Browsing by Subject "Alcohol abuse"

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    Gardnerella vaginalis causing pulmonary infection in a young adult: A novel case
    (Elsevier, 2019-07-25) Bittar, Julie M.; Gazzetta, Joshua; Surgery, School of Medicine
    Gardnerella vaginalis is an anaerobic, gram-variable bacterium primarily found in vaginal microflora of women. Previous reports of G. vaginalis cultured in men are few and have primarily been limited to the gastrointestinal and genitourinary tract.2-4 Few reports of G. vaginalis causing severe infections have been reported in the literature, including septicemia7 and two cases of perinephric abscess.8,9 There has been one previously reported case of G. vaginalis causing pulmonary complications that occurred in a male alcohol abuser. In our case review, we aim to demonstrate an unusual source of a pulmonary infection and highlight the importance of proper microbial isolation to guide treatment. Our patient is a young male who presented following multiple gunshot wounds including one to his head causing an intracranial hemorrhage, hydrocephalus, and a dural sinus thrombosis. His hospital course was complicated by a decline in neurological status treated with a craniotomy and external drain placement and multiple pulmonary infections. During his fever work-ups, he found to have G. vaginalis on mini-bronchoalveolar lavage and was subsequently treated with metronidazole. After treating his G. vaginalis pneumonia and other infectious sources, namely Haemaphilus influenzae and coagulase-negative staphylococcus pneumonias, his fevers and leukocytosis resolved and he was successfully discharged to a rehabilitation facility for neurologic recovery. To our knowledge, this is the second reported case of G. vaginalis isolated from a pulmonary culture and the first in a previously healthy, immunocompetent young male outside of the urinary tract.
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    IS COGNITIVE FUNCTION IMPAIRED IN A RODENT MODEL OF ALCOHOLISM?
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2012-04-13) Todd, Brianna M.; Lapish, Christopher C.
    Alcohol abuse is a major problem in society resulting in issues of health, family, and economics. The relationship between an individual’s genetic makeup and their environment is becoming a primary focus of preclinical and clinical research that seeks to understand the etiology of alcoholism. Ex-cessive drinking may be the result of the inability of advanced forms of cog-nition to properly govern behavior, and the current proposal explored this possibility. This study used Wistar and alcohol preferring rats (P-rats) to in-vestigate the relationship between the phenotypic vulnerability for alcohol-ism and its relationship to cognitive functions. Rats were given four weeks of intermittent alcohol access and completed a cognitively demanding task known as operant set-shifting. The effects of prior alcohol exposure in vul-nerable versus non-vulnerable phenotypes was examined. Thus far no dif-ferences between lines have been observed in the ability to learn a new task that gauges function of the prefrontal cortex. These data are inconclusive and require further analysis, but may indicate that the cognitive task is not demanding enough to show differences in prefrontal cortex functioning. Re-sults from the drinking study confirmed that alcohol drinking significantly in-creased over the four weeks of testing for P-rats, but not Wistars. P-rats also significantly increased ethanol consumption measured during the first 30 minutes of access throughout the drinking protocol. Results from this study show how future tests could improve our current understanding of the rela-tionship between alcohol abuse and cognition and can help guide future re-search to better understand this disease. School of Science Start-up funds and RSFG to C. Lapish. UROP to B. Todd
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    Underlying Neurobiological and Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Impulsivity in Risk-Taking Behaviors
    (MDPI, 2020-03-25) Cyders, Melissa A.; Psychology, School of Science
    Impulsivity has been widely implicated in many maladaptive risk-taking and clinical disorders associated with such behaviors [1,2], and may be the most frequently noted criteria in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders [3] across a wide variety of disorder classes [4] [...].