Exploring the role of antibiotics and steroids in managing respiratory diseases.

Respiratory diseases (RDs), such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cystic fibrosis, asthma, and pneumonia, are associated with significant morbidity and mortality. Treatment usually consists of antibiotics and steroids. Relevant published literature reviews, studies, and clinical trials were accessed from institutional and electronic databases. The keywords used were respiratory diseases, steroids, antibiotics, and combination of steroids and antibiotics. Selected articles and literature were carefully reviewed. Antibiotics are often prescribed as the standard therapy to manage RDs. Types of causative respiratory pathogens, spectrum of antibiotics activity, route of administration, and course of therapy determine the type of antibiotics that are prescribed. Despite being associated with good clinical outcome, treatment failure and recurrence rate are still high. In addition, antibiotic resistance has been widely reported due to bacterial mutations in response to the use of antibiotics, which render them ineffective. Nevertheless, there has been a growing demand for corticosteroids (CS) and antibiotics to treat a wide variety of diseases, including various airway diseases, due to their immunosuppressive and anti-inflammatory properties. The use of CS is well established and there are different formulations based on the diseases, such as topical administration, tablets, intravenous injections, and inhaled preparations. Both antibiotics and CS possess similar properties in terms of their anti-inflammatory effects, especially regulating cytokine release. Thus, the current review examines and discusses the different applications of antibiotics, CS, and their combination in managing various RDs. Drawbacks of these interventions are also discussed.

Validation of whole genome sequencing from dried blood spots.

BACKGROUND: Dried blood spots (DBS) are a relatively inexpensive source of nucleic acids and are easy to collect, transport, and store in large-scale field surveys, especially in resource-limited settings. However, their performance in whole-genome sequencing (WGS) relative to that of venous blood DNA has not been analyzed for various downstream applications. METHODS: This study compares the WGS performance of DBS paired with venous blood samples collected from 12 subjects. RESULTS: Results of standard quality checks of coverage, base quality, and mapping quality were found to be near identical between DBS and venous blood. Concordance for single-nucleotide variants, insertions and deletions, and copy number variants was high between these two sample types. Additionally, downstream analyses typical of population-based studies were performed, such as mitochondrial heteroplasmy detection, haplotype analysis, mitochondrial copy number changes, and determination of telomere lengths. The absolute mitochondrial copy number values were higher for DBS than for venous blood, though the trend in sample-to-sample variation was similar between DBS and blood. Telomere length estimates in most DBS samples were on par with those from venous blood. CONCLUSION: DBS samples can serve as a robust and feasible alternative to venous blood for studies requiring WGS analysis.