A 6-year-review of patients who presented with recurrent respiratory papillomatosis (RRP) to our hospital from January 1996 to December 2001 was carried out. Ten cases were identified, of which six were juvenile-onset RRP. Hoarseness was the most common symptom, noted in nine (90%) patients. Other clinical presentations included cough, stridor and aphonia. All patients had glottic papillomas; two had multiple sites of involvement. One patient underwent a tracheostomy that revealed papillomas over the trachea, bronchus and lung parenchyma. Half of the patients were Chinese. Of the six cases of juvenile-onset RRP, three patients were Malay, two Chinese and one Indian. Three Chinese and one German patient had adult-onset RRP. Among the juvenile-onset RRP cases, the mean age at presentation was 2 years, while for adult-onset RRP, it was 42 years. Juvenile-onset RRP was more common in females. There were more papillomas over more sites in patients with juvenile-onset RRP than with adult-onset disease. Subglottic involvement was noted in the juvenile-onset RRP cases. All patients were treated with CO2 laser therapy, but there was complete remission of the papillomas in only two cases.
Although the incidence of complications of otitis media that require surgical interventions has decreased substantially over the past few years, it is a prevailing condition for which clinicians should remain vigilant.
A four years review from June 1998 to June 2002 of traumatic facial nerve paralysis from temporal bone fractures that required surgical intervention is presented. The aim of this clinical presentation was to determine the current pattern of cases with traumatic facial paralysis which required surgical intervention at our center. There were six cases, of which four (66%) were longitudinal fractures, one each (17%) had transverse fracture and fracture over the lateral wall of mastoid. Hearing loss (83%) was the commonest associated clinical symptom. All cases underwent decompression via the transmastoid surgical approach. Intraoperative findings revealed oedema of facial nerve involving vertical segment and horizontal segment in three cases each respectively. Two cases had concomitant bony impingement. The facial nerve functions in four cases (66%) and one case recovered to House Brackmann grade 2 and 4, 12 months and 3 months respectively postsurgery. The case with transverse fracture remained as House Brackmann grade 5 after two years.
Leptospirosis is a potentially life-threatening zoonosis caused by pathogenic Leptospira. The major hurdle of the diagnosis of Leptospirosis lies in the issues associated with current methods of detection, which are time-consuming, tedious and the need for sophisticated, special equipments. Restrategizing the diagnostics of Leptospirosis may involve considerations of the direct detection of the outer membrane protein, which can be faster, cost-saving and require fewer equipments. One such promising marker is LipL32, which is an antigen with high amino acid sequence conservation among all the pathogenic strains. In this study, we endeavored to isolate an aptamer against LipL32 protein via a modified SELEX strategy known as tripartite-hybrid SELEX, based on 3 different partitioning strategies. In this study, we also demonstrated the deconvolution of the candidate aptamers by using in-house Python-aided unbiased data sorting in examining multiple parameters to isolate potent aptamers. We have successfully generated an RNA aptamer against LipL32 of Leptospira, LepRapt-11, which is applicable in a simple direct ELASA for the detection of LipL32. LepRapt-11 can be a promising molecular recognition element for the diagnosis of leptospirosis by targeting LipL32.