Nivolumab-induced IgA nephropathy in a patient with advanced gastric cancer A case report

Introduction: Immune checkpoint inhibitors including nivolumab, an antibody against programmed death-1, have been increasingly introduced in various cancer treatment regimens, and are reported to be associated with immune-related adverse events. Nivolumab-induced renal injury is generally caused by acute interstitial nephritis and is managed by drug discontinuation and steroid therapy. Although this agent can infrequently induce glomerulonephritis, the pathogenesis and therapeutic strategy remain undetermined. Patient concerns: A 78-year-old man was diagnosed with advanced gastric cancer with portal thrombosis. First- and second-line chemotherapies were ineffective; thus, nivolumab monotherapy was initiated. Although it effectively prevented tumor growth, proteinuria and microhematuria appeared 2 months later. Despite drug discontinuation, serum creatinine progressively increased from 0.72 to 1.45 mg/dL. Renal biopsy revealed mesangial IgA and C3 deposition in immunofluorescence analysis and mesangial proliferation with crescent formation in light microscopy. Diagnosis: The patient was diagnosed with IgA nephropathy. Based on the temporal relationship between the nivolumab therapy and abnormal urinalysis, IgA nephropathy was considered to have been induced by nivolumab. Interventions: A moderate dose (0.6 mg/kg/day) of prednisolone was orally administrated, with tapering biweekly. Outcomes: Steroid therapy stabilized his serum creatinine levels and markedly reduced proteinuria. However, bacterial pneumonia substantially impaired his performance status; thus, nivolumab could not be restarted despite tumor regrowth. Lessons: IgA nephropathy should be recognized as an uncommon renal adverse event during nivolumab therapy. After drug discontinuation, nivolumab-induced IgA nephropathy is likely to respond to moderate doses of steroid therapy with early tapering. However, more evidence is needed to determine whether nivolumab can be safely restarted during or after steroid therapy

KYOTO: A System for Mining, Structuring, and Distributing Knowledge Across Languages and Cultures

We outline work performed within the framework of a current EC project. The goal is to construct a language-independent information system for a specific domain (environment/ecology/biodiversity) anchored in a language-independent ontology that is linked to wordnets in seven languages. For each language, information extraction and identification of lexicalized concepts with ontological entries is carried out by text miners (?Kybots?). The mapping of language-specific lexemes to the ontology allows for crosslinguistic identification and translation of equivalent terms. The infrastructure developed within this project enables long-range knowledge sharing and transfer across many languages and cultures, addressing the need for global and uniform transition of knowledge beyond the specific domains addressed here

Psychokinesis

About the book: Psychic and other exceptional experiences are surprisingly common but opinions as to their causes vary widely. Can tricks of the mind such as hallucinations, mistaken perception and errors of judgement explain such phenomena or does some yet to be understood non-sensory means of communication come into play? In Parapsychology, leading researchers from both the UK and the USA combine their expertise to form a lucid account of research into the science of psychic experience. Beginning with an introduction to the methodology, Parapsychology addresses topics including coincidence, telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis, healing, apparitions, reincarnation and out-of-body experiences. Each chapter describes the phenomenon, outlines the main lines of research and discusses the merits of possible explanations for such anomalies of cognitive function. Extensive suggestions for relevant further reading on each individual subject are provided, along with a detailed glossary of terms. Parapsychology provides an accessible and succinct overview of the research and current thinking on the subject of psychic and allied experiences. This balanced account of work in this fascinating area will be of great interest to students and researchers in psychology as well as anyone with an interest in the field

Hierarchy extraction based on inclusion of appearance

In this paper, we propose a method of auto-matically extracting word hierarchies based on the inclusion relation of appearance patterns from corpora. We apply a complementary similarity measure to find a hierarchical word structure. This similarity measure was devel-oped for the recognition of degraded machine-printed text in the field and can be applied to estimate one-to-many relations. Our purpose is to extract word hierarchies from corpora automatically. As the initial task, we attempt to extract hierarchies of abstract nouns co-occurring with adjectives in Japanese and compare with hierarchies in the EDR elec-tronic dictionary.