Efficacy and safety of oral cyclophosphamide versus mycophenolate mofetil in childhood nephrotic syndrome: an open-label comparative study.

Introduction: There is a scarcity of research comparing the efficacy of cyclophosphamide and mycophenolate mofetil in childhood nephrotic syndrome. The aim was to evaluate the efficacy and safety of oral cyclophosphamide (CYC) and mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) in children with steroid-sensitive nephrotic syndrome in terms of the proportion of children who have been off steroids for at least 6 months without proteinuria (responders).

Methods: This open-label retrospective-prospective comparative study was conducted in a pediatric nephrology clinic of a referral center for children between 1 and 18 years of age with FR/SD nephrotic syndrome.

Genome replication in asynchronously growing microbial populations.

Biological cells replicate their genomes in a well-planned manner. The DNA replication program of an organism determines the timing at which different genomic regions are replicated, with fundamental consequences for cell homeostasis and genome stability. In a growing cell culture, genomic regions that are replicated early should be more abundant than regions that are replicated late.

Opposing Responses to Scarcity Emerge from Functionally Unique Sociality Drivers.

AbstractFrom biofilms to whale pods, organisms across taxa live in groups, thereby accruing numerous diverse benefits of sociality. All social organisms, however, pay the inherent cost of increased resource competition. One expects that when resources become scarce, this cost will increase, causing group sizes to decrease.

Speed variations of bacterial replisomes.

Replisomes are multi-protein complexes that replicate genomes with remarkable speed and accuracy. Despite their importance, their dynamics is poorly characterized, especially in vivo. In this paper, we present an approach to infer the replisome dynamics from the DNA abundance distribution measured in a growing bacterial population.

Search and Localization Dynamics of the CRISPR-Cas9 System.

The CRISPR-Cas9 system acts as the prokaryotic immune system and has important applications in gene editing. The protein Cas9 is one of its crucial components. The role of Cas9 is to search for specific target sequences on the DNA and cleave them.

Comparison of Noninvasive Oscillometric and Intra-Arterial Blood Pressure Measurements in Children Admitted to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.

Intra-arterial blood pressure (IABP) measurement, although considered the gold standard in critically ill children, is associated with certain risks and lacks widespread availability. This study was conducted to determine the differences and agreements between oscillometric non-invasive blood pressure (NIBP) and invasive IABP measurements in children. Inclusion criteria consisted of children (from 1 month to 18 years) admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) of a teaching hospital who required arterial catheter insertion for blood pressure (BP) monitoring.

Comparison of Clinical Features and Outcome of Dengue Fever and Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children Associated With COVID-19 (MIS-C).

Objective: To identify clinical and laboratory features that differentiate dengue fever patients from MIS-C patients and determine their outcomes.

Methods: This comparative cross-sectional study was done at a tertiary care teaching institute. We enrolled all hospitalized children aged 1 month - 18 years and diagnosed with either MIS-C and/or dengue fever according to WHO criteria between June and December, 2020.

Role of montelukast in multitrigger wheezers attending chest clinic in Punjab, India.

Background: Wheeze is seen in 40% of preschool children, one-third of these may develop recurrent wheeze. Montelukast is an oral, once a day, easy to give therapy but there is no definite evidence to support its use in a recent meta-analysis. Present study was done to evaluate role of daily montelukast and various factors affecting the outcome after therapy in multitrigger wheeze (MTW).

Extended Residual-State Creep Test and Its Application for Landslide Stability Assessment.

This paper contains the results of a newly developed residual-state creep test performed to determine the behavior of a selected geomaterial in the context of reactivated landslides. Soil and rock creep is a time-dependent phenomenon in which a deformation occurs under constant stress. Based on the examination results, it was found that the tested clayey material (from Kobe, Japan) shows tertiary creep behavior only under shear stress higher than the residual strength condition and primary and secondary creep behavior under shear stress lower or equal to the residual strength condition.

Oral cyclophosphamide therapy in 100 children with steroid-sensitive nephrotic syndrome: experience from a developing country.

Background: Oral cyclophosphamide (CYP) is an important therapeutic agent in treatment of steroid-sensitive nephrotic syndrome having a steroid-dependent (SD) or frequent relapsing (FR) course. This retrospective observational study aimed to determine response to oral CYP and factors associated with positive response in these patients.

Methods: We studied 100 children (male; 75) with FR (19%) and SD (81%) NS treated with CYP in the Pediatric Nephrology clinic.

A Case Report of An Iris Epithelial Cyst Masquerading As Iris Cysticercosis.

Introduction: Iris cysts can be primary or secondary. It is common to mistake a parasitic cyst for a benign pigment epithelial cyst. However, we report a case where a benign cyst was mistaken for a parasitic cyst.

Nonuniversal opinion dynamics driven by opposing external influences.

We study the opinion dynamics of a generalized voter model in which N voters are additionally influenced by two opposing news sources whose effect is to promote political polarization. As the influence of these news sources is increased, the mean time to reach consensus scales nonuniversally as N^{α}. The parameter α quantifies the influence of the news sources and increases without bound as the news sources become increasingly influential.

Utilization of the renal angina index in PICU of a developing country for prediction of subsequent severe acute kidney injury.

Background: Acute kidney injury (AKI) is independently associated with worsened morbidity and increased mortality in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). AKI risk score, termed renal angina index (RAI) is used in developed countries to predict subsequent severe AKI. Very few studies have investigated application of RAI in the PICU of a developing country.

Multidimensional impact on families of children with steroid-sensitive nephrotic syndrome.

Aim: Children with nephrotic syndrome (NS) have prolonged disease course with relapses requiring frequent visits and prolonged steroid therapy with their long-term concerns. All these factors affect the child and their families in many domains of functioning. The objective of this study was to assess multidimensional impact on families of children with nephrotic syndrome using (PedsQL) Family Impact Module (FIM).

Transport of organelles by elastically coupled motor proteins.

Motor-driven intracellular transport is a complex phenomenon where multiple motor proteins simultaneously attached on to a cargo engage in pulling activity, often leading to tug-of-war, displaying bidirectional motion. However, most mathematical and computational models ignore the details of the motor-cargo interaction. A few studies have focused on more realistic models of cargo transport by including elastic motor-cargo coupling, but either restrict the number of motors and/or use purely phenomenological forms for force-dependent hopping rates.

Outcome of children with acute disseminated encephalomyelitis in a tertiary care center in India.

Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM) is an immune-mediated disease of the brain that follows viral infection or vaccination, or even appears spontaneously. The objective of the study was to evaluate the clinical, neuroimaging and laboratory profiles of children with ADEM. Seventeen children admitted to the Pediatric Department of Dayanand Medical College and Hospital, Ludhiana, whose cases were consistent with the diagnosis of ADEM, were included.

Memory, bias, and correlations in bidirectional transport of molecular-motor-driven cargoes.

Molecular motors are specialized proteins that perform active, directed transport of cellular cargoes on cytoskeletal filaments. In many cases, cargo motion powered by motor proteins is found to be bidirectional, and may be viewed as a biased random walk with fast unidirectional runs interspersed with slow tug-of-war states. The statistical properties of this walk are not known in detail, and here, we study memory and bias, as well as directional correlations between successive runs in bidirectional transport.

Effectiveness of a dynein team in a tug of war helped by reduced load sensitivity of detachment: evidence from the study of bidirectional endosome transport in D. discoideum.

Bidirectional cargo transport by molecular motors in cells is a complex phenomenon in which the cargo (usually a vesicle) alternately moves in retrograde and anterograde directions. In this case, teams of oppositely pulling motors (e.g.

Melting of Ni and Fe nanoparticles: a molecular dynamics study with application to carbon nanotube synthesis.

Molecular dynamics simulations with many-body interatomic potentials are used to study melting of Ni and Fe nanoparticles with diameters that range between 2 and 12 nm. Two different embedded-atom method interatomic potentials are used for each element. The capability of each interatomic potential to model (i) size-dependent melting in nanoparticles and (ii) the bulk melting temperature of Ni or Fe is explored.