Casopis lekaru ceskych最新文献

Vocational rehabilitation plays a key role in the overall improvement of the quality of life for patients with chronic illness or after injury. Physicians have an important role in identifying suitable patients and recommending vocational rehabilitation as part of a comprehensive rehabilitation treatment. This article provides an overview of the use of vocational rehabilitation in the treatment of various patients with different types of illnesses and suggests criteria for selecting appropriate patients for involvement in vocational rehabilitation. The review presents the current state of vocational rehabilitation, its possibilities, limitations, and challenges for further development. One of the main challenges is the potential use of vocational rehabilitation for patients on temporary disability leave. Although employment law has allowed this possibility for 20 years, in practice, the tool of vocational rehabilitation has not yet been used for this group of individuals. The article also brings new findings revealed by research conducted within an experimental project that pilot tested the concept of so-called "vocational rehabilitation centers." The research showed, among other things, that the early involvement of individuals with disabilities in vocational rehabilitation, combined with a multidisciplinary approach, more than triples their chances of obtaining or retaining employment.

This study deals with the development and evaluation of healthcare districts, which were implemented in the territory of Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s and abolished in the early 1990s due to the reform of the Czech healthcare system in progress at the time. The author of the study examines the legal frame of healthcare districts, their real form and occupation and further the transformation of their structure over time. The study also evaluates the advantages and disadvantages of health districts from the perspective of the patient, the doctor and the state.

Drug induced akathisia is classified as an extrapyramidal adverse effect. Although akathisia is quite common extrapyramidal adverse effect, it is often overlooked or mistaken for restlessness or agitation of another etiology. Drugs associated with the risk of extrapyramidal adverse effects (antipsychotics, antiemetics, antidepressants) belong to frequently used pharmacotherapy. The use of these drugs is often complicated by serious condition of a patient and several other comorbidities, which increase the risk of the aforementioned adverse effects. In many situations, akathisia can be more difficult to recognize and more easily attributed to non-drug etiology, especially outside the fields of psychiatry and neurology. The variability of the clinical symptoms and the similarity to other clinical entities that occur frequently (anxiety, delirium, agitated depression, restless legs syndrome, etc.) can lead to difficult determination of the etiology and to the administration of medication, which tends to worsen the problem. At the same time, akathisia can be a source of very strong distress for a patient and fundamentally reduce his quality of life.

Tomáš Šídlo, a Czech physician active in Vienna in the second half of the 19th century, is among the less researched figures in Czech medicine. He was born in 1839 in Strážovice, in Western Bohemia, studied medicine at the Vienna Medical-Surgical Academy, where he earned his doctorate in general medicine in 1866. He specialized in laryngology and later also qualified in this field. He published works in Czech and German on diphtheria, stenosing respiratory diseases, and voice disorders. After serving in the military, he moved to civilian practice in 1889 and earned an excellent reputation as a general practitioner.

Many patients do not take their medication as prescribed by their physician, either intentionally or unintentionally. This phenomenon, most referred as nonadherence, leads to suboptimal treatment response and increased healthcare costs. To detect nonadherence, in addition to indirect methods, we also use direct methods that detect the presence of the drug in patient's body. However, by simple assessment based on the presence or the absence of a measurable concentration of the drug or its metabolite in a blood sample, it is difficult to distinguish complete adherence from partial adherence, i.e., a situation where the patient takes the drug irregularly, or from masked adherence, where the patient takes his medicine only once before a medical appointment. A possible refinement may be allowed using pharmacokinetic simulations, which estimate whether the measured value corresponds to the expected drug level after a single or short-term administration, or whether it represents steady state confirming long-term adherence. Not only an analysis of a parent drug, but also its metabolite with more favourable pharmacokinetic properties (especially with longer half-life) can be used. Since, in many cases, nonadherence can be caused by several different reasons, multiple approaches in its detection and management are required and a multidisciplinary approach should be involved.

A popliteal artery injury in a 12-year-old female patient, injured in the war conflict in Ukraine, proved to be serious, requiring surgical treatment, despite seemingly poor symptoms and the absence of subjective difficulties. The presentation of arterial injury without acute limb ischemia was atypical. The clinical picture of the lower limb in the sense of "pulseless pink" based on an arterial lesion is not common, but its underestimation can have permanent consequences for the patient.

Glycation plays a crucial role in the development of chronic vascular complications in diabetes. The total individual glycation is a result of interaction between proglycation and deglycation mechanisms and can be expressed by hemoglobin glycation index (HGI). There is increasing evidence that patients with higher glycation (and higher HGI) suffer from more frequent diabetic complications. In practice, it would therefore be advantageous to identify and treat such patients to stricter glycemic goals.

With the growing significance of artificial intelligence in healthcare, new perspectives are emerging in primary care. Diabetic retinopathy, a microvascular complication of diabetes mellitus, often remains unnoticed until patient is facing complications. Artificial intelligence presents a promising solution that can enhance the accessibility of diabetic retinopathy screening for a broader range of patients. The key challenge lies in successfully integrating the solution into clinical practice, a demanding process with multiple phases to ensure the resulting medical device is effective and safe for patient use. Aireen software uses artificial intelligence to perform diabetic retinopathy screening on retinal images captured by optical fundus cameras. The medical device complies with European Medical Device Regulation 2017/745 and was introduced to the market in 2023. Collaboration between physicians and the development team played a crucial role throughout the entire lifecycle of the medical device. Physicians were engaged in defining the intended use of the medical device, risk analysis, data annotation for training and software validation, as well as throughout a clinical trial. A clinical trial was conducted on 1,274 patients with type 1 and type 2 diabetes mellitus, where Aireen medical device achieved a sensitivity of 94.0% and a specificity of 90.7% compared to the reference evaluation. This clinical trial confirmed the potential of Aireen to enhance the availability of diabetic retinopathy screening and early disease detection.

Gene therapy is gradually becoming a mainstream treatment modality and is no longer the preserve of large university departments whose laboratories master nucleic acid analytical procedures and whose clinical teams manage its administration. It was originally designed for genetic diseases that, because of their prevalence, were a group known as rare diseases. Gene therapy has so far been applied in children to act before the disease development. These new treatments have also begun to be applied for common diseases such as metabolic disorders (e. g. diabetes) and even for those that are increasingly affecting us, such as various malignancies and diseases of the central nervous system (e. g. Alzheimer's disease). The targets targeted by GT are genes, where pathogenic alterations in the form of pathogenic variants (formerly mutations) induce phenotypic disorders, and our aim is either to knock them out of function (e. g. haemoglobinopathies) or to replace them with genes with normal function, which we introduce into the genome using one of the appropriate vectors, such as viruses or liposomes. The process of GT can take place directly inside the patient's body (in vivo) or outside the body on isolated cells (ex vivo), which are usually stem cells (iPSCs, induced pluripotent stem cell). After treatment, these cells are returned to the patient's body to fulfil their "destiny". In a broader sense, GT can target the product of gene transcription, which is the messenger RNA, or the end product of gene function, such as functional proteins (eg. cystic fibrosis). Any of these approaches have been used successfully in various diseases, depending on their availability, which is determined, among other things, by the costs associated with GT or the accessibility of the target tissue. Ultimately, it is not only the validation of the efficacy and safety of GT, but also economic reasons that determine why GT has been slow to develop and is mostly undertaken only by large and wealthy institutions. Another decisive factor is that from initial experimental work through clinical trials, the whole process of its development normally takes up to a decade.