Evaluation of pedagogical-therapeutic measures in practice. Insight into the SCAP project

Das SCAP stellt im luxemburgischen Bildungssystem ein pädagogisch-therapeutisches Angebot im obligatorischen Bildungssystem zur Verfügung. SCAP steht für «Service de Consultation et d’Aide pour troubles de l’Attention, de la Perception et du développement Psychomoteur» - zu Deutsch: Beratungs- und Unterstützungsstelle bei Störungen der Aufmerksamkeit, der Wahrnehmung und der psychomotorischen Entwicklung. Zielgruppe sind Kinder und Jugendliche zwischen 4 und 18 Jahren mit Aufmerksamkeitsschwierigkeiten, Wahrnehmungsschwierigkeiten oder psychomotorischen Schwierigkeiten. Das SCAP intendiert für eine allgemeine Qualitätsverbesserung das Konzept der Einrichtung hinsichtlich des pädagogisch-therapeutischen Angebots zu überarbeiten. Um diese Anpassung datenbasiert vorzunehmen, soll zunächst die aktuelle Arbeit evaluiert werden, was die Möglichkeit eröffnet, die Wirksamkeit und Nachhaltigkeit von psychomotorischen und weiteren pädagogisch-therapeutischen Maßnahmen im Feld nachzuzeichnen. Der Beitrag stellt das Projektdesign vor. Zudem wird skizziert, welche Maßnahmen auf Basis welcher Indikation vom SCAP geplant und eingesetzt werden, sowie welche Entwicklungen die Kinder während der Wartezeit vor Therapiebeginn im SCAP durchlaufen. (DIPF/Orig.)The SCAP (Service de Consultation et d’Aide pour troubles de l’Attention, de la Perception et du développement Psychomoteur) provides a pedagogical-therapeutic offering within the Luxembourgish education system. SCAP translates to “Consultation and Support Service for Attention, Perception, and Psychomotor Development Disorders.” The target audience consists of children and adolescents aged 4 to 18 with difficulties in attention, perception, or psychomotor development. SCAP aims to adapt and revise the concept of the facility in terms of its pedagogical-therapeutic offerings for a general improvement in quality. To make data-driven adjustments, the current work will be evaluated initially, providing the opportunity to trace the effectiveness and sustainability of psychomotor and other pedagogical-therapeutic measures in the field. This contribution introduces the project design and outlines the measures planned and implemented by SCAP based on specific indications. Additionally, it highlights the developments that children undergo during the waiting period before therapy begins at SCAP. (DIPF/Orig.

p53 is associated with high-risk and pinpointsTP53missense mutations in mantle cell lymphoma

Survival for patients diagnosed with mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) has improved drastically in recent years. However, patients carrying mutations in tumour protein p53 (TP53) do not benefit from modern chemotherapy-based treatments and have poor prognosis. Thus, there is a clinical need to identify missense mutations through routine analysis to enable patient stratification. Sequencing is not widely implemented in clinical practice for MCL, and immunohistochemistry (IHC) is a feasible alternative to identify high-risk patients. The aim of the present study was to investigate the accuracy of p53 as a tool to identify patients withTP53missense mutations and the prognostic impact of overexpression and mutations in a Swedish population-based cohort. In total, 317 cases were investigated using IHC and 255 cases were sequenced, enabling analysis of p53 andTP53status among 137 cases divided over the two-cohort investigated. The accuracy of predicting missense mutations from protein expression was 82%, with sensitivity at 82% and specificity at 100% in paired samples. We further show the impact of p53 expression andTP53mutations on survival (hazard ratio of 3 center dot 1 in univariate analysis for both), and the association to risk factors, such as high MCL International Prognostic Index, blastoid morphology and proliferation, in a population-based setting.Peer reviewe

Mantle Cell Lymphoma: Contemporary Diagnostic and Treatment Perspectives in the Age of Personalized Medicine.

Mantle cell lymphoma is a clinically heterogeneous disease occurring within a heterogeneous patient population, highlighting a need for personalized therapy to ensure optimal outcomes. It is therefore critical to understand the benefits and risks associated with both intensive and deintensified approaches. In the following review we provide a therapeutic roadmap to strategically guide treatment for newly diagnosed and relapsed/refractory patients highlighting pivotal and recently published results involving known and novel therapies

Towards a Reproducible Synthesis of High Aspect Ratio Gold Nanorods

The seed-mediated method in presence of high concentrations of CTAB is frequently implemented in the preparation of high aspect ratio gold nanorods (i.e., nanorods with aspect ratios of 5 or more); however, the reproducibility has still been limited. We rendered the synthesis procedure simpler, decreased the susceptibility to impurities, and improved the reproducibility of the product distribution. As a result of the high aspect ratios, longitudinal plasmon absorptions were shifted up to very high absorption maxima of 1955 nm in UV-vis-NIR spectra (since this band is completely covered in aqueous solution by the strong absorption of water, the gold species were embedded in poly(vinyl alcohol) films for UV-vis-NIR measurements). Finally, the directed particle growth in (110) direction leads to the conclusion that the adsorption of CTAB molecules at specific crystal faces accounts for nanorod growth and not cylindrical CTAB micelles, in agreement with other observations

Affective State Prediction from Smartphone Touch and Sensor Data in the Wild

Knowledge of users’ affective states can improve their interaction with smartphones by providing more personalized experiences (e.g., search results and news articles). We present an affective state classification model based on data gathered on smartphones in real-world environments. From touch events during keystrokes and the signals from the inertial sensors, we extracted two-dimensional heat maps as input into a convolutional neural network to predict the affective states of smartphone users. For evaluation, we conducted a data collection in the wild with 82 participants over 10 weeks. Our model accurately predicts three levels (low, medium, high) of valence (AUC up to 0.83), arousal (AUC up to 0.85), and dominance (AUC up to 0.84). We also show that using the inertial sensor data alone, our model achieves a similar performance (AUC up to 0.83), making our approach less privacy-invasive. By personalizing our model to the user, we show that performance increases by an additional 0.07 AUC

Programmed death 1 signaling on chronic myeloid leukemia-specific T cells results in T-cell exhaustion and disease progression

Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) is a malignant myeloproliferative disease with a characteristic chronic phase (cp) of several years before progression to blast crisis (bc). The immune system may contribute to disease control in CML. We analyzed leukemia-specific immune responses in cpCML and bcCML in a retroviral-induced murine CML model. In the presence of cpCML and bcCML expressing the glycoprotein of lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus as a model leukemia antigen, leukemia-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) became exhausted. They maintained only limited cytotoxic activity, and did not produce interferon-gamma or tumor necrosis factor-alpha or expand after restimulation. CML-specific CTLs were characterized by high expression of programmed death 1 (PD-1), whereas CML cells expressed PD-ligand 1 (PD-L1). Blocking the PD-1/PD-L1 interaction by generating bcCML in PD-1-deficient mice or by repetitive administration of alphaPD-L1 antibody prolonged survival. In addition, we found that PD-1 is up-regulated on CD8(+) T cells from CML patients. Taken together, our results suggest that blocking the PD-1/PD-L1 interaction may restore the function of CML-specific CTLs and may represent a novel therapeutic approach for CML