Design and baseline characteristics of the finerenone in reducing cardiovascular mortality and morbidity in diabetic kidney disease trial

Background: Among people with diabetes, those with kidney disease have exceptionally high rates of cardiovascular (CV) morbidity and mortality and progression of their underlying kidney disease. Finerenone is a novel, nonsteroidal, selective mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist that has shown to reduce albuminuria in type 2 diabetes (T2D) patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) while revealing only a low risk of hyperkalemia. However, the effect of finerenone on CV and renal outcomes has not yet been investigated in long-term trials. Patients and Methods: The Finerenone in Reducing CV Mortality and Morbidity in Diabetic Kidney Disease (FIGARO-DKD) trial aims to assess the efficacy and safety of finerenone compared to placebo at reducing clinically important CV and renal outcomes in T2D patients with CKD. FIGARO-DKD is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group, event-driven trial running in 47 countries with an expected duration of approximately 6 years. FIGARO-DKD randomized 7,437 patients with an estimated glomerular filtration rate >= 25 mL/min/1.73 m(2) and albuminuria (urinary albumin-to-creatinine ratio >= 30 to <= 5,000 mg/g). The study has at least 90% power to detect a 20% reduction in the risk of the primary outcome (overall two-sided significance level alpha = 0.05), the composite of time to first occurrence of CV death, nonfatal myocardial infarction, nonfatal stroke, or hospitalization for heart failure. Conclusions: FIGARO-DKD will determine whether an optimally treated cohort of T2D patients with CKD at high risk of CV and renal events will experience cardiorenal benefits with the addition of finerenone to their treatment regimen. Trial Registration: EudraCT number: 2015-000950-39; ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT02545049

Cross Media Retrieval in Knowledge Discovery

Abstract. Recent trends show that more and more digital cameras, video cameras and DVD recorders are sold and the number of emails and other messages sent increases each year. For example it is estimated that there will be nearly 300 million digital image capture devices in use worldwide through 2004, capturing about 29 billion digital pictures [12]. Users not only produce huge amounts of content, but this content is also spread over many different media types and document formats. Storing all contents implicates a great extent of documents in large, heterogeneous data repositories. Performing effective retrieval in heterogeneous repositories requires new approaches: documents in different formats containing different media types have to be transformed to a common denominator, and relations between contents of different media types must be established. This allows direct comparison of contents of different media types. In this paper we present a prototype called Magick that implements such an approach to cross-media retrieval

The Pierre Auger Observatory: Contributions to the 33rd International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC 2013)

Contributions of the Pierre Auger Collaboration to the 33rd International Cosmic Ray Conference, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 201