Long-Term Outcomes with Subcutaneous C1-Inhibitor Replacement Therapy for Prevention of Hereditary Angioedema Attacks

Background For the prevention of attacks of hereditary angioedema (HAE), the efficacy and safety of subcutaneous human C1-esterase inhibitor (C1-INH[SC]; HAEGARDA, CSL Behring) was established in the 16-week Clinical Study for Optimal Management of Preventing Angioedema with Low-Volume Subcutaneous C1-Inhibitor Replacement Therapy (COMPACT). Objective To assess the long-term safety, occurrence of angioedema attacks, and use of rescue medication with C1-INH(SC). Methods Open-label, randomized, parallel-arm extension of COMPACT across 11 countries. Patients with frequent angioedema attacks, either study treatment-naive or who had completed COMPACT, were randomly assigned (1:1) to 40 IU/kg or 60 IU/kg C1-INH(SC) twice per week, with conditional uptitration to optimize prophylaxis (ClinicalTrials.gov registration no. NCT02316353). Results A total of 126 patients with a monthly attack rate of 4.3 in 3 months before entry in COMPACT were enrolled and treated for a mean of 1.5 years; 44 patients (34.9%) had more than 2 years of exposure. Mean steady-state C1-INH functional activity increased to 66.6% with 60 IU/kg. Incidence of adverse events was low and similar in both dose groups (11.3 and 8.5 events per patient-year for 40 IU/kg and 60 IU/kg, respectively). For 40 IU/kg and 60 IU/kg, median annualized attack rates were 1.3 and 1.0, respectively, and median rescue medication use was 0.2 and 0.0 times per year, respectively. Of 23 patients receiving 60 IU/kg for more than 2 years, 19 (83%) were attack-free during months 25 to 30 of treatment. Conclusions In patients with frequent HAE attacks, long-term replacement therapy with C1-INH(SC) is safe and exhibits a substantial and sustained prophylactic effect, with the vast majority of patients becoming free from debilitating disease symptoms

Staging of Schizophrenia with the Use of PANSS: An International Multi-Center Study

Introduction: A specific clinically relevant staging model for schizophrenia has not yet been developed. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the factor structure of the PANSS and develop such a staging method.Methods: Twenty-nine centers from 25 countries contributed 2358 patients aged 37.21 ± 11.87 years with schizophrenia. Analysis of covariance, Exploratory Factor Analysis, Discriminant Function Analysis, and inspection of resultant plots were performed.Results: Exploratory Factor Analysis returned 5 factors explaining 59% of the variance (positive, negative, excitement/hostility, depression/anxiety, and neurocognition). The staging model included 4 main stages with substages that were predominantly characterized by a single domain of symptoms (stage 1: positive; stages 2a and 2b: excitement/hostility; stage 3a and 3b: depression/anxiety; stage 4a and 4b: neurocognition). There were no differences between sexes. The Discriminant Function Analysis developed an algorithm that correctly classified >85% of patients.Discussion: This study elaborates a 5-factor solution and a clinical staging method for patients with schizophrenia. It is the largest study to address these issues among patients who are more likely to remain affiliated with mental health services for prolonged periods of time.<br /

Combinaison des donnees thematic mapper et radar: exemple d'une application geologique dans le sud Algerien

No Abstract. Technologies Avancess Vol. 16 2003: pp. 13-1

Subset Based Properties of Partially Ordered Sets

Abstract The theory of partially ordered sets (posets, for short) proved to have crucial applications in at least two major fields of computer science: concurrency theory and the semantics of programming languages. In these fields, properties like discreteness, observability, generability, and completeness play an important role. The first three of them have been studied in the literature only for the particular case of finite cardinals and/or at most countable posets. In this paper we generalize the properties of discreteness, observability, and generability by allowing arbitrarily large cardinals. The results we obtain extend in a proper way many of the results obtained until now regarding these properties [4, 5]. Concerning completeness properties, we adopt a general definition using subset systems, and then investigate the relationships between various concepts of completeness

Overview of the photo annotation task in ImageCLEF@ICPR

The Photo Annotation Task poses the challenge for automated annotation of 53 visual concepts in Flickr photos and was organized as part of the ImageCLEF@ICPR contest. In total, 12 research teams participated in the multilabel classification challenge while initially 17 research groups were interested and got access to the data. The participants were provided with a training set of 5,000 Flickr images with annotations, a validation set of 3,000 Flickr images with annotations and the test was performed on 10,000 Flickr images. The evaluation was carried out twofold: first the evaluation per concept was conducted by utilizing the Equal Error Rate (EER) and the Area Under Curve (AUC) and second the evaluation per example was performed with the Ontology Score (OS). Summarizing the results, an average AUC of 86.5% could be achieved, including concepts with an AUC of 96%. The classification performance for each image ranged between 59% and 100% with an average score of 85%. In comparison to the results achieved in ImageCLEF 2009, the detection performance increased for the concept-based evaluation by 2.2% EER and 2.5% AUC and showed a slight decrease for the example-based evaluation