Zoledronic acid once-yearly: What role in the prevention of non-vertebral osteoporotic fractures?

Osteoporosis is the most common bone disease. Low levels of oestrogens or testosterone are risk factors for primary osteoporosis. The most common cause of secondary osteoporosis is glucocorticoid treatment, but there are many other secondary causes of osteoporosis. Osteoporosis can be secondary to anti-oestrogen treatment for hormone-sensitive breast cancer and to androgen-deprivation therapy for prostate cancer. Zoledronic is the most potent bisphosphonate at inhibiting bone resorption. In osteoporosis, zoledronic acid increases bone mineral density for at least a year after a single intravenous administration. The efficacy and safety of extended release (once-yearly) zoledronic acid in the treatment of osteoporosis is reviewed

Using higher-order dynamic bayesian networks to model periodic data from the circadian clock of Arabidopsis Thaliana

Modelling gene regulatory networks in organisms is an important task that has recently become possible due to large scale assays using technologies such as microarrays. In this paper, the circadian clock of Arabidopsis thaliana is modelled by fitting dynamic Bayesian networks to luminescence data gathered from experiments. This work differs from previous modelling attempts by using higher-order dynamic Bayesian networks to explicitly model the time lag between the various genes being expressed. In order to achieve this goal, new techniques in preprocessing the data and in evaluating a learned model are proposed. It is shown that it is possible, to some extent, to model these time delays using a higher-order dynamic Bayesian network

Pharmacotherapy of Bone Loss in Postmenopausal Women: Focus on Denosumab

Denosumab is a human monoclonal antibody against RANKL. This antibody decreases bone turnover markers and increases bone mineral density (BMD) in postmenopausal women. In phase 3 studies including more than 1100 women, denosumab achieved greater increases in lumbar spine, total hip, distal 1/3 radius, and total BMD than alendronate 70 mg weekly. Recent data suggest that denosumab also decreases vertebral and non-vertebral fractures. This drug seems to be safe, although the most frequent side effects are arthralgia, back pain, and nasopharyngitis. No increased incidence of neoplasia has been found compared to placebo or alendronate. However, infections requiring inpatient treatment were more frequent in study groups treated with denosumab. These were common community acquired infections and were treated with standard antibiotics. No opportunistic infections were reported. Denosumab is a very promising new drug for the treatment of osteopenia and osteoporosis, and hopefully more long-term safety information and further fracture data will support its commercial use in the near future