A Practical Approach to the Diagnosis and Management of Hair Loss in Children and Adolescents

Hair loss or alopecia is a common and distressing clinical complaint in the primary care setting and can arise from heterogeneous etiologies. In the pediatric population, hair loss often presents with patterns that are different from that of their adult counterparts. Given the psychosocial complications that may arise from pediatric alopecia, prompt diagnosis and management is particularly important. Common causes of alopecia in children and adolescents include alopecia areata, tinea capitis, androgenetic alopecia, traction alopecia, trichotillomania, hair cycle disturbances, and congenital alopecia conditions. Diagnostic tools for hair loss in children include a detailed history, physical examination with a focused evaluation of the child’s hair and scalp, fungal screens, hair pull and tug test, and if possible, light microscopy and/or trichoscopy. Management of alopecia requires a holistic approach including psychosocial support because treatments are only available for some hair loss conditions, and even the available treatments are not always effective. This review outlines the clinical presentations, presents a diagnostic algorithm, and discusses management of these various hair loss disorders

Novel and improved Caenorhabditis briggsae gene models generated by community curation

Abstract Background The nematode Caenorhabditis briggsae has been used as a model in comparative genomics studies with Caenorhabditis elegans because of their striking morphological and behavioral similarities. However, the potential of C. briggsae for comparative studies is limited by the quality of its genome resources. The genome resources for the C. briggsae laboratory strain AF16 have not been developed to the same extent as C. elegans. The recent publication of a new chromosome-level reference genome for QX1410, a C. briggsae wild strain closely related to AF16, has provided the first step to bridge the gap between C. elegans and C. briggsae genome resources. Currently, the QX1410 gene models consist of software-derived gene predictions that contain numerous errors in their structure and coding sequences. In this study, a team of researchers manually inspected over 21,000 gene models and underlying transcriptomic data to repair software-derived errors. Results We designed a detailed workflow to train a team of nine students to manually curate gene models using RNA read alignments. We manually inspected the gene models, proposed corrections to the coding sequences of over 8,000 genes, and modeled thousands of putative isoforms and untranslated regions. We exploited the conservation of protein sequence length between C. briggsae and C. elegans to quantify the improvement in protein-coding gene model quality and showed that manual curation led to substantial improvements in the protein sequence length accuracy of QX1410 genes. Additionally, collinear alignment analysis between the QX1410 and AF16 genomes revealed over 1,800 genes affected by spurious duplications and inversions in the AF16 genome that are now resolved in the QX1410 genome. Conclusions Community-based, manual curation using transcriptome data is an effective approach to improve the quality of software-derived protein-coding genes. The detailed protocols provided in this work can be useful for future large-scale manual curation projects in other species. Our manual curation efforts have brought the QX1410 gene models to a comparable level of quality as the extensively curated AF16 gene models. The improved genome resources for C. briggsae provide reliable tools for the study of Caenorhabditis biology and other related nematodes

Targeted HIV testing at birth supported by low and predictable mother‐to‐child transmission risk in Botswana

Abstract Introduction: Most African countries perform infant HIV testing at 6 weeks or later. The addition of targeted testing at birth may improve retention in care, treatment outcomes and survival for HIV‐infected infants. Methods: HIV‐exposed infants were screened as part of the Early Infant Treatment (EIT) study in Botswana. Screened infants were ≥35 weeks gestational age and ≥2000 g at birth. Risk factors for mother‐to‐child transmission (MTCT) were assessed by maternal obstetric card or verbally. Risk factors included 400 copies/mL, poor maternal ART adherence, lack of maternal zidovudine (ZDV) in labour, or lack of infant post‐exposure prophylaxis. Infants underwent dried blood spot testing by Roche Cobas Ampliprep/Cobas Taqman HIV‐1 qualitative PCR. Results: From April 2015 to April 2016, 2303 HIV‐exposed infants were tested for HIV in the EIT study. Of these, 369 (16%) were identified as high risk for HIV infection by information available at birth, and 12 (0.5% overall, 3.25% of high risk) were identified as HIV positive at birth. All 12 positive infants were identified as high risk at the time of screening, and only 2 risk factors were required to identify all positive infants: either <8 weeks of maternal ART in pregnancy (75%) or lack of maternal HIV suppression at last test (25%). Conclusions: In utero MTCT occurred only among infants identified as high risk at delivery, using information available from the mother or obstetric record. Birth testing that targets high‐risk infants based on maternal ART receipt is likely to identify the majority of in utero HIV transmissions, and allows early ART initiation for these infants

Spatial distribution of marker gene activity in the mouse lung during alveolarization

This data is a curated collection of visual images of gene expression patterns from the pre- and post-natal mouse lung, accompanied by associated mRNA probe sequences and RNA-Seq expression profiles. Mammalian lungs undergo significant growth and cellular differentiation before and after the transition to breathing air. Documenting normal lung development is an important step in understanding abnormal lung development, as well as the challenges faced during a preterm birth. Images in this dataset indicate the spatial distribution of mRNA transcripts for over 500 different genes that are active during lung development, as initially determined via RNA-Seq. Images were systematically acquired using high-throughput in situ hybridization with non-radioactive digoxigenin-labeled mRNA probes across mouse lungs from developmental time points E16.5, E18.5, P7, and P28. The dataset was produced as part of The Molecular Atlas of Lung Development Program (LungMAP) and is hosted at https://lungmap.net. This manuscript describes the nature of the data and the protocols for generating the dataset

The Associations of Dyadic Coping and Relationship Satisfaction Vary between and within Nations: A 35-Nation Study

Objective: Theories about how couples help each other to cope with stress, such as the systemic transactional model of dyadic coping, suggest that the cultural context in which couples live influences how their coping behavior affects their relationship satisfaction. In contrast to the theoretical assumptions, a recent meta-analysis provides evidence that neither culture, nor gender, influences the association between dyadic coping and relationship satisfaction, at least based on their samples of couples living in North America and West Europe. Thus, it is an open questions whether the theoretical assumptions of cultural influences are false or whether cultural influences on couple behavior just occur in cultures outside of the Western world. Method: In order to examine the cultural influence, using a sample of married individuals N = 7973) from 35 nations, we used multilevel modeling to test whether the positive association between dyadic coping and relationship satisfaction varies across nations and whether gender might moderate the association. Results: Results reveal that the association between dyadic coping and relationship satisfaction varies between nations. In addition, results show that in some nations the association is higher for men and in other nations it is higher for women. Conclusions: Cultural and gender differences across the globe influence how couples' coping behavior affects relationship outcomes. This crucial finding indicates that couple relationship education programs and interventions need to be culturally adapted, as skill trainings such as dyadic coping lead to differential effects on relationship satisfaction based on the culture in which couples live