今泉 和良

The purpose of this study was to evaluate how the first oral administration of suvorexant affects PSG results in patients with severe obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Single-center, prospective study conducted in a nonrandomized, uncontrolled, unblinded fashion. Undiagnosed 64 patients with suspected OSA underwent first-night PSG, and 30 patients with severe OSA (Apnea Hypopnea Index [AHI] ≥ 30 events/h) underwent second-night PSG testing after administration of 15 mg suvorexant. The change in AHI between the first and second nights was not significant, although the upper limit of the 95% confidence interval for the mean difference in AHI was high at 5.987.The mean duration of apnea on the second night was significantly prolonged compared to that on the first night, but there were no significant differences n 3% oxygen desaturation index, saturation of percutaneous oxygen<90% time. On the second night, total sleep time was significantly prolonged, mid-night awakenings decreased, REM sleep percentage increased, and REM latency was shorter. Because the environment for PSG testing is very different from the patient's home and many patients have difficulty sleeping, there are clinical cases in which PSG is performed with sleep medication. In this study, PSG after oral administration of 15 mg of suvorexant on the second night showed no significant difference or clear trend in AHI. However, the upper limit of the 95% confidence interval for the mean difference in AHI was greater than 5, suggesting that suvorexant may exacerbate AHI, even with the first administration.

BACKGROUND: The increasing prevalence of lung cancer in the elderly population necessitates a closer evaluation of diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. This study aimed to compare the safety and diagnostic efficacy of transbronchial lung cryobiopsy (TBLC) between patients ≥ 80 years and younger patients. METHODS: A retrospective review was conducted of 96 patients diagnosed with peripheral lung cancer who underwent TBLC between April 2021 and October 2023. The patients were categorized into two groups: the elderly group (age ≥ 80 years, n = 20) and younger group (age < 80 years; n = 76). Data regarding the biopsy yield, complications, and feasibility of molecular analyses were collected and analyzed. RESULTS: The diagnostic yield of TBLC was comparable between the elderly and younger groups (95% vs. 89.5%, p = 0.679). Biomarker testing, including programmed death-ligand 1 expression and genetic mutations, were feasible in all cases diagnosed with cancer using TBLC samples. No significant differences were observed in major complications such as pneumothorax or bleeding. CONCLUSIONS: TBLC was found to be a safe and effective diagnostic tool for peripheral lung cancer in elderly patients and provided adequate samples for molecular testing. Since the complication rates did not significantly differ between the two age groups, age alone should not be considered a contraindication for the procedure.

BACKGROUND: Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) play a central role in cancer immunotherapy. However, the occurrence of immune-related adverse events, especially ICI-induced interstitial lung disease (ICI-ILD), is life-threatening and affects the effectiveness of ICI treatment. This study aimed to explore potential drugs to mitigate ICI-ILD occurrence using data from the Japanese Adverse Drug Event Report (JADER) and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS [JAPIC AERS]). RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: We investigated concomitant drugs that reduce ILD associated with four ICIs - nivolumab, pembrolizumab, atezolizumab, and durvalumab - across the JADER and FAERS databases. Subsequently, the identified common concomitant drugs that reduce the occurrence of ICI-ILD were detected and analyzed. RESULTS: We found omega-3 fatty acids, loperamide, and amlodipine as common concomitant drugs that reduced ICI-ILD occurrence in both the JADER and FAERS databases. Omega-3 fatty acids reportedly have many effects in animal models of drug-induced ILD, including their association with ILD in humans and anti-inflammatory effects against ICI-ILD. However, loperamide and amlodipine reportedly have minimal effects against ILD, thereby necessitating further evaluation. CONCLUSION: Omega-3 fatty acids have emerged as potential agents for reducing ICI-ILD occurrence, as evidenced by findings from two different pharmacovigilance databases.

Cytology, a type of pathological examination, involves sampling cells from the human body and observing the morphology of the nucleus, cytoplasm, and cell arrangement. In developing classification AI technologies to support cytology, it is essential to collect and utilize a diverse range of images without bias. However, this is often challenging in practice because of the epidemiologic bias of cancer types and cellular characteristics. The main aim of this study was to develop a method to generate cytological diagnostic images from image findings using text-to-image technology in order to generate diverse images. In the proposed method, we collected Papanicolaou-stained specimens derived from the lung cells of 135 lung cancer patients, from which we extracted 472 patch images. Descriptions of the corresponding findings for these patch images were compiled to create a data set. This dataset was then utilized to finetune the Stable Diffusion (SD) v1 and v2 models. The cell images generated by this method closely resemble real images, and both cytotechnologists and cytopathologists provided positive subjective evaluations. Furthermore, SDv2 demonstrated shapes and contours of nuclei and cytoplasm that were more similar to real images compared to SDv1, showing superior performance in quantitative evaluation metrics. When the generated images were utilized in the classification tasks for cytological images, there was an improvement in classification performance. These results indicate that the proposed method may be effective for generating high-quality cytological images, which enables the image classification model to learn diverse features, thereby improving classification performance.