Characteristics of Adolescent Patients Admitted to the Emergency Department due to Attempted Suicide by Poisoning; a Brief Report

Introduction: In the background of the increased suicide rate in the second decade of life, analysis of the characteristics of poisoning-related attempted suicide in adolescents and evaluation of the differences from adults may form an important basis for establishing measures to prevent deaths from poisoning. Objective: We aimed to investigate the types of toxic substances ingested for attempted suicide by poisoning in adolescents admitted to the emergency department (ED). Method: This cross-sectional study retrospectively analyzed and investigated the medical records of patients aged 13 or older, admitted to the ED of a tertiary medical institute over a period of 3 years, for attempted suicide by poisoning. Results: The psychiatric diagnoses among patients in the adolescent group included depression (75.8%), bipolar disorder (12.5%), and panic disorder (12.5%). In terms of the type of drug used for poisoning, antidepressants or anti-psychotics and sleeping pills were the most commonly used in the adolescent (43 subjects, 45.2%) and adult (286 subjects, 37.6%) groups, respectively. Conclusion: As there is a higher chance of poisoning by easily accessible drugs, the emergency physician needs to investigate any preceding diagnoses of psychiatric or medical illnesses in the adolescent patients attempting suicide with unknown drugs

Online Class Incremental Learning on Stochastic Blurry Task Boundary via Mask and Visual Prompt Tuning

Continual learning aims to learn a model from a continuous stream of data, but it mainly assumes a fixed number of data and tasks with clear task boundaries. However, in real-world scenarios, the number of input data and tasks is constantly changing in a statistical way, not a static way. Although recently introduced incremental learning scenarios having blurry task boundaries somewhat address the above issues, they still do not fully reflect the statistical properties of real-world situations because of the fixed ratio of disjoint and blurry samples. In this paper, we propose a new Stochastic incremental Blurry task boundary scenario, called Si-Blurry, which reflects the stochastic properties of the real-world. We find that there are two major challenges in the Si-Blurry scenario: (1) inter- and intra-task forgettings and (2) class imbalance problem. To alleviate them, we introduce Mask and Visual Prompt tuning (MVP). In MVP, to address the inter- and intra-task forgetting issues, we propose a novel instance-wise logit masking and contrastive visual prompt tuning loss. Both of them help our model discern the classes to be learned in the current batch. It results in consolidating the previous knowledge. In addition, to alleviate the class imbalance problem, we introduce a new gradient similarity-based focal loss and adaptive feature scaling to ease overfitting to the major classes and underfitting to the minor classes. Extensive experiments show that our proposed MVP significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods in our challenging Si-Blurry scenario

Systemic EBV+ T-cell lymphoma in elderly patients: comparison with children and young adult patients

Fulminant Epstein–Barr virus (EBV+) T-cell lymphoma in immunocompetent elderly patients is rare and its character has not been well defined. This study analyzed the clinicopathological features of five elderly patients (group A: 50–84 years) and compared them with those of eight children and young adult patients with systemic T-cell lymphomas (group B: 10–34 years). Group A more commonly presented with generalized lymphadenopathy (n = 3) than did group B (n = 1). Chronic active EBV infection (n = 3) and hydroa vacciniforme-like eruptions (n = 1) were seen in group B, while group A showed no evidence of chronic EBV infection, but did show chronic hepatitis B or C virus infections (n = 3). The histological and immunophenotypical findings were similar. All patients died within 1 to 14 months of diagnosis. These findings suggest that EBV+ T-cell lymphoma in elderly patients is a unique disease with an underlying derangement of T-cell immunity and failure to eradicate infected virus. Additional factors related to senility may play a role in the disruption of homeostasis between the virus and the host’s immune system

Visfatin exerts angiogenic effects on human umbilical vein endothelial cells through the mTOR signaling pathway

AbstractThe biologically active factors known as adipocytokines are secreted primarily by adipose tissues and can act as modulators of angiogenesis. Visfatin, an adipocytokine that has recently been reported to have angiogenic properties, is upregulated in diabetes, cancer, and inflammatory diseases. Because maintenance of an angiogenic balance is critically important in the management of these diseases, understanding the molecular mechanism by which visfatin promotes angiogenesis is very important. In this report, we describe our findings demonstrating that visfatin stimulates the mammalian target of the rapamycin (mTOR) pathway, which plays important roles in angiogenesis. Visfatin induced the expression of hypoxia-inducible factor 1α (HIF1α) and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in human endothelial cells. Inhibition of the mTOR pathway by rapamycin eliminated the angiogenic and proliferative effects of visfatin. The visfatin-induced increase in VEGF expression was also eliminated by RNA interference-mediated knockdown of the 70-kDa ribosomal protein S6 kinase (p70S6K), a downstream target of mTOR. Visfatin inactivated glycogen synthase kinase 3β (GSK3β) by phosphorylating it at Ser-9, leading to the nuclear translocation of β-catenin. Both rapamycin co-treatment and p70S6K knockdown inhibited visfatin-induced GSK3β phosphorylation at Ser-9 and nuclear translocation of β-catenin. Taken together, these results indicate that mTOR signaling is involved in visfatin-induced angiogenesis, and that this signaling leads to visfatin-induced VEGF expression and nuclear translocation of β-catenin

Characterization of diverse natural variants of CYP102A1 found within a species of Bacillus megaterium

An extreme diversity of substrates and catalytic reactions of cytochrome P450 (P450) enzymes is considered to be the consequence of evolutionary adaptation driven by different metabolic or environmental demands. Here we report the presence of numerous natural variants of P450 BM3 (CYP102A1) within a species of Bacillus megaterium. Extensive amino acid substitutions (up to 5% of the total 1049 amino acid residues) were identified from the variants. Phylogenetic analyses suggest that this P450 gene evolve more rapidly than the rRNA gene locus. It was found that key catalytic residues in the substrate channel and active site are retained. Although there were no apparent variations in hydroxylation activity towards myristic acid (C14) and palmitic acid (C16), the hydroxylation rates of lauric acid (C12) by the variants varied in the range of >25-fold. Interestingly, catalytic activities of the variants are promiscuous towards non-natural substrates including human P450 substrates. It can be suggested that CYP102A1 variants can acquire new catalytic activities through site-specific mutations distal to the active site