Assessment of myocardial viability by nuclear imaging techniques

The assessment of myocardial viability has become important in the diagnostic and prognostic work up of patients with ischemic cardiomyopathy. Patients with viable myocardium may benefit from revascularization in terms of improvement of function, symptoms, and prognosis. In contrast, patients without viable myocardium do not benefit and should be treated conservatively. Various nuclear imaging techniques are available.     

Five system barriers to achieving ultrasafe health care

Although debate continues over estimates of the amount of preventable medical harm that occurs in health care, there seems to be a consensus that health care is not as safe and reliable as it might be. It is often assumed that copying and adapting the success stories of nonmedical industries, such as civil aviation and nuclear power, will make medicine as safe as these industries. However, the solution is not that simple. This article explains why a benchmarking approach to safety in high-risk industries is needed to help translate lessons so that they are usable and long lasting in health care. The most important difference among industries lies not so much in the pertinent safety toolkit, which is similar for most industries, but in an industry's willingness to abandon historical and cultural precedents and beliefs that are linked to performance and autonomy, in a constant drive toward a culture of safety. Five successive systemic barriers currently prevent health care from becoming an ultrasafe industrial system: the need to limit the discretion of workers, the need to reduce worker autonomy, the need to make the transition from a craftsmanship mindset to that of equivalent actors, the need for system-level (senior leadership) arbitration to optimize safety strategies, and the need for simplification. Finally, health care must overcome 3 unique problems: a wide range of risk among medical specialties, difficulty in defining medical error, and various structural constraints (such as public demand, teaching role, and chronic shortage of staff). Without such a framework to guide development, ongoing efforts to improve safety by adopting the safety strategies of other industries may yield reduced dividends. Rapid progress is possible only if the health care industry is willing to address these structural constraints needed to overcome the 5 barriers to ultrasafe performance.     

Plasma homocysteine levels and the left ventricular systolic function in coronary artery disease patients

BACKGROUND: Numerous studies have shown a relationship between hyperhomocysteinemia, atherothrombosis and cardiovascular mortality. However, an association between hyperhomocysteinemia and the extent of coronary artery disease (CAD) remains controversial whereas its relationship with left ventricular systolic function has not been established. METHODS: One hundred and fifty-seven patients with angiographically defined CAD were included. The relationships between hyperhomocysteinemia, severity of CAD and left ventricular systolic function were studied. Left ventricular systolic function was determined primarily by ventriculography. The severity of CAD was determined through coronary angiography using the Gensini score and the number of vessels with > or = 50% stenosis. RESULTS: The mean fasting plasma homocysteine level was 13.4 mumol/l+/-0.5 SE. Elevated levels of homocysteine correlated significantly with increased severity of CAD both by the Gensini scores (r-value = 0.344, P < 0.0005) and the total number of diseased vessels (r-value = 0.387, P < 0.0005). The patients with hyperhomocysteinemia were found to have significantly reduced left ventricular ejection fraction (r-value = -0.382, P < 0.0005). A multivariate regression analysis revealed homocysteine level to be an independent predictor of left ventricular systolic function. In addition, adjusted analysis revealed hyperhomocysteinemia to be associated with global left ventricular dysfunction. CONCLUSION: In patients with CAD, homocysteine levels correlate independently with left ventricular systolic function. The mechanism of this association between homocysteine and left ventricular systolic function is unknown but may be due to a direct effect of homocysteine on myocardial function separate from its effects on coronary atherosclerosis.     

Immune evasion in HPV− head and neck precancer–cancer transition is driven by an aneuploid switch involving chromosome 9p loss

An aneuploid-immune paradox encompasses somatic copy-number alterations (SCNAs), unleashing a cytotoxic response in experimental precancer systems, while conversely being associated with immune suppression and cytotoxic-cell depletion in human tumors, especially head and neck cancer (HNSC). We present evidence from patient samples and cell lines that alterations in chromosome dosage contribute to an immune hot-to-cold switch during human papillomavirus-negative (HPV⁻) head and neck tumorigenesis. Overall SCNA (aneuploidy) level was associated with increased CD3⁺ and CD8⁺ T cell microenvironments in precancer (mostly CD3⁺, linked to trisomy and aneuploidy), but with T cell-deficient tumors. Early lesions with 9p21.3 loss were associated with depletion of cytotoxic T cell infiltration in TP53 mutant tumors; and with aneuploidy were associated with increased NK-cell infiltration. The strongest driver of cytotoxic T cell and Immune Score depletion in oral cancer was 9p-arm level loss, promoting profound decreases of pivotal IFN-γ-related chemokines (e.g., CXCL9) and pathway genes. Chromosome 9p21.3 deletion contributed mainly to cell-intrinsic senescence suppression, but deletion of the entire arm was necessary to diminish levels of cytokine, JAK-STAT, and Hallmark NF-κB pathways. Finally, 9p arm-level loss and JAK2-PD-L1 codeletion (at 9p24) were predictive markers of poor survival in recurrent HPV⁻ HNSC after anti–PD-1 therapy; likely amplified by independent aneuploidy-induced immune-cold microenvironments observed here. We hypothesize that 9p21.3 arm-loss expansion and epistatic interactions allow oral precancer cells to acquire properties to overcome a proimmunogenic aneuploid checkpoint, transform and invade. These findings enable distinct HNSC interception and precision-therapeutic approaches, concepts that may apply to other CN-driven neoplastic, immune or aneuploid diseases, and immunotherapies.

The genetic bases for predisposition, and neoplastic transformation, to cancer have been increasingly well described. However, it remains less clear how early, precancer cells employ these genetic alterations to acquire the characteristic features and properties (1) of malignant disease. For example, studies of the immune landscape led to breakthrough trials of programmed death-1 (PD-1) inhibitors for recurrent, metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSC) therapy (2–4). This underscores the importance of immune modulation in these tumors, despite a still suboptimal overall response rate of less than 20% in advanced cancers. Immune response within tumors has been observed to be strongest at the earliest neoplastic stages, as reported recently in lung adenocarcinoma precursors (5). As such, new, immune-based strategies could be developed to reduce the high global burden of HNSC, by intercepting the most common precursor of the most common HNSC presentation: HPV⁻ oral squamous cell carcinomas (6–8).Studies of chromosome somatic copy-number (CN) alteration (SCNA) profiles have reported the impact of 3p14, 9p21, or 17p13 loss in molecular models of HNSC progression (9) and risk (10–15). Early studies reported that patients with oral precancers harboring 9p21 and/or 3p14 loss were at significantly greater cancer risk than those with retention at these loci (10, 16). A comprehensive, prospective validation study examined the relative contribution of six candidate chromosome-arm regions. 9p21 loss had the greatest influence on cancer risk (13). The mechanism underlying the association between CN and malignant transformation of precancers, however, is unclear (17–20). Studies of CN-altered neoplastic cells have shown that SCNAs can trigger a cytotoxic response in experimental precancer systems (21, 22) but, paradoxically, were associated with immune evasion (23) and suppression (24) in computational studies of naturally occurring human cancers. The latter, in melanoma, found that nonresponders to PD-1 and CTLA-4 blockade had higher CN alteration and loss burdens, which correlated with immunologically cold tumors, characterized by cytotoxic-cell, marker, and metric reductions, and suppressive microenvironment cell, network, and signal increases (23–26). This SCNA-cold association was particularly strong in our previous, pan-The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) computational study in HNSC (23). These data point to a putative in vivo switch from immune hot-to-cold in the precancer–cancer transition, and raise the hypothesis that SCNAs in precursor lesions contribute to malignant transformation through genomic events and mechanisms that enable the acquisition of immune-suppressive, evasive properties. To test this hypothesis, we evaluated CN influence on immune profiles and outcomes in a large prospective oral precancer patient cohort, and HPV⁻ HNSC (tissue specimens and cell lines) and anti–PD-1–treated recurrent-disease cohorts.