A Rare Case of Spinal Sarcoidosis Presenting as Multiple Bone Marrow Oedematous Lesions

Sarcoidosis is a systemic disorder that most commonly affects the lungs. Bone involvement is rare, and spinal involvement is even more rare. The presence of focal lesions of the vertebrae is highly suspicious of advanced malignancy. However, malignant metastatic spread to the spine involves the vertebral cortex rather than the bone marrow itself, a distinction that is often missed and therefore misleading. We describe here a middle-aged woman with multiple focal oedematous lesions of the bone marrow suspected of being advanced malignancy but finally diagnosed as a rare case of spinal sarcoidosis

Parents' perceptions of their children's outdoor activities before and during COVID-19 crisis

This study is focused on Israeli parents' perceptions regarding the possible benefits and barriers to their children's outdoor activities as well as on their reports on the actual engagement of their children in these kinds of activities, before and during the COVID-19 crisis. We employed a mixed-method design, including a questionnaire and a semi-structured interview. The participants were 213 Israeli parents. Findings reveal that parents think that outdoor activities benefit children's physical-motor and social development and their health. They consider their long work hours and weather conditions as the main barriers to spending more time outdoors. Parents also reported going out significantly less with their children to playgrounds after the peak of the COVID-19 crisis, compared to their habits before the pandemic. The decrease in the time spent outdoors was attributed by the parents to their long work hours and to an increase in the time spent by their children in front of screens. In light of the findings, we suggest that parents need guidance in order to restore the habit of going out to close playgrounds on an almost daily basis and in order to appreciate the contribution of outdoor activities to children's connectedness and knowledge about nature

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Can Induce Neuroplasticity and Significant Clinical Improvement in Patients Suffering From Fibromyalgia With a History of Childhood Sexual Abuse—Randomized Controlled Trial

Background: Fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS), a condition considered to represent a prototype of central sensitization syndrome, can be induced by different triggers including childhood sexual abuse (CSA). Recent studies have demonstrated hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) can induce neuroplasticity and improve clinical outcome of FMS. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the effect of HBOT on patients suffering from FMS with a history of CSA.Materials and methods: A prospective randomized clinical trial conducted between July 2015 and November 2017 included women with a history of CSA who fulfilled fibromyalgia diagnosis criteria for at least 5 years prior to inclusion. Included participants (N = 30) were randomly assigned to treatment group, treated with 60 HBOT sessions and a control/crossover group received psychotherapy. After the control period, the control/crossover group was crossed to HBOT. Clinical outcomes were assessed using FMS questioners, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) questioners and quality of life questioners. Objective outcome were assessed using brain function and structure imaging.Findings: Following HBOT, there was a significant improvement in all FMS questionnaires (widespread pain index, Fibromyalgia symptoms severity scale, Fibromyalgia functional impairment), most domains of quality of life, PTSD symptoms and psychological distress. The same significant improvements were demonstrated in the control following crossover to HBOT. Following HBOT, brain SPECT imaging demonstrated significant increase in brain activity in the prefrontal cortex, orbital frontal cortex, and subgenual area (p < 0.05). Brain microstructure improvement was seen by MRI-DTI in the anterior thalamic radiation (p = 0.0001), left Insula (p = 0.001), and the right Thalamus (p = 0.001).Conclusion: HBOT induced significant clinical improvement that correlates with improved brain functionality and brain microstructure in CSA related FMS patients.Trial Registration:www.Clinicaltrials.gov, identifier: NCT03376269. url: https://clinicaltrials.gov/show/NCT0337626

A reference map of potential determinants for the human serum metabolome

The serum metabolome contains a plethora of biomarkers and causative agents of various diseases, some of which are endogenously produced and some that have been taken up from the environment(1). The origins of specific compounds are known, including metabolites that are highly heritable(2,3), or those that are influenced by the gut microbiome(4), by lifestyle choices such as smoking(5), or by diet(6). However, the key determinants of most metabolites are still poorly understood. Here we measured the levels of 1,251 metabolites in serum samples from a unique and deeply phenotyped healthy human cohort of 491 individuals. We applied machine-learning algorithms to predict metabolite levels in held-out individuals on the basis of host genetics, gut microbiome, clinical parameters, diet, lifestyle and anthropometric measurements, and obtained statistically significant predictions for more than 76% of the profiled metabolites. Diet and microbiome had the strongest predictive power, and each explained hundreds of metabolites-in some cases, explaining more than 50% of the observed variance. We further validated microbiome-related predictions by showing a high replication rate in two geographically independent cohorts(7,8) that were not available to us when we trained the algorithms. We used feature attribution analysis(9) to reveal specific dietary and bacterial interactions. We further demonstrate that some of these interactions might be causal, as some metabolites that we predicted to be positively associated with bread were found to increase after a randomized clinical trial of bread intervention. Overall, our results reveal potential determinants of more than 800 metabolites, paving the way towards a mechanistic understanding of alterations in metabolites under different conditions and to designing interventions for manipulating the levels of circulating metabolites.The levels of 1,251 metabolites are measured in 475 phenotyped individuals, and machine-learning algorithms reveal that diet and the microbiome are the determinants with the strongest predictive power for the levels of these metabolites

Self-Customized BSP Trees for Collision Detection

The ability to perform efficient collision detection is essential in virtual reality environments and their applications, such as walkthroughs. In this paper we re-explore a classical structure used for collision detection -- the binary space partitioning tree. Unlike the common approach, which attributes equal likelihood to each possible query, we assume events that happened in the past are more likely to happen again in the future. This leads us to the definition of self-customized data structures. We report encouraging results obtained while experimenting with this concept in the context of self-customized bsp trees. Keywords: Collision detection, binary space partitioning, self-customization. 1 Introduction Virtual reality refers to the use of computer graphics to simulate physical worlds or to generate synthetic ones, where a user is to feel immersed in the environment to the extent that the user feels as if "objects" seen are really there. For example, "objects" should m..