A 6 day course of liposomal amphotericin B in the treatment of infantile visceral leishmaniasis: the Italian experience

OBJECTIVES: To evaluate in a retrospective analysis the efficacy and safety of a 6 day course of liposomal amphotericin B (L-AmB) in infantile cases of Mediterranean visceral leishmaniasis (VL) diagnosed over a 10 year period in Italy. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Patients included were diagnosed as having VL consecutively admitted from December 1992 to December 2001 at four main referral children's hospitals in Italy and treated with six intravenous doses of 3 mg/kg L-AmB given on days 1-5 and 10 (a total dose of 18 mg/kg). Demographic data, nutritional status, underlying diseases, clinical and laboratory findings, and therapy outcome were considered. RESULTS: A total of 164 HIV-negative children (median age 1.6 years; range 4 months to 14 years) were enrolled. All patients were initially cured by the given treatment, and did not present adverse events related to drug infusion. Seven patients (4.3%) had a clinical and parasitological relapse 3-15 months after therapy. All relapses were successfully retreated with 3 mg/kg L-AmB for 10 consecutive days (a total dose of 30 mg/kg). CONCLUSIONS: This study highlights the efficacy (>95%) and safety of the six dose L-AmB regimen and validates it as a first-line treatment for Mediterranean VL in children

A numerical method for finite-part integrals

In the present paper we introduce and study an extended product quadrature rule to approximate Hadamard finite part integrals of the type Hp( f U, t) = Z = +1 0 f (x) (x t)p+1 U(x)d x, t > 0, p 2 N, U(x) = ex x , 0. Hypersingular integrals arise in many contexts, such as singular and hypersingular boundary integral equations, which are tools for modeling many phenomena in different branches of the applied sciences. Here we derive an extended product rule and by a mixed combination with the one weight product rule introduced in [9], we propose a compound scheme of quadrature rules which allows a significant reduction in the number of evaluations of the density function f . Conditions assuring the stability and the convergence of the the mixed scheme in weighted uniform form are deduced. Some numerical experiments are also given, in order to highlight the efficiency of the mixed approach