutrition and periodontal inoculation are factors in systemic pathology that can be immune-modulatory targeted through dietary substitution is unknown and of clinical relevance.MethodsNormal-weight C57BL/6-mice received OA-or PA-enriched diets (PA-ED, OA-ED, PA/OA-ED) or a normal-standard diet (n=12/group) for 16 weeks and were orally infected with P. gingivalis/placebo to induce periodontal disease. Using histomorphometry and LC-MS/MS, systemic bone morphology, incorporated immunometabolic FA-species, serological markers of bone metabolism, and stress response were determined in addition to bone cell inflammation and interaction in vitro.ResultsIn contrast to OA-ED, PA-ED reduced systemic bone microarchitecture paralleled by increased lipotoxic PA-containing metabolite accumulation in bone. Substitution with OA reversed the bone-destructive impact of PA, which was accompanied by reduced diacylglycerols (DAG) and saturated ceramide levels. Further, PA-associated reduction in mineralization activity and concomitant pro-inflammatory activation of primary osteoblasts were diminished in cultures where PA was replaced with OA, which impacted cellular interaction with osteoclasts. Additionally, PA-ED increased osteoclast numbers in femurs in response to oral P. gingivalis infection, whereas OA-ED reduced osteoclast occurrence, which was paralleled by serologically increased levels of the stress-reducing lipokine PI(18:1/18:1).ConclusionOA substitution reverses the bone-destructive and pro-inflammatory effects of PA and eliminates incorporated lipotoxic PA metabolites. This supports Mediterranean-style OA-based diets as a preventive intervention to target the accumulation of PA-associated lipotoxic metabolites and thereby supports systemic bone tissue resilience after oral bacterial P. gingivalis infection.

Fatty acid unsaturation by stearoyl-CoA desaturase 1 (SCD1) protects against cellular stress through unclear mechanisms. Here the authors show 1,2-dioleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phospho-(1’-myo-inositol) is an SCD1-derived signaling lipid that regulates stress-adaption, protects against cell death and promotes proliferation.