Fexofenadine is Efficacious and Safe in Children (Aged 6-11 Years) with Seasonal Allergic Rhinitis

Background: This is the first prospective, randomized, doubleblind, placebo-controlled study showing statistical improvement of an H1-antihistamine in children with seasonal allergic rhinitis in all symptoms throughout the entire treatment period. Objective: This randomized, placebo-controlled, parallelgroup,double-blind study was performed to assess the efficacy and safety of fexofenadine in children with seasonal allergic rhinitis. Methods: This study was conducted at 148 centers in 15 countries. Nine hundred thirty-five children (aged 6-11 years) were randomized and treated with either fexofenadine HCl 30 mg (n = 464) or placebo (n = 471) tablets twice a day for 14 days. Individual symptoms (sneezing; rhinorrhea; itchy nose, mouth, throat, and/or ears; itchy, watery, and/or red eyes; and nasal congestion) were assessed at baseline and then daily at 7:00 AM and 7:00 PM (±1 hour) during the double-blind treatment period. Each total symptom score was the sum of all symptoms, excluding nasal congestion. The primary efficacy variable was the change from baseline in the average of the daily 12-hour evening reflective total symptom scores throughout the double-blind treatment. Safety was evaluated from adverse-event reporting, vital signs, physical examinations, and clinical laboratory data at screening and study end point

Safety and Feasibility of Thoracic Malignancy Surgery During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has decreased surgical activity, particularly in the field of oncology, because of the suspicion of a higher risk of COVID-19–related severe events. This study aimed to investigate the feasibility and safety of thoracic cancer surgery in the most severely affected European and Canadian regions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: The study investigators prospectively collected data on surgical procedures for malignant thoracic diseases from January 1 to April 30, 2020. The study included patients from 6 high-volume thoracic surgery departments: Nancy and Strasbourg (France), Freiburg (Germany), Milan and Turin (Italy), and Montreal (Canada). The centers involved in this research are all located in the most severely affected regions of those countries. An assessment of COVID-19–related symptoms, polymerase chain reaction (PCR)–confirmed COVID-19 infection, rates of hospital and intensive care unit admissions, and death was performed for each patient. Every deceased patient was tested for COVID-19 by PCR. Results: In the study period, 731 patients who underwent 734 surgical procedures were included. In the whole cohort, 9 cases (1.2%) of COVID-19 were confirmed by PCR, including 5 in-hospital contaminants. Four patients (0.5%) needed readmission for oxygen requirements. In this subgroup, 2 patients (0.3%) needed intensive care unit and mechanical ventilatory support. The total number of deaths in the whole cohort was 22 (3%). A single death was related to COVID-19 (0.14%). Conclusions: Maintaining surgical oncologic activity in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic seems safe and feasible, with very low postoperative morbidity or mortality. To continue to offer the best care to patients who do not have COVID-19, reports on other diseases are urgently needed

Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition and Senescence in the Retinal Pigment Epithelium of NFE2L2/PGC-1 alpha Double Knock-Out Mice

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the most prevalent form of irreversible blindness worldwide in the elderly population. In our previous studies, we found that deficiencies in the nuclear factor, erythroid 2 like 2 (NFE2L2) and peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma coactivator 1-alpha (PGC-1 alpha) genes caused AMD-like pathological phenotypes in mice. In the present work, we show hijacked epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) due to the common loss of PGC-1 alpha and NFE2L2 (double knock-out, dKO) genes in aged animals. The implanted area was assessed by histology, immunohistochemistry and transmission electron microscopy. Confocal microscopy revealed altered regions in the filamentous actin ring. This contrasted with hexagonal RPE morphology in wild-type mice. The ultrastructural RPE features here illustrated loss of apical microvilli, alteration of cell-cell contact, loss of basal in-folding with deposits on Bruch's membrane, and excessive lipofuscin deposition in dKO samples. We also found the expression of epithelial-mesenchymal transition transcription factors, such as Snail, Slug, collagen 1, vimentin and OB-cadherin, to be significantly different in dKO RPEs. An increased immunoreactivity of senescence markers p16, DEC1 and HMGB1 was also noted. These findings suggest that EMT and senescence pathways may intersect in the retinas of dKO mice. Both processes can be activated by damage to the RPE, which may be caused by increased oxidative stress resulting from the absence of NFE2L2 and PGC-1 alpha genes, important for antioxidant defense. This dKO model may provide useful tools for studying AMD pathogenesis and evaluating novel therapies for this disease

Transmembrane Prostatic Acid Phosphatase (TMPAP) Interacts with Snapin and Deficient Mice Develop Prostate Adenocarcinoma

Peer reviewe

An MBO scheme for minimizing the graph Ohta-Kawasaki functional

We study a graph based version of the Ohta-Kawasaki functional, which was originally introduced in a continuum setting to model pattern formation in diblock copolymer melts and has been studied extensively as a paradigmatic example of a variational model for pattern formation. Graph based problems inspired by partial differential equations (PDEs) and varational methods have been the subject of many recent papers in the mathematical literature, because of their applications in areas such as image processing and data classification. This paper extends the area of PDE inspired graph based problems to pattern forming models, while continuing in the tradition of recent papers in the field. We introduce a mass conserving Merriman-Bence-Osher (MBO) scheme for minimizing the graph Ohta-Kawasaki functional with a mass constraint. We present three main results: (1) the Lyapunov functionals associated with this MBO scheme Γ-converge to the Ohta-Kawasaki functional (which includes the standard graph based MBO scheme and total variation as a special case); (2) there is a class of graphs on which the Ohta-Kawasaki MBO scheme corresponds to a standard MBO scheme on a transformed graph and for which generalized comparison principles hold; (3) this MBO scheme allows for the numerical computation of (approximate) minimizers of the graph Ohta-Kawasaki functional with a mass constraint

B-cell growth factor: distinction from t-cell growth factor and b-cell maturation factor.

A T-cell hybridoma was derived by somatic cell hybridization between concanavalin A-activated BALB/c spleen cells and the AKR thymoma BW 5147. Media conditioned by hybridoma cells, even at high dilutions (1:1,000) support the growth of lipopolysaccharide-stimulated B-cell blasts but not that of T-cell growth factor (TCGF)-reactive T-cells. This activity, herein designated B-cell growth factor (BCGF), has a Mr of approximately equal to 20,000 and it can readily be separated from TCGF (Mr approximately equal to 30,000) by gel filtration. BCGF is constitutively produced by the hybridoma cells, it is removed from conditioned media by incubation with target cells at +4 degrees C, and it is equally effective on B-cell blasts carrying different major histocompatibility complex and Ig haplotypes. BCGF shows no T-cell replacing factor (TRF) activity, and it is poor in supporting the development of Ig-secreting plaque-forming cells in B-cell blast cultures. Terminal maturation, however, can be induced in BCGF-dependent blasts by addition of conditioned media from normal helper T cell cultures, suggesting that two distinct factors are involved in the helper cell-dependent growth and maturation of B lymphocytes