Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to P Pugliese.
The M-Mode, two-dimensional echocardiographic and surgical findings of a ball-like thrombus floating freely in the left atrium are described in a patient with mitral stenosis. These echocardiographic features are so impressive that further diagnostic procedures are not required for operation.
In the period 1971-1981 220 children below 1 year of age have been operated upon in our Hospital for Congenital Heart Diseases (CHD). Among them, 125 children were selected, in whom, because of the type of CHD present, either a palliation or a correction could have been chosen as the surgical approach. The first three common malformation treated are presented.
A rare case of chylopericardium following correction of Total Anomalous Pulmonary Venous Drainage (TAPVD) in a 10 month old female child is presented. Conservative treatment was successfully adopted. The Authors review the English Literature concerning this unusual complication.
From 4,100 patients who had cardiac catheterization for congenital heart disease and " normocardia ", 6 were found to have a persistent left superior vena cava ( PLSVC ) and an absence of right superior vena cava ( RSVC ). Because of the rarity of this finding (1.46%) the clinical and surgical implications are considered. Four of them were successfully operated upon.
A technique of total pericardiectomy for chronic constrictive pericarditis is presented. The authors have used a femoro-femoral cardiopulmonary bypass in nine cases of constrictive pericarditis to prevent the complications of the traditional approach. The advantages of this technique in comparison to the performance of pericardiectomy without the use of extracorporeal circulation (ECC) or with standard ECC are discussed.
The myelopoietic growth factors, in particular G-CSF and GM-CSF have been available for clinical use for only a few years but they have already profoundly affected the management of chemotherapy-induced neutropenia, the use of dose-intensive chemotherapy regimens, and the practice and safety of autologous stem cell transplantation. While these growth factors have rapidly been introduced as routine agents in the management of cancer patients, they have continued to generate a considerable amount of basic research on the biology of hematopoiesis as well as on the growth regulation of normal and tumor cells. One attractive possibility offered by growth factors is to protect hemopoietic stem and progenitor cells from the toxic effects of chemotherapy, while not diminishing its anti-tumor action. Any means of preferentially and reversibly suppressing the proliferation of normal hemopoietic stem and progenitor cell while leaving unmodified the proliferation of tumor cells and their susceptibility to chemotherapy, could potentially optimize treatment efficacy. In the present paper, we have briefly discussed the possibility to use the myeloid growth factors as myeloprotective agents in the context of drug-intensified chemotherapy on the basis of the results obtained during some clinical trials recently conducted in patients with advanced cancer.