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Putting on weight in youngsters right after adenotonsillectomy: unwanted weight gain as well as catch-up growth?
Adjusted post-transplant mortality risk, conditional on one-year survival, was not statistically different in ACHD and DCM while ICM patients had 17% higher long-term mortality risk than DCM patients leading to overall worse outcomes in ICM patients. Therefore, ICM patients have poorer outcomes in comparison to both DCM and ACHD patients.The endothelial exocytosis of high-molecular-weight multimeric von Willebrand factor (vWF) may occur in critical illness states, including trauma and sepsis, leading to the sustained elevation and altered composition of plasma vWF. These critical illnesses involve the common process of sympathoadrenal activation and loss of the endothelial glycocalyx. As a prothrombotic and proinflammatory molecule that interacts with the endothelium, the alterations exhibited by vWF in critical illness have been implicated in the development and damaging effects of downstream pathologies, such as disseminated intravascular coagulation and systemic inflammatory response syndrome. Given the role of vWF in these pathologies, there has been a recent push to further understand how the molecule may be involved in the pathophysiology of related diseases, such as trauma-induced coagulopathy and acute renal injury, which are also known to develop secondarily to critical illness states. Elucidation of the role of vWF across the broader spectrum of generalized pathologies may provide a basis for the development of novel preventative and restorative measures, while also bolstering the scaffold of more widely used treatments, such as the administration of plasma-containing blood products.Aims Identifying DNA variants associated with trough serum anti-TNF levels could predict response to treatment in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). To date, no specific studies have been performed in children. The aim of this study was to identify genetic variants associated with trough serum anti-TNF levels and whether these variants are differential markers for infliximab and adalimumab. Methods We included 154 children (age less then 18 years) from 17 hospitals who had been diagnosed with IBD and actively treated with infliximab or adalimumab. Twenty-one polymorphisms were genotyped using real-time PCR. Trough serum anti-TNF levels were measured using ELISA. check details The association between DNA polymorphisms and the therapeutic range or the absolute values of anti-TNF drugs was analyzed by Fisher exact test, student's t test and logistic regression. Results The variants rs5030728 (TLR4) and rs11465996 (LY96) were associated with subtherapeutic infliximab levels. rs1816702 (TLR2) was associated with supratherapeutic levels and rs3397 (TNFRSF1B) with subtherapeutic levels of adalimumab (p less then 0.05). In addition, rs1816702 (TLR2) and rs2569190 (CD14) were associated with absolute values of trough serum adalimumab, and rs2569190 (CD14) was associated with absolute values of trough serum adalimumab and infliximab (p less then 0.05). Conclusion Genotyping of these DNA variants before starting treatment may help to select the best anti-TNF drug in pediatric patients. The SNP rs1816702 is the most promising marker for tailoring the anti-TNF regimen in children with IBD. For the first time DNA variants are associated with trough serum anti-TNF levels.Human health is strongly associated with person's lifestyle and levels of physical activity. Therefore, characterization of daily human activity is an important task. Accelerometers have been used to obtain precise measurements of body acceleration. Wearable accelerometers collect data as a three-dimensional time series with frequencies up to 100 Hz. Using such accelerometry signal, we are able to classify different types of physical activity. In our work, we present a novel procedure for physical activity classification based on the raw accelerometry signal. Our proposal is based on the spherical representation of the data. We classify four activity types resting, upper body activities (sitting), upper body activities (standing), and lower body activities. The classifier is constructed using decision trees with extracted features consisting of spherical coordinates summary statistics, moving averages of the radius and the angles, radius variance, and spherical variance. The classification accuracy of our method has been tested on data collected on a sample of 47 elderly individuals who performed a series of activities in laboratory settings. The achieved classification accuracy is over 90% when the subject-specific data are used and 84% when the group data are used. Main contributor to the classification accuracy is the angular part of the collected signal, especially spherical variance. To the best of our knowledge, spherical variance has never been previously used in the analysis of the raw accelerometry data. Its major advantage over other angular measures is its invariance to the accelerometer location shifts.Fabrication of cardiac tissue from human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPS-CMs) has received great interest, but a major challenge facing researchers is the alignment of cardiomyocytes in the same direction to optimize force generation. We have developed a novel method of fabricating a cardiac tissue-like construct with aligned cells based on the unidirectional stretching of an hiPS-CM sheet. A square cell sheet was harvested from a temperature-responsive culture dish and placed on a silicone surface, and an extending force was imposed on the silicone to stretch the cell sheet along one direction. To enable evaluation of cardiomyocyte morphology in vitro, a cell sheet was constructed by coculture of hiPS-CMs and human adipose-derived stem cells. In separate experiments, a stretched double-layered cell sheet constructed from hiPS-CMs alone was transplanted onto the muscle of an athymic rat, and its features were compared with those of a nonstretched (control) cell sheet. Immediately after stretching, the stretched cell sheet was significantly longer than the control cell sheet. Immunohistological analysis revealed that the cardiomyocytes showed unidirectional alignment in the stretched cell sheet but random directionality in the control cell sheet. Two weeks after transplantation, immunohistology demonstrated that the stretched cell sheet had retained the unidirectionality of its myocardial fibers and had an orientation intensity that was higher than that of the control cell sheet after transplantation or the stretched cell sheet before transplantation. Our technique provides a simple method of aligning an hiPS-CM-derived cardiac tissue-like construct without the use of a scaffold.
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