Liver transplantation for patients with human immunodeficiency virus and hepatitis C virus coinfection with special reference to hemophiliac recipients in Japan.

Liver transplantation for patients with hepatitis C virus (HCV) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) remains challenging. The advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) for HIV has reduced mortality from opportunistic infection related to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome dramatically, while about 50% of patients die of end-stage liver cirrhosis resulting from HCV. In Japan, liver cirrhosis frequently develops after HCV-HIV coinfection resulting from previously transfused infected blood products for hemophilia. The problems of liver transplantation for those patients arise from the need to control calcineurin inhibitor with HAART drugs, the difficulty of using interferon after liver transplantation with HAART, and the need to control intraoperative coagulopathy associated with hemophilia. We review published reports of liver transplantation for these patients in the updated world literature

Live-attenuated vaccine sCPD9 elicits superior mucosal and systemic immunity to SARS-CoV-2 variants in hamsters

Vaccines play a critical role in combating the COVID-19 pandemic. Future control of the pandemic requires improved vaccines with high efficacy against newly emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants and the ability to reduce virus transmission. Here we compare immune responses and preclinical efficacy of the mRNA vaccine BNT162b2, the adenovirus-vectored spike vaccine Ad2-spike and the live-attenuated virus vaccine candidate sCPD9 in Syrian hamsters, using both homogeneous and heterologous vaccination regimens. Comparative vaccine efficacy was assessed by employing readouts from virus titrations to single-cell RNA sequencing. Our results show that sCPD9 vaccination elicited the most robust immunity, including rapid viral clearance, reduced tissue damage, fast differentiation of pre-plasmablasts, strong systemic and mucosal humoral responses, and rapid recall of memory T cells from lung tissue after challenge with heterologous SARS-CoV-2. Overall, our results demonstrate that live-attenuated vaccines offer advantages over currently available COVID-19 vaccines

Reproducibility in the absence of selective reporting : An illustration from large-scale brain asymmetry research

Altres ajuts: Max Planck Society (Germany).The problem of poor reproducibility of scientific findings has received much attention over recent years, in a variety of fields including psychology and neuroscience. The problem has been partly attributed to publication bias and unwanted practices such as p-hacking. Low statistical power in individual studies is also understood to be an important factor. In a recent multisite collaborative study, we mapped brain anatomical left-right asymmetries for regional measures of surface area and cortical thickness, in 99 MRI datasets from around the world, for a total of over 17,000 participants. In the present study, we revisited these hemispheric effects from the perspective of reproducibility. Within each dataset, we considered that an effect had been reproduced when it matched the meta-analytic effect from the 98 other datasets, in terms of effect direction and significance threshold. In this sense, the results within each dataset were viewed as coming from separate studies in an "ideal publishing environment," that is, free from selective reporting and p hacking. We found an average reproducibility rate of 63.2% (SD = 22.9%, min = 22.2%, max = 97.0%). As expected, reproducibility was higher for larger effects and in larger datasets. Reproducibility was not obviously related to the age of participants, scanner field strength, FreeSurfer software version, cortical regional measurement reliability, or regional size. These findings constitute an empirical illustration of reproducibility in the absence of publication bias or p hacking, when assessing realistic biological effects in heterogeneous neuroscience data, and given typically-used sample sizes

Subcortical volumes across the lifespan: data from 18,605 healthy individuals aged 3-90 years

Age has a major effect on brain volume. However, the normative studies available are constrained by small sample sizes, restricted age coverage and significant methodological variability. These limitations introduce inconsistencies and may obscure or distort the lifespan trajectories of brain morphometry. In response, we capitalized on the resources of the Enhancing Neuroimaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) Consortium to examine age-related trajectories inferred from cross-sectional measures of the ventricles, the basal ganglia (caudate, putamen, pallidum, and nucleus accumbens), the thalamus, hippocampus and amygdala using magnetic resonance imaging data obtained from 18,605 individuals aged 3-90 years. All subcortical structure volumes were at their maximum value early in life. The volume of the basal ganglia showed a monotonic negative association with age thereafter; there was no significant association between age and the volumes of the thalamus, amygdala and the hippocampus (with some degree of decline in thalamus) until the sixth decade of life after which they also showed a steep negative association with age. The lateral ventricles showed continuous enlargement throughout the lifespan. Age was positively associated with inter-individual variability in the hippocampus and amygdala and the lateral ventricles. These results were robust to potential confounders and could be used to examine the functional significance of deviations from typical age-related morphometric patterns.Education and Child Studie

Who Really Pays for Health Insurance? The Incidence of Employer-Provided Health Insurance with Sticky Nominal Wages

This paper addresses two seeming paradoxes in the realm of employer-provided health insurance: First, businesses consistently claim that they bear the burden of the insurance they provide for employees, despite theory and empirical evidence indicating that workers bear the full incidence. Second, benefit generosity and the percentage of premiums paid by employers have decreased in recent decades, despite the preferential tax treatment of employer-paid benefits relative to wages—trends unexplained by the standard incidence model. This paper offers a revised incidence model based on nominal wage rigidity, in an attempt to explain these paradoxes. The model predicts that when the nominal wage constraint binds, some of the burden of increasing insurance premiums will fall on firms, particularly small companies with low-wage employees. In response, firms will reduce employment, decrease benefit generosity, and require larger employee premium contributions. Using Current Population Survey data from 2000–2001, I find evidence for this kind of wage rigidity and its associated impact on the employment and premium contributions of low-wage insured workers during a period of rapid premium growth. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2005employer-provided health insurance, wage stickiness, premium contributions,