Acute pancreatitis and hyperamylasemia in renal homograft recipients.

In a series of 301 renal homograft recipients, 17 (5.6%) had acute pancreatitis at some time after transplantation. Eleven of these patients died, for a mortality of 64.7%. In each instance, pancreatitis was a major factor in a complex chain of lethal events to which immunosuppression invariably contributed. An additional 43 patients (14.3%) developed asymptomatic hyperamylasemia after transplantation and, undoubtedly, some of these recipients also had pancreatitis. The factors causing pancreatitis in the renal transplantation patient include uremia, hyperparathyroidism, pancreatic injury by drugs, infections resulting from chronic immunosuppression, gallstones, and operative trauma to the pancreas. In cases of preexisting pancreatitis, transplantation is not necessarily precluded, but efforts should be made to find a specific cause of the pancreatitis and take corrective measures, such as biliary tract surgery or parathyroidectomy if indicated, in advance of transplantation

Dose reconstruction including dynamic six-degree of freedom motion during prostate radiotherapy

© Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd. An in-house developed program for real-time reconstruction of motion-induced dose errors, DoseTracker, was extended to handle rotational target motion in addition to the previously implemented translational motion, and applied offline for prostate VMAT treatments. For translational motion, the motion-induced errors of DoseTracker were in good agreement with ground truth dose reconstructions performed in a commercial treatment planning system. For rotational motion, no ground truth was available, but DoseTracker showed that the VMAT dose is highly robust against static interfractional rotations but quite sensitive to dynamic intrafraction rotations due to interplay effects between target motion and machine motion

Is there a role for publication consultants and how should their contribution be recognized?

When a scientific paper, dissertation or thesis is published the author(s) have a duty to report who has contributed to the work. This recognition can take several forms such as authorship, relevant acknowledgments and by citing previous work. There is a growing industry where publication consultants will work with authors, research groups or even institutions to help get their work published, or help submit their dissertation/thesis. This help can range from proof reading, data collection, analysis (including statistics), helping with the literature review and identifying suitable journals/conferences. In this opinion article we question whether these external services are required, given that institutions should provide this support and that experienced researchers should be qualified to carry out these activities. If these services are used, we argue that their use should at least be made transparent either by the consultant being an author on the paper, or by being acknowledged on the paper, dissertation or thesis. We also argue that publication consultants should provide an annual return that details the papers, dissertations and thesis that they have consulted on

Resolving issues with environmental impact assessment of marine renewable energy installations

ArticleThis Document is Protected by copyright and was first published by Frontiers. All rights reserved. it is reproduced with permission.Growing concerns about climate change and energy security have fueled a rapid increase in the development of marine renewable energy installations (MREIs). The potential ecological consequences of increased use of these devices emphasizes the need for high quality environmental impact assessment (EIA). We demonstrate that these processes are hampered severely, primarily because ambiguities in the legislation and lack of clear implementation guidance are such that they do not ensure robust assessment of the significance of impacts and cumulative effects. We highlight why the regulatory framework leads to conceptual ambiguities and propose changes which, for the most part, do not require major adjustments to standard practice. We emphasize the importance of determining the degree of confidence in impacts to permit the likelihood as well as magnitude of impacts to be quantified and propose ways in which assessment of population-level impacts could be incorporated into the EIA process. Overall, however, we argue that, instead of trying to ascertain which particular developments are responsible for tipping an already heavily degraded marine environment into an undesirable state, emphasis should be placed on better strategic assessment.Technology Strategy Boar

5-Formylcytosine can be a stable DNA modification in mammals.

5-Formylcytosine (5fC) is a rare base found in mammalian DNA and thought to be involved in active DNA demethylation. Here, we show that developmental dynamics of 5fC levels in mouse DNA differ from those of 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC), and using stable isotope labeling in vivo, we show that 5fC can be a stable DNA modification. These results suggest that 5fC has functional roles in DNA that go beyond being a demethylation intermediate.This work was supported by the Cancer Research UK (C14303/A17197, S.B.), The Wellcome Trust (WT099232, S.B.; WT095645/Z/11/Z, W.R.) and the BBSRC (BB/K010867/1, W.R.).This is the accepted manuscript. It is currently embargoed pending publication