Case report: A rare case of cerebral herniation during glioma resection in a syphilis-positive patient.

Acute intraoperative cerebral herniation is catastrophic in craniotomy and seriously affects the outcomes of surgery and the prognosis of the patient. Although the probability of its occurrence is low, it can lead to severe disability and high mortality. We describe a rare case of intraoperative cerebral herniation that occurred in a syphilis-positive patient. The patient was diagnosed with both glioma and syphilis. When the glioma was completely removed under the surgical microscope, acute cerebral herniation occurred. An urgent intervention in cerebral herniation identified a collection of colorless, transparent, and protein-rich gelatinous substances rather than a hematoma, which is a more commonly reported cause of intraoperative cerebral herniation in the literature. We have found no previous descriptions of such cerebral herniation during craniotomy in a patient with syphilis and glioma. We suspected that the occurrence of intraoperative cerebral hernia might be related to the patient's infection with syphilis. We considered the likelihood of an intraoperative cerebral herniation to be elevated when a patient had a disease similar to syphilis that could cause increased vascular permeability.

Simultaneous Homogeneous Fluorescence Detection of AFP and GPC3 in Hepatocellular Carcinoma Clinical Samples Assisted by Enzyme-Free Catalytic Hairpin Assembly.

Simultaneous sensitive and cost-effective detection of multiple tumor markers has shown great potential for cancer diagnostics. Herein, we reported a simple enzyme-free parallel catalytic hairpin assembly (CHA) amplification strategy with N-methyl mesoporphyrin IX (NMM) and quantum dots (QDs) as signal reporters for the homogeneous fluorescent simultaneous detection of alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) and glypican-3 (GPC3). Upon selective binding, the released single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) from the two-aptamer double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) probes triggers CHA amplification, further releasing the G-quadruplex sequence and Ag+ from the C-Ag+-C structures at the same time. Then, NMM and CdTe QDs selectively recognize G-quadruplex and Ag+, respectively. Under optimized conditions, limits of detections (LODs) as low as 3 fg/mL for AFP and 0.25 fg/mL for GPC3 were achieved using fluorescence readout. Using color- and distance-based visual readouts, an LOD of 1 fg/mL for GPC3 was reached. This method was applied to quantitatively analyze AFP and GPC3 in 41 clinical serum samples of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients. The quantitative test results for AFP and GPC3 were consistent with those obtained using the electrochemiluminescence immunoassay (ECL-IA) clinical kit and correlated with radiological and pathological findings. The results of clinical tests demonstrated the potential of GPC3 as a tumor biomarker, and we propose a cut-off value of 2 ng/mL GPC3 for HCC.

Circular RNA ITCH downregulates GLUT1 and suppresses glucose uptake in melanoma to inhibit cancer cell proliferation.

BACKGROUND: Circular RNA ITCH has been proved as a tumor suppressor in several types of cancer. Genetic alterations are known to play important roles in melanoma development. However, the function of circular RNAs and the role of ITCH in melanoma are still hardly known. METHODS: We investigated the expression levels of ITCH and the correlation between ITCH expression and GLUT1 expression, which showed that ITCH was downregulated in melanoma tissues and inversely correlated with GLUT1. RESULTS: ITCH overexpression resulted in the downregulation of GLUT1 and suppressed glucose uptake in melanoma. GLUT1 overexpression promoted glucose uptake but failed to affect ITCH. ITCH overexpression resulted in increased, while GLUT1 overexpression resulted in decreased rate of melanoma cell proliferation. In addition, GLUT1 overexpression reduced the effects of ITCH overexpression on cell proliferation. CONCLUSIONS: We concluded that ITCH may downregulate GLUT1 and suppresses glucose uptake in melanoma to inhibit cancer cell proliferation.