L. Migirov, G. Borisovsky, E. Carmel, M. Wolf and J. Kronenberg
Background: Severe hearing impairment can have devastating effects on social integration and vocational opportunities.
Objectives: To investigate how well – or poorly – individuals who underwent cochlear implantation as children integrated into the general Israeli hearing community.
Method: We sent a questionnaire to the 30 subjects ≥ 18 years old who underwent cochlear implants our department from 1990 to 2004 when they were < 18 years of age and had used their device for at least 3 years before replying.
Results: Eighteen implant users responded (14 males), yielding a 60% response rate. Their mean age was 13.3 ± 7.0 years (range 6–17) at implantation and 21.1 ± 3.6 years (range 18–34) when they filled in the questionnaire. Five were attending rabbinical school (yeshiva students), four were in regular military service, five were university students (three also held jobs), two were attending high school, one was employed (and had a university degree), and one had left the yeshiva and was unemployed when he returned the questionnaire. Fourteen respondents use the oral communication mode for conversation and the other 4 use both oral and sign languages. Longer daily implant use was significantly associated with coping with the difficulties in the setting in which they were currently active, with a higher level of satisfaction with their current lifestyle and with recognition of the implant’s contribution to this satisfaction (P = 0.037, P = 0.019 and P = 0.001, respectively).
Conclusions: Advances in cochlear implant technologies enable profoundly deaf implanted children to integrate well into the Israeli hearing society, albeit with a large inter-subject variability.
D. Bendayan, K. Littman and V. Polansky
Background: Tuberculosis is the most common opportunistic infection among people infected with human immunodeficiency virus and its first cause of morbidity and mortality.
Objectives: To analyze the characteristics of a population in Israel with both tuberculosis disease and HIV infection in order to identify factors that contribute to outcome.
Methods: The study group comprised patients hospitalized in the Pulmonary and Tuberculosis Department of Shmuel Harofeh Hospital during the period January 2000 to December 2006. They were located by a computer search in the hospital registry and the pertinent data were collected.
Results: During the study period 1059 cases of active tuberculosis disease were hospitalized; 93 of them were co-infected with HIV. Most of them came from endemic countries (61.2% from Ethiopia and 20.4% from the former Soviet Union; none of them was born in Israel). Ten percent of the cases were multiple-drug resistant and 32% showed extrapulmonary involvement. The response rate to the treatment was good, and the median hospitalization time was 70 days. The mortality rate was 3.2%.
Conclusions: Despite the high prevalence of pulmonary disease in our group, the short-term outcome was good and the Mycobacterium was highly sensitive to first-line drugs. These encouraging results can be attributed to the fact that tuberculosis patients in Israel are identified early and treated continuously and strictly, with early initiation of antiretroviral therapy, which ensures that the development of drug resistance is low.
L. Perl, A. Weissler, Y.A. Mekori and A. Mor
Stem cell therapy has developed extensively in recent years, leading to several new clinical fields. The use of mesenchymal stromal cells sparks special interest, as it reveals the importance of the paracrine and immunomodulatory effects of these supporting cells, in disease and in cure. This review discusses our current understanding of the basic clinical principles of stem cell therapy and demonstrates the broad range of this treatment modality by examining two relatively new therapeutic niches – autoimmune and cardiac diseases.
G. Akler, P. Rotman Pikielny, E. Kots, S. Ish-Shalom and Y. Uziel