Characteristics of pediatric rhabdomyolysis and the associated risk factors for acute kidney injury: a retrospective multicenter study in Korea

Background The clinical features of pediatric rhabdomyolysis differ from those of the adults with rhabdomyolysis; however, multicenter studies are lacking. This study aimed to investigate the characteristics of pediatric rhabdomyolysis and reveal the risk factors for acute kidney injury (AKI) in such cases. Methods This retrospective study analyzed the medical records of children and adolescents diagnosed with rhabdomyolysis at 23 hospitals in South Korea between January 2007 and December 2016. Results Among 880 patients, those aged 3 to 5 years old composed the largest subgroup (19.4%), and all age subgroups were predominantly male. The incidence of AKI was 11.3%. Neurological disorders (53.6%) and infection (39.0%) were the most common underlying disorder and cause of rhabdomyolysis, respectively. The median age at diagnosis in the AKI subgroup was older than that in the non-AKI subgroup (12.2 years vs. 8.0 years). There were no significant differences in body mass index, myalgia, dark-colored urine, or the number of causal factors between the two AKI-status subgroups. The multivariate logistic regression model indicated that the following factors were independently associated with AKI: multiorgan failure, presence of an underlying disorder, strong positive urine occult blood, increased aspartate aminotransferase and uric acid levels, and reduced calcium levels. Conclusions Our study revealed characteristic clinical and laboratory features of rhabdomyolysis in a Korean pediatric population and highlighted the risk factors for AKI in these cases. Our findings will contribute to a greater understanding of pediatric rhabdomyolysis and may enable early intervention against rhabdomyolysis-induced AKI

Controllable Text Generation Using Semantic Control Grammar

Controllable text generation is the primary technique for controlling specific attributes such as topic, keywords and obtaining augmented data. This work proposes a novel controllable text generation framework to improve the controllability of generation models. First, we introduce semantic control grammar, a controllable input format to generate sentences that satisfy the constraints. Second, we adopt a generation and rerank method to obtain semantically reranked controlled sentences. Extensive experiments and analyses are conducted on benchmark, natural language understanding, data-to-text generation, and text classification datasets. Through automatic evaluations, we show that our method leads to improvement over strong baselines. The results show that our model can control sentence and word attributes and semantically generate natural sentences. Furthermore, our techniques improve the generation quality of the model

Efficacy and Safety of Korean Herbal Medicine for Patients with Post-Accident Syndrome, Persistent after Acute Phase: A Pragmatic Randomized Controlled Trial

This is a pragmatic, two-armed, parallel, single-center, randomized controlled clinical trial for comparative evaluation between the effectiveness of integrated Korean medicine (IKM) and herbal medicine treatment with that of IKM monotherapy (control) for post-accident syndrome persistent after the acute phase. Participants were randomized into Herbal Medicine (HM, n = 20) and Control groups (n = 20) to receive the allocated treatment of 1–3 sessions/week for 4 weeks. Intention-to-treat analysis was conducted. The Difference of Numeric Rating Scale (NRS) change of overall post-accident syndromes from baseline to week 5 for the two groups was 1.78 (95% CI: 1.08–2.48; p p < 0.001 by the log-rank test). IKM combined with herbal medicine treatment significantly improved the quality of life by relieving somatic pain and alleviating the overall post-accident syndrome persistent after the acute phase; this effect was maintained for at least 17 weeks