International Analysis of Electronic Health Records of Children and Youth Hospitalized With COVID-19 Infection in 6 Countries

Question What are international trends in hospitalizations for children and youth with SARS-CoV-2, and what are the epidemiological and clinical features of these patients? Findings This cohort study of 671 children and youth found discrete surges in hospitalizations with variable trends and timing across countries. Common complications included cardiac arrhythmias and viral pneumonia, and laboratory findings included elevations in markers of inflammation and abnormalities of coagulation; few children and youth were treated with medications directed specifically at SARS-CoV-2. Meaning These findings suggest large-scale informatics-based approaches used to incorporate electronic health record data across health care systems can provide an efficient source of information to monitor disease activity and define epidemiological and clinical features of pediatric patients hospitalized with SARS-CoV-2 infections

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research

Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (4th edition)1.

In 2008, we published the first set of guidelines for standardizing research in autophagy. Since then, this topic has received increasing attention, and many scientists have entered the field. Our knowledge base and relevant new technologies have also been expanding. Thus, it is important to formulate on a regular basis updated guidelines for monitoring autophagy in different organisms. Despite numerous reviews, there continues to be confusion regarding acceptable methods to evaluate autophagy, especially in multicellular eukaryotes. Here, we present a set of guidelines for investigators to select and interpret methods to examine autophagy and related processes, and for reviewers to provide realistic and reasonable critiques of reports that are focused on these processes. These guidelines are not meant to be a dogmatic set of rules, because the appropriateness of any assay largely depends on the question being asked and the system being used. Moreover, no individual assay is perfect for every situation, calling for the use of multiple techniques to properly monitor autophagy in each experimental setting. Finally, several core components of the autophagy machinery have been implicated in distinct autophagic processes (canonical and noncanonical autophagy), implying that genetic approaches to block autophagy should rely on targeting two or more autophagy-related genes that ideally participate in distinct steps of the pathway. Along similar lines, because multiple proteins involved in autophagy also regulate other cellular pathways including apoptosis, not all of them can be used as a specific marker for bona fide autophagic responses. Here, we critically discuss current methods of assessing autophagy and the information they can, or cannot, provide. Our ultimate goal is to encourage intellectual and technical innovation in the field

Outcome of Supracondylar Fractures of the Humerus in Children Treated by Closed Reduction and Percutaneous Pinning

Supracondylar fractures of humerus in children are common injuries. Displaced fractures are inherently unstable. Conservative treatment results in malunion. Open reduction and internal fixation (ORIF) is more invasive and recovery is prolonged. From September 2004 to September 2005, 102displacedsupracondylarfractures of humerus, agedbetween one andhalf yearto 13 years, were treated using close reduction and percutaneous Kirschner (K) wire fixation under c-arm fluoroscopy. Seventy nine patients were treated by cross K-wires and in twenty three cases lateral two K-wires wereput.Above elbow plaster ofparis back slab was appliedinall cases for atleastfour weeks.Back slab,K-wireswere removedafterfourweeks andelbowrangeofmotionexercisewas started.Results were analyzed using Flynn’s criteria. All patients were followed up to 14th week postoperatively. In cross K-wire group(N=79) 70.8% had excellent, 22.7% good, 3.8% fair and 2.5% had poor results at eight weeks follow up which was improved to 91.1% excellent, 6.3 good, 1.2% fair and 1.26% poor results at 14 weeks follow up. In lateral K-wire group (N=23) 70% had excellent, 21.7% good, 4.3% fair and 4.3% had poor result at eighth week which was improved to 91.3% excellent, 4.3% good, 4.3% fair and no poor result at 14th week follow up. Eight patients got superficial pin tract infection and seven patients sustained ulnar nerve injury post operatively.We recommend this procedure for displacedsupracondylarfractures inchildrenas itis safeandcost effectiveprocedurewithacceptable complication rates. Key words: closed reduction, humerus, percutaneous pinning, supracondylar fractur