Properdin Levels in Individuals with Chemotherapy-Induced Neutropenia

BACKGROUND: Neutrophils produce and carry key components of the alternative pathway (AP) of complement, including properdin (P). The effect of chemotherapy-induced absolute neutropenia on circulating P levels and AP function has not been previously established. METHODS: We prospectively measured free P levels in serum from 27 individuals expected to develop neutropenia after administration of chemotherapy for hematological malignancies in preparation for hematopoietic stem cell transplantation and here describe the relationship between serum P levels and the neutrophil count over time. RESULTS: When the absolute neutrophil count (ANC) was \u3e 500 cells/mm3 pre-chemotherapy, P levels were significantly higher than P levels associated with an ANC ≤500 cells/mm3 (median values 8392 ng/mL and 6355 ng/mL, respectively; P = .001). Pairwise comparison between pre-chemotherapy P levels and P levels at initial or last documented neutropenia before recovery showed a significant decline (P \u3c .0001). No correlation was observed between P levels during neutropenia and after recovery of neutropenia in 20 subjects for which postneutropenia samples were obtained. A small but significant (P = .02) decrease in AP hemolytic activity was noted between baseline (preneutropenia) and samples obtained at the onset of neutropenia, but only with low (6.25%) and not higher (12.5 or 25%) serum concentrations. CONCLUSIONS: A decline in P levels and AP activity could contribute to the increased risk of infection in neutropenic patients and warrants further study

Error Analysis of SaHiT - A Statistical Sanskrit-Hindi Translator

AbstractThe paper shows a statistical Sanskrit-Hindi Translator and analyzes the errors being generated by the system. The System is being trained simultaneously on the platform - the Microsoft Translator Hub (MTHub) and is intended only for simple Sanskrit prose texts. The training set includes 24K parallel sentences and 25k monolingual data with recent BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) scores of 41 and above. The paper discusses the errors analysis of the system and suggests possible solutions. Further, it also focuses on the evaluation of MTHub system with BLEU metrics. For developing MT systems, the parallel Sanskrit-Hindi text corpora has been collected or developed manually from the literature, health, news and tourism domains. The paper also discusses issues and challenges in the development of translation systems for languages like Sanskrit

Early relapse of Burkitt lymphoma heralded by a bone marrow necrosis and numb chin syndrome successfully treated with allogeneic stem cell transplantation

AbstractThe optimal salvage therapy for patients with relapsed Burkitt lymphoma is unknown. Bone marrow necrosis is an underreported (<1% of bone marrow failures). Numb chin syndrome is another rare syndrome associated with aggressive malignancies. Survival of these syndromes is dictated by the underlying disease and is usually dismal. Our 35-year-old patient experienced an early relapse of Burkitt lymphoma accompanied by syndromes, achieved second complete remission and underwent allogeneic stem cell transplantation. He remains alive and well >2 years after the transplant. To our knowledge, this is the longest reported survival of the two syndromes in the setting of BL relapse