Ultrazvučna analiza štitnjače u trudnoći

The aim of the study was to determine whether pregnancy induced ultrasonographically detectable changes of the thyroid gland. It is a very interesting clinical feature, because some parts of inland Croatia were an endemic goiter area before the implementation of the 1996 act on salt iodination. Sixty-six pregnant women with no history of thyroid disease were repeatedly examined by ultrasound during the course of pregnancy. The size and echostructure of the thyroid were estimated. The thyroid volume increased slightly during pregnancy, but mostly remained within the normal range for particular age. A significant thyroid volume enlargement was observed in third trimester as compared with either first trimester (p=0.02) or control group (p=0.01). Mild goiter of 16% was found in pregnant women in comparison to control group. Morning urine sample, thyroid hormone, TSH and thyroid antibodies were also analyzed in 89 women. Median urine iodine was 8.8 µg/dL. Sixty percent of pregnant women had an iodine concentration below 10 µg/dL. In four out of nine subjects with goiter, urinary iodine excretion was below 5 µg/dL. Elevated serum TSH concentration was recorded in three (3%) women; however, they were euthyroid at the time of the study. Results of the study supported the hypothesis that thyroid volume and thyroid function adapt to the physiologically increased iodine and energy demands. The possible goitrogenic effect of pregnancy could be prevented by an increased iodine intake by diet rich in iodine.U kontinentalnim dijelovima Hrvatske prije uvođenja novoga pravilnika o jodiranju soli 1996. godine zabilježena je endemska gušavost. Stoga je svrha ovoga istraživanja bila utvrditi postoji li i u kojoj mjeri gušavost, odnosno povećanje volumena štitnjaču trudnica sa zagrebačkog područja. Šezdeset šest zdravih trudnica u kojih prethodno nije postojala bolest štitnjače u više je navrata pregledano ultrazvukom, pri čem je određen volumen i ehostruktura štitnjače. Utvrđen je porast volumena štitnjače u sva tri trimestra trudnoće koji je, međutim, prelazio gornju granicu normalne veličine štitnjače (18 mL) i to uglavnom u trećem trimestru. Značajan porast veličine štitnjače ustanovljen je u trećem trimestru u odnosu na prvi trimestar (p=0,02) te na kontrolnu skupinu (p=0,01). Umjerena guša nađena je u 16% trudnica u odnosu na kontrolnu skupinu. U skupini od 89 trudnica određena je koncentracija joda u mokraći, koncentracija hormona štitnjače, TSH te tiroidna protutijela. Utvrđen je medijan koncentracije joda u mokraći od 8,8 µg/dL, a 60% trudnica imalo je koncentraciju nižu od 10 µg/dL. U četiri od devet trudnica s ustanovljenom gušom razina joda bila je ispod 5 µg/dL. Povišena razina TSH u serumu nađena je u 3% trudnica, ali uz normalne razine hormona štitnjače. Ovim smo ispitivanjem potvrdili očekivani porast volumena štitnjače u trudnoći kao posljedicu povećane potrebe za energijom i jodom. Stoga zaključujemo da se očekivani goitrogeni učinak trudnoće može spriječiti prehranom obogaćenom jodom

Large constraint length high speed viterbi decoder based on a modular hierarchial decomposition of the deBruijn graph

A method of formulating and packaging decision-making elements into a long constraint length Viterbi decoder which involves formulating the decision-making processors as individual Viterbi butterfly processors that are interconnected in a deBruijn graph configuration. A fully distributed architecture, which achieves high decoding speeds, is made feasible by novel wiring and partitioning of the state diagram. This partitioning defines universal modules, which can be used to build any size decoder, such that a large number of wires is contained inside each module, and a small number of wires is needed to connect modules. The total system is modular and hierarchical, and it implements a large proportion of the required wiring internally within modules and may include some external wiring to fully complete the deBruijn graph. pg,14

More Reliable Protein NMR Peak Assignment via Improved 2-Interval Scheduling

Protein NMR peak assignment refers to the process of assigning a group of \u201cspin systems\u201d obtained experimentally to a protein sequence of amino acids. The automation of this process is still an unsolved and challenging problem in NMR protein structure determination. Recently, protein backbone NMR peak assignment has been formulated as an interval scheduling problem, where a protein sequence of amino acids is viewed as a discrete time interval (the amino acids on one-to-one correspond to the time units of ), each subset S of spin systems that are known to originate from consecutive amino acids of is viewed as a \u201cjob\u201d j S , the preference of assigning S to a subsequence P of consecutive amino acids on is viewed as the profit of executing job j S in the subinterval of corresponding to P, and the goal is to maximize the total profit of executing the jobs (on a single machine) during . The interval scheduling problem is Max SNP-hard in general. Typically the jobs that require one or two consecutive time units are the most difficult to assign/schedule. To solve these most difficult assignments, we present an efficient 7/13-approximation algorithm. Combining this algorithm with a greedy filtering strategy for handling long jobs (i.e. jobs that need more than two consecutive time units), we obtained a new efficient heuristic for protein NMR peak assignment. Our study using experimental data shows that the new heuristic produces the best peak assignment in most of the cases, compared with the NMR peak assignment algorithms in the literature. The 7/13-approximation algorithm is also the first approximation algorithm for a nontrivial case of the classical (weighted) interval scheduling problem that breaks the ratio 2 barrier

Thalidomide, dexamethasone and lovastatin with autologous stem cell transplantation as a salvage immunomodulatory therapy in patients with relapsed and refractory multiple myeloma

The treatment of patients with multiple myeloma usually includes many drugs including thalidomide, lenalidomide and bortezomib. Lovastatin and other inhibitors of HMG-CoA reductase demonstrated to exhibit antineoplasmatic and proapoptotic properties in numerous in vitro studies involving myeloma cell lines. We treated 91 patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma with thalidomide, dexamethasone and lovastatin (TDL group, 49 patients) or thalidomide and dexamethasone (TD group, 42 patients). A clinical response defined of at least 50% reduction of monoclonal band has been observed in 32% of TD patients and 44% of TDL patients. Prolongation of overall survival and progression-free survival in the TDL group as compared with the TD group has been documented. The TDL regimen was safe and well tolerated. The incidence of side effects was comparable in both groups. Plasma cells have been cultured in vitro with thalidomide and lovastatin to assess the impact of both drugs on the apoptosis rate of plasma cells. In vitro experiments revealed that the combination of thalidomide and lovastatin induced higher apoptosis rate than apoptosis induced by each drug alone. Our results suggest that the addition of lovastatin to the TD regimen may improve the response rate in patients with relapsed or refractory myeloma

A unifying probabilistic framework for analyzing residual dipolar couplings

Residual dipolar couplings provide complementary information to the nuclear Overhauser effect measurements that are traditionally used in biomolecular structure determination by NMR. In a de novo structure determination, however, lack of knowledge about the degree and orientation of molecular alignment complicates the analysis of dipolar coupling data. We present a probabilistic framework for analyzing residual dipolar couplings and demonstrate that it is possible to estimate the atomic coordinates, the complete molecular alignment tensor, and the error of the couplings simultaneously. As a by-product, we also obtain estimates of the uncertainty in the coordinates and the alignment tensor. We show that our approach encompasses existing methods for determining the alignment tensor as special cases, including least squares estimation, histogram fitting, and elimination of an explicit alignment tensor in the restraint energy

Atypical audiovisual speech integration in infants at risk for autism

The language difficulties often seen in individuals with autism might stem from an inability to integrate audiovisual information, a skill important for language development. We investigated whether 9-month-old siblings of older children with autism, who are at an increased risk of developing autism, are able to integrate audiovisual speech cues. We used an eye-tracker to record where infants looked when shown a screen displaying two faces of the same model, where one face is articulating/ba/and the other/ga/, with one face congruent with the syllable sound being presented simultaneously, the other face incongruent. This method was successful in showing that infants at low risk can integrate audiovisual speech: they looked for the same amount of time at the mouths in both the fusible visual/ga/− audio/ba/and the congruent visual/ba/− audio/ba/displays, indicating that the auditory and visual streams fuse into a McGurk-type of syllabic percept in the incongruent condition. It also showed that low-risk infants could perceive a mismatch between auditory and visual cues: they looked longer at the mouth in the mismatched, non-fusible visual/ba/− audio/ga/display compared with the congruent visual/ga/− audio/ga/display, demonstrating that they perceive an uncommon, and therefore interesting, speech-like percept when looking at the incongruent mouth (repeated ANOVA: displays x fusion/mismatch conditions interaction: F(1,16) = 17.153, p = 0.001). The looking behaviour of high-risk infants did not differ according to the type of display, suggesting difficulties in matching auditory and visual information (repeated ANOVA, displays x conditions interaction: F(1,25) = 0.09, p = 0.767), in contrast to low-risk infants (repeated ANOVA: displays x conditions x low/high-risk groups interaction: F(1,41) = 4.466, p = 0.041). In some cases this reduced ability might lead to the poor communication skills characteristic of autism

Parent-reported and clinician-observed autism spectrum disorder (ASD) symptoms in children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): implications for practice under DSM-5

BACKGROUND: Children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) often present with social difficulties, though the extent to which these clearly overlap with symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is not well understood. METHODS: We explored parent-reported and directly-observed ASD symptoms on the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R) and the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) in children referred to ASD-specialty clinics who received diagnoses of either ADHD (n = 48) or ASD (n = 164). RESULTS: Of the ADHD sample, 21 % met ASD cut-offs on the ADOS and 30 % met ASD cut-offs on all domains of the ADI-R. Four social communication ADOS items (Quality of Social Overtures, Unusual Eye Contact, Facial Expressions Directed to Examiner, and Amount of Reciprocal Social Communication) adequately differentiated the groups while none of the items on the ADI-R met the criteria for adequate discrimination. CONCLUSIONS: Results of this work highlight the challenges that clinicians and researchers face when distinguishing ASD from other disorders in verbally fluent, school-age children

Generation of Functional CLL-Specific Cord Blood CTL Using CD40-Ligated CLL APC

PMCID: PMC3526610This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

A genome-wide scan for common alleles affecting risk for autism

Although autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have a substantial genetic basis, most of the known genetic risk has been traced to rare variants, principally copy number variants (CNVs). To identify common risk variation, the Autism Genome Project (AGP) Consortium genotyped 1558 rigorously defined ASD families for 1 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and analyzed these SNP genotypes for association with ASD. In one of four primary association analyses, the association signal for marker rs4141463, located within MACROD2, crossed the genome-wide association significance threshold of P < 5 × 10−8. When a smaller replication sample was analyzed, the risk allele at rs4141463 was again over-transmitted; yet, consistent with the winner's curse, its effect size in the replication sample was much smaller; and, for the combined samples, the association signal barely fell below the P < 5 × 10−8 threshold. Exploratory analyses of phenotypic subtypes yielded no significant associations after correction for multiple testing. They did, however, yield strong signals within several genes, KIAA0564, PLD5, POU6F2, ST8SIA2 and TAF1C