[Surgical management of breast cancer in outpatient versus overnight hospitalization: Satisfaction study]. / Prise en charge chirurgicale du cancer du sein ambulatoire versus hospitalisation d'une nuit : enquête de satisfaction.

OBJECTIVES: Breast cancer is the primary female cancer. In cancerology, it is essential to give to the patient some support. The advent of outpatient surgery optimizes the care path. This need for support of patients raises the question of its compatibility with the day surgery. The purpose is to compare the satisfaction of outpatients with those who stay overnight after surgery of breast cancer. MéTHODS: Patients who underwent breast conservative surgery were included. It is a mixed study, a quantitative, observational and prospective one using a satisfaction survey and a qualitative one which consisted on semi - directive individual interviews. We compared the satisfaction rate (highest marks). RESULTS: There were 91 patientes, 38 in the ambulatory group and 53 in the overnight group. There was no significant difference in satisfaction between the two groups (P=0.18). The difficulties frequently highlighted by the patients during their stay were the organizational management, the lack of hospital comfort and the sometimes long wait. The need for human support was unanimous. CONCLUSION: The satisfaction was excellent in the study. The mode of hospitalization does not seem to play a role here on satisfaction. This hospitalization mode can only be envisaged by providing sufficient human and technical resources. Enhanced recovery after surgery appears to be an alternative to outpatient surgery.

Observation selection bias in contact prediction and its implications for structural bioinformatics.

Next Generation Sequencing is dramatically increasing the number of known protein sequences, with related experimentally determined protein structures lagging behind. Structural bioinformatics is attempting to close this gap by developing approaches that predict structure-level characteristics for uncharacterized protein sequences, with most of the developed methods relying heavily on evolutionary information collected from homologous sequences. Here we show that there is a substantial observational selection bias in this approach: the predictions are validated on proteins with known structures from the PDB, but exactly for those proteins significantly more homologs are available compared to less studied sequences randomly extracted from Uniprot. Structural bioinformatics methods that were developed this way are thus likely to have over-estimated performances; we demonstrate this for two contact prediction methods, where performances drop up to 60% when taking into account a more realistic amount of evolutionary information. We provide a bias-free dataset for the validation for contact prediction methods called NOUMENON.

Frequent detection of HIV-1 RNA but low rates of HIV-1 isolation in cervicovaginal secretions from infected women.

Information regarding the presence of HIV-1 in the female genital tract is necessary to gain insight into the mechanism of HIV-1 heterosexual transmission. Herein, we present the results of a study on virus isolation and HIV-1 RNA detection from cervicovaginal lavage (CVL) samples from 25 HIV-1 seropositive women. Despite detectable levels of HIV-1 RNA in 88% of CVL samples, HIV-1 was isolated in only four (19%) samples. Although HIV-1 shedding in cervicovaginal secretions is a common event at all disease stages, the recovery of infectious virus in cell cultures appears to be rare; this renders viral isolation in studies aimed to evaluate the infectivity of cervicovaginal secretions relatively useless.

[The role of vaginal pH. Importance of its normalization in the prevention of recurrent vaginitis]. / Ruolo del pH vaginale. Importanza della sua normalizzazione nella prevenzione delle vaginiti recidivanti.

BACKGROUND: A sample of 100 women was clinically examined for a very various vulvovaginal symptomatology and an individual diagnosis of vulvovaginitis of different aetiology was established. METHODS: All women were treated with antibiotic and/or antimycotic drugs on the basis of individual diagnosis. Sixty women had only this treatment, while 40 women had also a supplementary treatment with a cleanser emulsion characterized by physiologic pH value and an antiseptic activity due to a vegetable extract (Saugella Attiva, Lab. Guieu). The symptomatologic changes due to the two treatments were compared. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Combined treatment (drug + antiseptic) obtained better results mostly in subjective symptomatology; this combined treatment was very useful in the recovery of the Doderlein population.

Occupational engagement of low-functioning individuals: extending the applicability of a computer-aided programme.

The present study addressed two questions concerning a computer-aided programme for supervising occupational activities for low-functioning individuals. The first question was about the possibility of using the programme for extended time periods. The second question concerned the viability of the programme for subjects who require physical prompting in addition to normal supervision (e.g. instructions and reinforcement). Three adolescents participated in the study. Two of them (who could perform under normal supervision) were selected for investigating the first question. The other subject (who required caretaker prompting) served for the second question. The results for the first two subjects showed that the computer-aided programme could easily ensure engagement in constructive activities for periods of about 30 min. The data for the third subject showed the establishment of moderate responding. The practical implications of the findings are discussed.