Detection of human papillomavirus in epithelial lesions of the conjunctiva

CONTEXT: Many factors like exposure to UV radiation, climatic conditions, genetic predisposition, immunological state and, more recently, the presence of HPV have been implicated in the genesis of some lesions of the conjunctiva, especially the carcinoma. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the presence of HPV DNA in acquired lesions of the conjunctiva and in normal mucosa. TYPE OF STUDY: Cross-sectional study. SETTING: A public university referral center (the Ophthalmology Service of the A.C. Camargo Hospital - A. Prudente Foundation, São Paulo). PARTICIPANTS: Thirty patients with acquired lesions of the conjunctiva and 60 matched controls (by age and sex) were evaluated in this study, from June 1993 to March 1995. PROCEDURES: The detection of HPV DNA in the normal conjunctiva and in acquired lesions was done by the PCR technique and dot blot hybridization. The material was collected by scraping the normal mucosa and the surface of the lesions. A fragment of fresh frozen tissue and paraffin embedded specimens of each lesion were also included. MAIN MEASUREMENTS: The association between the HPV infection and the presence or absence of conjunctival lesions. RESULTS: Sequences of HPV DNA were detected in 4 of the 31 lesions evaluated (12.9%) and in the healthy mucosa of one individual of the control group (1.6%). HPV type 16 was detected in 2 carcinomas and in the normal mucosa of one individual of the control group. HPV type 11 was demonstrated in 2 papillomas of one patient with lesions in both eyes. CONCLUSIONS: The low frequency of HPV DNA found in the lesions of this sample and the detection of the viral genome in the normal mucosa indicate that there is a weak possibility of association between HPV infection and the carcinoma of the conjunctiva.CONTEXTO: Vários fatores como exposição à radiação ultravioleta, condições climáticas, predisposição genética, estado imunológico e, mais recentemente, a presença do papilomavírus humano têm sido implicados na etiopatogênese das lesões neoplásicas da conjuntiva, em especial dos carcinomas. OBJETIVO: Avaliar a presença de DNA do HPV em uma série de lesões adquiridas da conjuntiva e na mucosa clinicamente normal. TIPO DE ESTUDO: Estudo transversal. LOCAL: Centro de referência universitário (Serviço de Oftalmologia do Hospital A. C. Camargo - Fundação Antônio Prudente). PARTICIPANTES: Trinta pacientes com lesões epiteliais adquiridas da conjuntiva e 60 controles pareados por sexo e idade foram incluídos no estudo, no período de Junho de 1993 a Março de 1995. PROCEDIMENTOS: A pesquisa de DNA do HPV, na conjuntiva normal e nas lesões adquiridas, procedeu-se através das técnicas de reação de polimerização em cadeia (PCR) e hibridização em pontos. O material para estudo foi coletado por esfregaço da mucosa normal e da superfície das lesões conjuntivais. Os fragmentos congelados da peça cirúrgica e os espécimes incluídos em parafina de cada uma das lesões foram igualmente incluídos na investigação. VARIÁVEIS ESTUDADAS: A associação entre a infecção pelo HPV e a presença ou não de lesões conjuntivais. RESULTADOS: Seqüências do DNA do HPV foram detectadas em 4 de 31 lesões avaliadas (12,9%) e na mucosa clinicamente sadia de um indivíduo do grupo controle (1,6%) (P = 0,07). O HPV tipo 16 foi detectado em dois carcinomas invasivos e na mucosa clinicamente normal de um indivíduo do grupo controle. O HPV tipo 11 foi identificado em dois papilomas de um único paciente portador de lesões em ambos os olhos. CONCLUSÕES: A baixa freqüência do DNA do HPV, encontrada nas lesões desta amostra, e a detecção do genoma viral na mucosa clinicamente sadia indicam que há uma fraca possibilidade de associação entre a infecção pelo HPV e os carcinomas da conjuntiva.Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP), Escola Paulista de Medicina (EPM)University of São Paulo Faculty of MedicineUNIFESP, EPMSciEL

Sport: A Possible Road toward Social Inclusion and Quality of Life

Sport is a universal language, recognized and shared by all. A psychiatric users Association, in collaboration with public Mental Health Department and UISP, Italian Union Promoting Sport for All, proposes the sport as one of the possible strategies within a wider therapeutic project for schizophrenia. Soft gymnastic, swimming, football, and volley are observed from the point of view of users, main recipients of the intervention, trainers, and referees. The perceived quality of life was measured in the users/athletes, using the WHOQOL-brief schedule. To practice sport enhances the adhesion to treatment and the quality of life and can reduce hospitalizations. It is a useful tool for promoting well-being, personal autonomy and an active lifestyle, preventing isolation, and improving self-esteem and social cognition. It may be an important factor preventing poor functional outcome and promoting recovery. Team sports seem to have a greater therapeutic value, producing fun, cohesion, and social inclusion; they can also play an important educational role, preventing social stigma

Antifungal Prophylaxis and Risk for Invasive Mold Infections in Children with Hematologic Malignancies

Introduction: Invasive mold infections (IMI) are a leading cause of mortality in immunocompromised hosts. Children diagnosed with hematologic malignancies experience profound, prolonged neutropenia following intensive chemotherapy, and are at increased risk for infection-related outcomes. Depending on the anticipated therapeutic intensity, antimicrobial prophylaxis may be employed to mitigate risk for infection. We conducted a retrospective review of children diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), acute myeloid leukemia (AML), or lymphoma between 2006-2015 and determined the incidence of IMI to be 4.8% (47/976), with an exceptionally high incidence observed in patients with AML (8.1%). This observation prompted a change in clinical practice that broadened prophylaxis for high risk patients to include coverage of molds, and resulted in development of a risk-stratified algorithm for antifungal prophylaxis in children with hematologic malignancies. The objective of this study was to evaluate the change in IMI incidence post-implementation of this algorithm, and to identify host factors contributing to risk for IMI in children with hematologic malignancies. Objective: The objective was to compare the incidence of IMI pre/post implementation of antifungal prophylaxis decision tree. Also, it was planned to evaluate the impact of race/ethnicity on the development of IMI in children with hematologic malignancies. Methods: We conducted a retrospective review of children ≤ 21 years old and diagnosed with ALL, AML, or lymphoma between 2016-2019, and were treated for IMI between 2016 and June 2020. To identify potential cases, we employed a strategy identical to the one used in the 2006-2015 review, specifically, a search of the electronic medical record utilizing ICD9 codes broadly inclusive of relevant cancer and fungal diagnoses. Each potentially eligible case was then reviewed for the following inclusion/exclusion criteria (also identical to the prior review): diagnosis and treatment of ALL, AML, or lymphoma at Texas Children’s Hospital, diagnosis of IMI that met criteria for ‘proven’ or ‘probable’ per the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer/Mycoses Study Group and occurring prior to stem cell transplant, and no underlying immunodeficiency or history of solid organ transplant. Host and disease-related factors, as well as IMI incidence, were compared for 2006-2015 vs. 2016-2020 using a Chi-square, Fisher, or Student t-test as appropriate, and host factors predictive of IMI were assessed by multivariable linear regression. Results: The overall incidence of proven/probable IMI in children diagnosed with hematological malignancies between 2006-2019 was 4.2% (61/1456). The incidence of IMI decreased from 4.8% to 2.9% between 2006-2015 and 2016-2020. For specific diagnoses, the rate of IMI decreased from 5.0% to 3.6% (ALL, 35/705 vs. 10/276), from 1.9% to 1.4% (lymphoma, 47/976 vs. 14/480), and from 8.1% to 3.2% (AML, 9/111 vs. 2/62). No significant differences in host factor or disease-related characteristics were noted when comparing IMI cases in 2006-2015 vs. 2016-2020, nor were there differences in the proportion of patients in relapse at the time of IMI or taking antifungal prophylaxis. Substantial differences in representative mold species were noted between the two-time periods, e.g. Aspergillus spp. accounted for 19/47 IMI from 2006-2015, but accounted for none of the IMIs diagnosed 2016-2020. In 2016-2020, 5/14 IMI were due to Trichosporon spp., with 4/14 Rhizopus spp., 2/14 Fusarium spp., 1/14 Curvularia spp., 1/14 Histoplasma spp., and 1 that met criteria for probable IMI. In multivariable analyses (Table 1), Hispanics were more likely to develop an IMI than non-Hispanics (p=0.04, OR 1.94, CI 1.03-3.66), and those with lymphoma were less likely to develop an IMI than those with ALL (p=0.03, OR 0.33, CI 0.12-0.87). Patients diagnosed between 2016- 2019 were substantially less likely to develop IMI than those diagnosed 2006-2015 (p=0.003, OR 0.33, CI 0.16-0.69). Discussion and Conclusion: In this single institution study, risk for IMI in children with hematologic malignancies declined significantly after implementation of an antifungal prophylaxis algorithm that broadened coverage for high risk populations. Hispanics were at higher risk for IMI than non-Hispanics, suggesting a need to investigate relevant factors contributing to this disparity. This project can be used to further investigate the factors that contributed to invasive mold infections using a larger study populations. We can then continue to explore the potential contributing factors to the racial and ethnic disparities by including potential contributing factors such as socioeconomic factors and genetic risk

MINT: the Molecular INTeraction database

The Molecular INTeraction database (MINT, ) aims at storing, in a structured format, information about molecular interactions (MIs) by extracting experimental details from work published in peer-reviewed journals. At present the MINT team focuses the curation work on physical interactions between proteins. Genetic or computationally inferred interactions are not included in the database. Over the past four years MINT has undergone extensive revision. The new version of MINT is based on a completely remodeled database structure, which offers more efficient data exploration and analysis, and is characterized by entries with a richer annotation. Over the past few years the number of curated physical interactions has soared to over 95 000. The whole dataset can be freely accessed online in both interactive and batch modes through web-based interfaces and an FTP server. MINT now includes, as an integrated addition, HomoMINT, a database of interactions between human proteins inferred from experiments with ortholog proteins in model organisms ()

Online division of labour: emergent structures in Open Source Software

The development Open Source Software fundamentally depends on the participation and commitment of volunteer developers to progress on a particular task. Several works have presented strategies to increase the on-boarding and engagement of new contributors, but little is known on how these diverse groups of developers self-organise to work together. To understand this, one must consider that, on one hand, platforms like GitHub provide a virtually unlimited development framework: any number of actors can potentially join to contribute in a decentralised, distributed, remote, and asynchronous manner. On the other, however, it seems reasonable that some sort of hierarchy and division of labour must be in place to meet human biological and cognitive limits, and also to achieve some level of efficiency. These latter features (hierarchy and division of labour) should translate into detectable structural arrangements when projects are represented as developer-file bipartite networks. Thus, in this paper we analyse a set of popular open source projects from GitHub, placing the accent on three key properties: nestedness, modularity and in-block nestedness -which typify the emergence of heterogeneities among contributors, the emergence of subgroups of developers working on specific subgroups of files, and a mixture of the two previous, respectively. These analyses show that indeed projects evolve into internally organised blocks. Furthermore, the distribution of sizes of such blocks is bounded, connecting our results to the celebrated Dunbar number both in off- and on-line environments. Our conclusions create a link between bio-cognitive constraints, group formation and online working environments, opening up a rich scenario for future research on (online) work team assembly (e.g. size, composition, and formation). From a complex network perspective, our results pave the way for the study of time-resolved datasets, and the design of suitable models that can mimic the growth and evolution of OSS projects

Superconducting tunable flux qubit with direct readout scheme

We describe a simple and efficient scheme for the readout of a tunable flux qubit, and present preliminary experimental tests for the preparation, manipulation and final readout of the qubit state, performed in incoherent regime at liquid Helium temperature. The tunable flux qubit is realized by a double SQUID with an extra Josephson junction inserted in the large superconducting loop, and the readout is performed by applying a current ramp to the junction and recording the value for which there is a voltage response, depending on the qubit state. This preliminary work indicates the feasibility and efficiency of the scheme.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure