Changes in intestinal microbiota and biochemical parameters in patients with inflammatory bowel disease and irritable bowel syndrome induced by the prolonged addition of soluble fibers to usual drug therapy.

OBJECTIVES: Partially hydrolyzed guar gum (PHGG) is a soluble dietary fiber;in addition to improving bowel movements, it maintains intestinal health by producing short-chain fatty acids. However, majority of clinical studies on PHGG have been concluded within a month and excluded usual drug therapy. Hence, this study aimed to determine the effects of long-term consumption of PHGG, in combination with drug therapy, on gut bacteria ratios, laboratory values for inflammatory response, and fecal characteristics. METHODS AND RESULTS: The study was performed in patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), Crohn's disease (CD), and ulcerative colitis (UC), by the administration of PHGG for six months while they continued their usual treatment. PHGG treatment caused significant changes in patients with IBS, including an increase in the abundance of short-chain fatty acid-producing bacteria, a significant decrease in Bacteroides abundance, and normalization of the Bristol scale of stool. In patients with UC, non-significant normalization of soft stools and decrease in fecal calprotectin were observed. Adverse events were not observed in any of the groups. CONCLUSION: Thus, it would be beneficial to include PHGG in the usual drug therapies of patients with IBS. J. Med. Invest. 71 : 121-128, February, 2024.

Imaging Classification of Constipation.

Objectives: The diagnosis of patients with chronic constipation is very complicated. This study aimed to develop a simple imaging classification for the diagnosis of chronic constipation by abdominal computed tomography (CT). Methods: Sixty-two patients who underwent abdominal CT in our hospital between January and June 2022 were enrolled. The CT values of the stool in the rectum and cecum were measured in patients with chronic constipation (C group) and in those without (non-C group). Results: A strong correlation was observed between the Bristol Stool Form Scale (BSFS) and the CT value of rectal stool. Furthermore, the rectal stool CT value was significantly higher in patients with chronic constipation than in those without. The CT value of cecal stool did not differ between the two groups. The cecal stool CT value was significantly higher in patients with severe constipation (BSFS 1) than in those with BSFS 2-6. A cutoff CT value of 100 was selected as the optimal value for indicating chronic constipation. Conclusions: Abdominal CT was useful in the diagnosis of chronic constipation. If the patient had constipation, the optimal cutoff CT value was 100.

Fast iterative tomographic wavefront estimation with recursive Toeplitz reconstructor structure for large-scale systems.

Tomographic wavefront reconstruction is the main computational bottleneck to realize real-time correction for turbulence-induced wavefront aberrations in future laser-assisted tomographic adaptive-optics (AO) systems for ground-based giant segmented mirror telescopes because of its unprecedented number of degrees of freedom, N, i.e., the number of measurements from wavefront sensors. In this paper, we provide an efficient implementation of the minimum-mean-square error (MMSE) tomographic wavefront reconstruction, which is mainly useful for some classes of AO systems not requiring multi-conjugation, such as laser-tomographic AO, multi-object AO, and ground-layer AO systems, but is also applicable to multi-conjugate AO systems. This work expands that by Conan [Proc. SPIE9148, 91480R (2014)PSISDG0277-786X10.1117/12.2054472] to the multi-wavefront tomographic case using natural and laser guide stars. The new implementation exploits the Toeplitz structure of covariance matrices used in an MMSE reconstructor, which leads to an overall O(N log N) real-time complexity compared with O(N2) of the original implementation using straight vector-matrix multiplication. We show that the Toeplitz-based algorithm leads to 60 nm rms wavefront error improvement for the European Extremely Large Telescope laser-tomography AO system over a well-known sparse-based tomographic reconstruction; however, the number of iterations required for suitable performance is still beyond what a real-time system can accommodate to keep up with the time-varying turbulence.

Aluminum potassium sulfate and tannic acid sclerotherapy for Goligher Grades II and III hemorrhoids: Results from a multicenter study.

AIM: To show that aluminum potassium sulfate and tannic acid (ALTA) sclerotherapy has a high success rate for Grade II and III hemorrhoids. METHODS: This study was based on the clinical data of 604 patients with hemorrhoids who underwent ALTA sclerotherapy between January 2009 and February 2015. The objective of this study was to assess the efficacy of this treatment for Grades II and III hemorrhoids. Preoperative and postoperative symptoms, complications and success rate were all assessed retrospectively. Follow-up consisted of a simple questionnaire, physical examination and an anoscopy. Patients were followed-up at one day, one week, two weeks, one month, one year, two years, three years, four years and five years after the ALTA sclerotherapy. RESULTS: One hundred and sixty-nine patients were diagnosed with Grade II hemorrhoids and 435 patients were diagnosed with Grade III hemorrhoids. The one year, three year and five year cumulative success rates of ALTA sclerotherapy for Grades II and III hemorrhoids were 95.9% and 93.1%; 89.3% and 83.7%; and 89.3% and 78.2%, respectively. No significant differences were observed in the cumulative success rates after ALTA sclerotherapy between Grades II and III hemorrhoids (P = 0.09). There were forty-seven post-operative complications (low grade fever; anal pain; urinary retention; rectal ulcer; and others). No serious or life-threatening complications occurred and all cases improved through conservative treatment. At univariate analysis there were no predictive factors of failure. CONCLUSION: ALTA sclerotherapy has had a high success rate for Grade II and III hemorrhoids during five years of post-operative treatment. However, additional studies are needed to evaluate the efficacy of this ALTA sclerotherapy in the management of hemorrhoidal disease.

Multi time-step wavefront reconstruction for tomographic adaptive-optics systems.

In tomographic adaptive-optics (AO) systems, errors due to tomographic wavefront reconstruction limit the performance and angular size of the scientific field of view (FoV), where AO correction is effective. We propose a multi time-step tomographic wavefront reconstruction method to reduce the tomographic error by using measurements from both the current and previous time steps simultaneously. We further outline the method to feed the reconstructor with both wind speed and direction of each turbulence layer. An end-to-end numerical simulation, assuming a multi-object AO (MOAO) system on a 30 m aperture telescope, shows that the multi time-step reconstruction increases the Strehl ratio (SR) over a scientific FoV of 10 arc min in diameter by a factor of 1.5-1.8 when compared to the classical tomographic reconstructor, depending on the guide star asterism and with perfect knowledge of wind speeds and directions. We also evaluate the multi time-step reconstruction method and the wind estimation method on the RAVEN demonstrator under laboratory setting conditions. The wind speeds and directions at multiple atmospheric layers are measured successfully in the laboratory experiment by our wind estimation method with errors below 2 ms-1. With these wind estimates, the multi time-step reconstructor increases the SR value by a factor of 1.2-1.5, which is consistent with a prediction from the end-to-end numerical simulation.