Grade 4 hypertensive retinopathy in a 13-year-old girl as a serious complication of nephrogenic hypertension

The paper presents a case of a 13-year-old girl admitted to the Department of Ophthalmology due to bilateral vision deterioration persisting for about one month, who 9 years earlier was diagnosed and irregularly treated for hypertension. Her best-corrected visual acuity was 0.05 for the right and 0.2 for the left eye. Grade 4 hypertensive retinopathy was diagnosed based on the appearance of the fundus of the eye and significantly increased blood pressure (220/130 mm Hg). The girl was urgently referred to the Department of Nephrology for further diagnosis and treatment. Intensive antihypertensive treatment and reduction of blood pressure led to minor improvement in visual acuity. This case report emphasises the significance of periodic blood pressure monitoring in children as well as shows how serious the ophthalmological consequences of untreated hypertension can be

Estimation of environmental flows in semi-natural lowland rivers - the Narew basin case study

This paper discusses a new environmental flow method based on the adapted building block approach. A four-step procedure is outlined in this paper: (1) selecting biota of interest and organizing a team of specialists; (2) selecting river reaches of interest; (3) defining flow requirements of selected biota; (4) defining environmental flow indicators. The focus is placed on two elements of river and wetland ecosystems: fish and floodplain wetland vegetation. The method is applied to identify changes in the environmental flow indicators between 1976-83 (“past”) and 2001-08 (“present”) in 16 selected river reaches of the Narew basin, a large semi-natural lowland catchment situated in northeastern Poland. The results indicate that hydrological conditions for fish and floodplain wetland vegetation were significantly better in the past period compared to the present

Investigation of the Molecular Evolution of Treg Suppression Mechanisms Indicates a Convergent Origin

Regulatory T cell (Treg) suppression of conventional T cells is a central mechanism that ensures immune system homeostasis. The exact time point of Treg emergence is still disputed. Furthermore, the time of Treg-mediated suppression mechanisms’ emergence has not been identified. It is not yet known whether Treg suppression mechanisms diverged from a single pathway or converged from several sources. We investigated the evolutionary history of Treg suppression pathways using various phylogenetic analysis tools. To ensure the conservation of function for investigated proteins, we augmented our study using nonhomology-based methods to predict protein functions among various investigated species and mined the literature for experimental evidence of functional convergence. Our results indicate that a minority of Treg suppressor mechanisms could be homologs of ancient conserved pathways. For example, CD73, an enzymatic pathway known to play an essential role in invertebrates, is highly conserved between invertebrates and vertebrates, with no evidence of positive selection (w = 0.48, p-value < 0.00001). Our findings indicate that Tregs utilize homologs of proteins that diverged in early vertebrates. However, our findings do not exclude the possibility of a more evolutionary pattern following the duplication degeneration–complementation (DDC) model. Ancestral sequence reconstruction showed that Treg suppression mechanism proteins do not belong to one family; rather, their emergence seems to follow a convergent evolutionary pattern