Severe vaccine-acquired rotavirus infection in an infant with primary intestinal lymphangiectasia

Clinical letterTo date, severe cases of vaccine-related rotavirus infection have only been reported in infants with severe combined immunodeficiency after immunization. We describe the first case of vaccine-related rotavirus gastroenteritis in an infant with intestinal lymphangiectasia.S

Renal Survival in Children with Glomerulonephritis with Crescents: A Pediatric Nephrology Research Consortium Cohort Study

There is no evidence-based definition for diagnosing crescentic glomerulonephritis. The prognostic implications of crescentic lesions on kidney biopsy have not been quantified. Our objective was to determine risk factors for end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) in patients with glomerulonephritis and crescents on kidney biopsy. A query of the Pediatric Nephrology Research Consortium’s Pediatric Glomerulonephritis with Crescents registry identified 305 patients from 15 centers. A retrospective cohort study was performed with ESKD as the primary outcome. Median age at biopsy was 11 years (range 1–21). The percentage of crescents was 3–100% (median 20%). Etiologies included IgA nephropathy (23%), lupus (21%), IgA vasculitis (19%) and ANCA-associated GN (13%), post-infectious GN (5%), and anti-glomerular basement membrane disease (3%). The prevalence of ESKD was 12% at one year and 16% at last follow-up (median = 3 years, range 1–11). Median time to ESKD was 100 days. Risk factors for ESKD included %crescents, presence of fibrous crescents, estimated GFR, and hypertension at biopsy. For each 1% increase in %crescents, there was a 3% decrease in log odds of 1-year renal survival (p = 0.003) and a 2% decrease in log odds of renal survival at last follow-up (p \u3c 0.001). These findings provide an evidence base for enrollment criteria for crescentic glomerulonephritis in future clinical trials

Gaining the PROMIS perspective from children with nephrotic syndrome: a Midwest pediatric nephrology consortium study

Background and objectives Nephrotic syndrome (NS) represents a common disease in pediatric nephrology typified by a relapsing and remitting course and characterized by the presence of edema that can significantly affect the health-related quality of life in children and adolescents. The PROMIS pediatric measures were constructed to be publically available, efficient, precise, and valid across a variety of diseases to assess patient reports of symptoms and quality of life. This study was designed to evaluate the ability of children and adolescents with NS to complete the PROMIS assessment via computer and to initiate validity assessments of the short forms and full item banks in pediatric NS. Successful measurement of patient reported outcomes will contribute to our understanding of the impact of NS on children and adolescents. Design This cross-sectional study included 151 children and adolescents 8-17 years old with NS from 16 participating institutions in North America. The children completed the PROMIS pediatric depression, anxiety, social-peer relationships, pain interference, fatigue, mobility and upper extremity functioning measures using a web-based interface. Responses were compared between patients experiencing active NS (n = 53) defined by the presence of edema and patients with inactive NS (n = 96) defined by the absence of edema. Results All 151 children and adolescents were successfully able to complete the PROMIS assessment via computer. As hypothesized, the children and adolescents with active NS were significantly different on 4 self-reported measures (anxiety, pain interference, fatigue, and mobility). Depression, peer relationships, and upper extremity functioning were not different between children with active vs. inactive NS. Multivariate analysis showed that the PROMIS instruments remained sensitive to NS disease activity after adjusting for demographic characteristics. Conclusions Children and adolescents with NS were able to successfully complete the PROMIS instrument using a web-based interface. The computer based pediatric PROMIS measurement effectively discriminated between children and adolescents with active and inactive NS. The domain scores found in this study are consistent with previous reports investigating the health-related quality of life in children and adolescents with NS. This study establishes known-group validity and feasibility for PROMIS pediatric measures in children and adolescents with NS

DeadEasy Mito-Glia: Automatic Counting of Mitotic Cells and Glial Cells in Drosophila

Cell number changes during normal development, and in disease (e.g., neurodegeneration, cancer). Many genes affect cell number, thus functional genetic analysis frequently requires analysis of cell number alterations upon loss of function mutations or in gain of function experiments. Drosophila is a most powerful model organism to investigate the function of genes involved in development or disease in vivo. Image processing and pattern recognition techniques can be used to extract information from microscopy images to quantify automatically distinct cellular features, but these methods are still not very extended in this model organism. Thus cellular quantification is often carried out manually, which is laborious, tedious, error prone or humanly unfeasible. Here, we present DeadEasy Mito-Glia, an image processing method to count automatically the number of mitotic cells labelled with anti-phospho-histone H3 and of glial cells labelled with anti-Repo in Drosophila embryos. This programme belongs to the DeadEasy suite of which we have previously developed versions to count apoptotic cells and neuronal nuclei. Having separate programmes is paramount for accuracy. DeadEasy Mito-Glia is very easy to use, fast, objective and very accurate when counting dividing cells and glial cells labelled with a nuclear marker. Although this method has been validated for Drosophila embryos, we provide an interactive window for biologists to easily extend its application to other nuclear markers and other sample types. DeadEasy MitoGlia is freely available as an ImageJ plug-in, it increases the repertoire of tools for in vivo genetic analysis, and it will be of interest to a broad community of developmental, cancer and neuro-biologists

Development of a Panel of Genome-Wide Ancestry Informative Markers to Study Admixture Throughout the Americas

Most individuals throughout the Americas are admixed descendants of Native American, European, and African ancestors. Complex historical factors have resulted in varying proportions of ancestral contributions between individuals within and among ethnic groups. We developed a panel of 446 ancestry informative markers (AIMs) optimized to estimate ancestral proportions in individuals and populations throughout Latin America. We used genome-wide data from 953 individuals from diverse African, European, and Native American populations to select AIMs optimized for each of the three main continental populations that form the basis of modern Latin American populations. We selected markers on the basis of locus-specific branch length to be informative, well distributed throughout the genome, capable of being genotyped on widely available commercial platforms, and applicable throughout the Americas by minimizing within-continent heterogeneity. We then validated the panel in samples from four admixed populations by comparing ancestry estimates based on the AIMs panel to estimates based on genome-wide association study (GWAS) data. The panel provided balanced discriminatory power among the three ancestral populations and accurate estimates of individual ancestry proportions (R2>0.9 for ancestral components with significant between-subject variance). Finally, we genotyped samples from 18 populations from Latin America using the AIMs panel and estimated variability in ancestry within and between these populations. This panel and its reference genotype information will be useful resources to explore population history of admixture in Latin America and to correct for the potential effects of population stratification in admixed samples in the region

The Transiting Multi-planet System HD15337: Two Nearly Equal-mass Planets Straddling the Radius Gap

We report the discovery of a super-Earth and a sub-Neptune transiting the star HD 15337 (TOI-402, TIC 120896927), a bright (V = 9) K1 dwarf observed by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) in Sectors 3 and 4. We combine the TESS photometry with archival High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher spectra to confirm the planetary nature of the transit signals and derive the masses of the two transiting planets. With an orbital period of 4.8 days, a mass of ${7.51}_{-1.01}^{+1.09}\,{M}_{\oplus }$ and a radius of 1.64 ± 0.06 R ⊕, HD 15337 b joins the growing group of short-period super-Earths known to have a rocky terrestrial composition. The sub-Neptune HD 15337 c has an orbital period of 17.2 days, a mass of ${8.11}_{-1.69}^{+1.82}\,{{\rm{M}}}_{\oplus }$, and a radius of 2.39 ± 0.12 R ⊕, suggesting that the planet might be surrounded by a thick atmospheric envelope. The two planets have similar masses and lie on opposite sides of the radius gap, and are thus an excellent testbed for planet formation and evolution theories. Assuming that HD 15337 c hosts a hydrogen-dominated envelope, we employ a recently developed planet atmospheric evolution algorithm in a Bayesian framework to estimate the history of the high-energy (extreme ultraviolet and X-ray) emission of the host star. We find that at an age of 150 Myr, the star possessed on average between 3.7 and 127 times the high-energy luminosity of the current Sun

Gaining the Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) perspective in chronic kidney disease: a Midwest Pediatric Nephrology Consortium study

Chronic kidney disease is a persistent chronic health condition commonly seen in pediatric nephrology programs. Our study aims to evaluate the sensitivity of the Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) pediatric instrument to indicators of disease severity and activity in pediatric chronic kidney disease

La renovación de la palabra en el bicentenario de la Argentina : los colores de la mirada lingüística

El libro reúne trabajos en los que se exponen resultados de investigaciones presentadas por investigadores de Argentina, Chile, Brasil, España, Italia y Alemania en el XII Congreso de la Sociedad Argentina de Lingüística (SAL), Bicentenario: la renovación de la palabra, realizado en Mendoza, Argentina, entre el 6 y el 9 de abril de 2010. Las temáticas abordadas en los 167 capítulos muestran las grandes líneas de investigación que se desarrollan fundamentalmente en nuestro país, pero también en los otros países mencionados arriba, y señalan además las áreas que recién se inician, con poca tradición en nuestro país y que deberían fomentarse. Los trabajos aquí publicados se enmarcan dentro de las siguientes disciplinas y/o campos de investigación: Fonología, Sintaxis, Semántica y Pragmática, Lingüística Cognitiva, Análisis del Discurso, Psicolingüística, Adquisición de la Lengua, Sociolingüística y Dialectología, Didáctica de la lengua, Lingüística Aplicada, Lingüística Computacional, Historia de la Lengua y la Lingüística, Lenguas Aborígenes, Filosofía del Lenguaje, Lexicología y Terminología