Crohn's disease and risk of fracture: does thyroid disease play a role?

AIM: To assess the role of thyroid disease as a risk for fractures in Crohn's patients.METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted from 1998 to 2000. The study group consisted of 210 patients with Crohn's disease. A group of 206 patients without inflammatory bowel disease served as controls. Primary outcome was thyroid disorder. Secondary outcomes included use of steroids, immunosuppressive medications, surgery and incidence of fracture.RESULTS: The prevalence of hyperthyroidism was similar in both groups. However, the prevalence of hypothyroidism was lower in Crohn's patients (3.8 % vs 8.2 %, P=0.05).Within the Crohn's group, the use of immunosuppressive agents (0 % vs11 %), steroid usage (12.5 % vs37 %), small bowel surgery (12.5 % vs 28 %) and large bowel surgery (12.5 % vs27 %) were lower in the hypothyroid subset as compared to the euthyroid subset. Seven (3.4 %) Crohn'spatients suffered fracture, all of whom were euthyroid.CONCLUSION: Thyroid disorder was not found to be associated with Crohn's disease and was not found to increase the risk for fractures. Therefore, screening for thyroid disease is not a necessary component in the management of Crohn's disease.

Long term omeprazole therapy for reflux esophagitis:follow-up in serum gastrin levels,EC cell hyperplasia and neoplasia

AIM To evaluate the long-term safety ofomeprazole in patients of gastroesophagealreflux disease resistant to treatment with H2receptor antagonist.METHODS We prospectively followed 33patients on omeprazole therapy for severeerosive esophagitis for 5-8 years,with periodicgastrin levels,H.pylori infection,gastricbiopsies for incidence of ECL cell hyperplasia,carcinoids,gastric atrophy and neoplasia.Atotal 185 patient follow-up years and 137 gastricbiopsies were done.RESULTS Among the 33 patients,36% reachedtheir peak gastrin levels in an average of 8months to one year,then drifted Down slowlyover 1-2 year period to just above their baselinelevel,24% of the patients had a peak gastrinlevel above 400ng·L^1 and one patient had apeak level above 1000 ng·L^1.One patient had amild ECL cell hyperplasia which was self limitingand did not show any dysplastic changes.Eighteen percent of patients were positive forH.pylori infection.The gastric biopsies did notshow gastric atrophy,intestinal metaplasia orneoplastic changes.CONCLUSION In a series of 33 patients followed for 5 - 8 years on omeprazole therapy for severe reflux esophagitis, we did not observe any evidence of significant ECL cell hyperplasia, gastric atrophy, intestinal metaplasia, dysplasia or neoplastic changes.

Vehicle Positioning Based on Optical Camera Communication in V2I Environments

Demand for precise vehicle positioning(VP)increases as autonomous vehicles have recently been drawing attention.This paper proposes a scheme for positioning vehicles on the move based on optical camera communication(OCC)technology in the vehicle-to-infrastructure(V2I)environment.Light-emitting diode(LED)streetlights and vehicle cameras are used as transmitters and receivers respectively.Regions of streetlights are detected and traced by examining images that are obtained from cameras of vehicles.Then,a scheme for analyzing visible light data extracted from the images is proposed.The proposed vehicle positioning scheme uses information on angles between vectors that are formed under the collinearity conditions between the absolute coordinates of at least three received streetlights,and the coordinates of an image sensor.The experiments are performed under stationary state and moving state at a speed of 5 and 20 km/h.To verify the reliability of the proposed scheme,a comparison is made between the actual and estimated location of the camera in the stationary state.In addition,the path of a moving vehicle and the estimated path of the vehicle are compared to check the performance of the scheme.The performance of the proposed technique is analyzed and experimental demonstration confirms that the proposed OCC-based VP scheme achieves positioning accuracy of under 1 m.