All clinical trials

This study intends to use in patients with renal tissue and blood samples, screening and identification of renal tissue hURAT1 regulating the expression of micro-RNA, for further study of uric acid stone formation mechanism and the occurrence of clinical preventive uric acid stones provide new clues and new intervention targets.

To develop a simple blood and urine test that we would perform before patients start their treatment to predict the risk that their bladder cancer might come back. To develop this test the investigators plan to analyze blood, urine and cancer tissue from bladder cancer patients and follow them closely during and after treatment. This will include looking for changes in proteins and genes that might play a role in bladder cancer biology. The investigators will then compare the information obtained from the studies of blood, urine and cancer tissue between patients that are cured and those whose cancer comes back. The knowledge about these differences between patients can then potentially be used to develop a blood or urine test to tell us who has a high risk for having bladder cancer come back.

This study objective is to assess the nutritional status of Patients With Congestive Heart Failure.

This is a case-control study involving one medical center and one research institute to develop a data-set containing a minimum of 100 osteoarthritis cases, minimum of 100 independent controls of similar gender ratio and a minimum of 100 disease controls (cases with hip and/or knee OA) to associate DNA sequence (allelic) variations in candidate genes with osteoarthritis phenotypes. This study is intended to begin at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences at Academia Sinica (which includes National Genotyping Center (NGC) and National Clinical Core (NCC)), National Taiwan University Hospital.

We are conducting a study to evaluate two investigational devices that may help us better monitor discomfort or pain in anesthetized patients during minimally invasive lung surgery. We want to collect information on how people respond to pain related to their surgery. Currently, we use blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR) to check the response to pain. In this study, we will also use two devices called the Medasense PMD-100 and PhysioDoloris monitors to look at measurements of pain. We will compare the measurements from the study devices to the measurements of heart rate and blood pressure. We hope to enroll about 40 subjects in this study at the University of Washington Medical Center.

Clinical outcomes of chronic type B aortic dissections are unknown, especially in case of false lumen expansion and risk of rupture. Data of literature give us some indications about prognosis. The 1-year survival rate is about 80%, but we deplore the 25% rate of mortality at 3 years despite follow-up.The only known predictive factors are the initial diameter of more than 4 cm and the persistence of a false lumen patent.However, actual means of follow-up do not allow to predict severe complications. The aim of the sudy is to propose a diagnostic and preventive strategy for the follow-up of chronic type B aortic dissections treated medically. The primary objective is then to evaluate the prognostic role of 18-FDG-PET Scan in such patients in order to predict the risk of aortic diameter growth of more than 5 mm in 1 year and/or of an aortic dissections extension at 1 year. The secondary objectives are to evaluate the link between fibrosis biomarkers MMP et TIMP) and the results of imaging results (evolution of diameter and extension and results of PET-Scan imaging) Methods: 100 patients to be included in 3 years History of chronic type B aortic dissection, treated medically, evolving since more than 1 month and less than 5 years. Expected results: Prognostic contribution of 18FDG-PET-Scan and biomarkers for the identification of patients at high risk of evolution. Elaboration of a decisional algorithm about follow-up modalities of chronic aortic dissections. Demonstration of a correlation between aortic diameter growth or aortic dissection extension and intensity of marker fixation with 18-FDG-PET-Scan.

Infectious disease is the single biggest cause of death worldwide. New infectious agents,such as the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus and new strains of influenza continually emerge and require new investigations to understand pathogen biology and pathogenesis in the host. Witness the Influenza A pandemic. Concerns about new viruses and their impact on health and the economy are also increasing. Current alerts sent out by the Ministry of Health (about the novel coronavirus and the Avian influenza A virus) are but cases in point. These likely reflect advances in science, which have allowed novel pathogens to be identified. Because of its geography, Singapore is vulnerable to new pathogens through importation or the global travel of its citizens. Hence we must be ever ready to meet unexpected challenges anytime. On the administrative front, Singapore General Hospital has a Disease Outbreak Task-force which has in place many plans that can be activated should there be a large-scale epidemic. What is missing thus far is a program that will enable us to perform scientific studies in the setting of an epidemic. Hence in this study, we will, in collaboration with the Program in Emerging Infectious Diseases (EID) in Duke-National University of Singapore Postgraduate Medical School, attempt to (i) detect novel, previously undescribed pathogens; (ii) characterize viruses (not necessarily novel but emerging and re-emerging) that are raising concern or causing clusters or epidemics in the hospital and/or country; (iii) characterize immune responses to such viruses in healthcare workers as well as patients (those affected by these viruses and those exposed to the affected). The techniques that will be used will be those not routinely available in a hospital's service labs. Some patients will remain undiagnosable with the best available technology. Since new laboratory tools that can detect previously undiagnosed pathogens may become available in the future, the study also aims to archive specimens from patients whose illnesses remain undiagnosed.

Transversus abdominis (TrA) and lumbar multifidus (LM) muscle have been proposed to play key role in stability of the lumbosacral spine. The muscles' functional and/or structural deficits have been linked to the low back pain (LBP) syndrome. Evaluation of the transversus abdominis and lumbar multifidus muscles' function in clinical practice is scarce and not well defined due to number of reasons. Surface electromyography of TrA and LM muscles, as a method of examining muscles function, is not involved in clinical routine. Rehabilitative Ultrasound Imaging (RUSI) of the TrA and LM, apart from providing information about their morphology, could be helpful in assessing their function. Since concentric muscle contraction results in the shortening and thickening of the muscle, evaluation of the potential association between muscle's morphometry, assessed by the ultrasound, and electromyography, may be of potential clinical interest. However, this potential relationship is context-dependant. Our aim was to establish the difference in the thickness change of the TrA and LM muscle during activation in subjects with and without low back pain, and to establish the possible correlation between electromyography and the thickness change of these muscles assessed by ultrasound in both groups of subjects.

The complete blood count is a commonly performed blood test, and previous small studies have suggested that the counts of some types of white blood cell in the complete blood count may be related to the onset of cardiovascular diseases such as stroke and heart attack. This is of interest because this information may help to predict strokes or heart attacks and may guide new therapies which act on white blood cells to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. The hypothesis is that counts of particular types of white blood cell are associated with a range of cardiovascular diseases.

Lots of studies suggest that children with ADHD have deficits in facial emotion recognition, especially for the negative emotion. But there were arguments for this deficit is a secondary problem due to the general attention impairment in ADHD, or a specific social cognitive processing to ADHD. The objectives of this study are to investigate that association between the deficits in facial emotion recognition and the emotional attention processing in ADHD. In this study, the investigators use the emotion attentional bias and emotional go / no go paradigm to answer this question.