Clinical Value of Peripheral Blood Gene Expression Profile and Donor-Derived Cellfree DNA for Identifying Persistent Rejection.

Key Points: Peripheral blood biomarkers may have value in monitoring kidney transplant recipients after treatment of acute rejection. The donor-derived cellfree DNA may be more sensitive to identifying antibody-mediated rejection and gene expression profile may be more sensitive to identifying acute cellular rejection.

Background: Persistent rejection is an increasingly recognized barrier to long-term kidney allograft survival.

Detection of Subclinical Rejection in Pediatric Kidney Transplantation: Current and Future Practices.

Introduction: The successes in the field of pediatric kidney transplantation over the past 60 years have been extraordinary. Year over year, there have been significant improvements in short-term graft survival. However, improvements in longer-term outcomes have been much less apparent.

Clinical Value of Peripheral Blood Gene Expression Profile and dd-cfDNA for Identifying Persistent Rejection.

Background: Persistent rejection is an increasingly recognized barrier to long-term kidney allograft survival. A noninvasive method to help identify patients with persistent rejection in need of biopsy would be valuable.

Methods: This was a post-hoc analysis of a multicenter observational study.

Marginal Full Thickness Blepharotomy for Management of Orbital Compartment Syndrome.

Purpose: To assess the utility of a marginal full thickness blepharotomy (MFTB) for the treatment of orbital compartment syndrome.

Methods: An experimental study design employing a cadaver model for orbital compartment syndrome was used to assess the efficacy of an MFTB. Elevated orbital compartment pressures were created in 12 orbits of 6 fresh cadaver heads.

Caffeine Gum Improves Reaction Time but Reduces Composure Versus Placebo During the Extra-Time Period of Simulated Soccer Match-Play in Male Semiprofessional Players.

This study aimed to determine whether caffeine gum influenced perceptual-cognitive and physical performance during the extra-time period of simulated soccer match-play. Semiprofessional male soccer players (n = 12, age: 22 ± 3 years, stature: 1.78 ± 0.

Scoutknife: A naïve, whole genome informed phylogenetic robusticity metric.

The phylogenetic bootstrap, first proposed by Felsenstein in 1985, is a critically important statistical method in assessing the robusticity of phylogenetic datasets. Core to its concept was the use of pseudo sampling - assessing the data by generating new replicates derived from the initial dataset that was used to generate the phylogeny. In this way, phylogenetic support metrics could overcome the lack of perfect, infinite data.

Side Effects and Adverse Events After Treatment With Teprotumumab for Thyroid Eye Disease: A Retrospective Observational Case Series.

As the use of teprotumumab for thyroid eye disease (TED) becomes more prolific, there remains a scarcity of literature regarding the associated side effects and adverse events of teprotumumab use. The authors present a single-center retrospective, observational case review of TED patients who received at least a single dose of teprotumumab infusion at the oculofacial plastic surgery service between February 2020 and July 2023. The most predominant recollected side effects were fatigue, brittle nails, dry eye symptoms, hair loss, muscle spasms, and dry mouth.

Penetrating colored pencil injury with pre-septal cellulitis: case report, literature review, and treatment algorithm.

The incidence of penetrating orbital injuries from writing instruments continues to rise in the pediatric population. Such injuries can cause significant visual morbidity and have a lifelong psychosocial impact. While the description of graphite pencil-related orbital trauma management is well demonstrated with over 40 reported cases, a lack of consistent management protocol for colored pencil-related injuries.

Hagfish genome elucidates vertebrate whole-genome duplication events and their evolutionary consequences.

Polyploidy or whole-genome duplication (WGD) is a major event that drastically reshapes genome architecture and is often assumed to be causally associated with organismal innovations and radiations. The 2R hypothesis suggests that two WGD events (1R and 2R) occurred during early vertebrate evolution. However, the timing of the 2R event relative to the divergence of gnathostomes (jawed vertebrates) and cyclostomes (jawless hagfishes and lampreys) is unresolved and whether these WGD events underlie vertebrate phenotypic diversification remains elusive.

The Evolution of Temperature and Desiccation-Related Protein Families in Tardigrada Reveals a Complex Acquisition of Extremotolerance.

Tardigrada is an ecdysozoan lineage famed for its resilience. Tardigrades can tolerate high doses of radiation, low-oxygen environments, desiccation, and both high and low temperatures under a dormant state called "anhydrobiosis", which is a reversible halt of metabolism upon almost complete desiccation. A large amount of research has focused on the genetic pathways related to these capabilities, and a number of genes have been identified and linked to the extremotolerant response of tardigrades.

Prediction of mechanistic subtypes of Parkinson's using patient-derived stem cell models.

Parkinson's disease is a common, incurable neurodegenerative disorder that is clinically heterogeneous: it is likely that different cellular mechanisms drive the pathology in different individuals. So far it has not been possible to define the cellular mechanism underlying the neurodegenerative disease in life. We generated a machine learning-based model that can simultaneously predict the presence of disease and its primary mechanistic subtype in human neurons.

Structural Limits of Orbital Compliance and Treatment Options for Pathologic Orbital Pressure.

Purpose: The integrity of the orbit has a finite structural limit due to the compliance of its tissue. The authors investigate these limits to quantify them and inform the treatment of heightened ocular and orbital pressure.

Methods: Cadaveric study with 12 orbits being volumized before randomization of treatment for pathologic levels of ocular and orbital pressure.

Identifying and addressing methodological incongruence in phylogenomics: A review.

The availability of phylogenetic data has greatly expanded in recent years. As a result, a new era in phylogenetic analysis is dawning-one in which the methods we use to analyse and assess our data are the bottleneck to producing valuable phylogenetic hypotheses, rather than the need to acquire more data. This makes the ability to accurately appraise and evaluate new methods of phylogenetic analysis and phylogenetic artefact identification more important than ever.

A systematic review of opioid use and multimodal strategies in solid organ transplant recipients and living donors.

The opioid epidemic has impacted analgesia in the postoperative period for solid organ transplant (SOT) donors and recipients. However, optimal pain management and opioid stewardship strategies have not been identified across this unique population. The purpose of this systematic review was to evaluate the impact of perioperative opioid use and to describe multimodal analgesic strategies to reduce opiate use in SOT recipients and living donors.

nRCFV: a new, dataset-size-independent metric to quantify compositional heterogeneity in nucleotide and amino acid datasets.

Motivation: Compositional heterogeneity-when the proportions of nucleotides and amino acids are not broadly similar across the dataset-is a cause of a great number of phylogenetic artefacts. Whilst a variety of methods can identify it post-hoc, few metrics exist to quantify compositional heterogeneity prior to the computationally intensive task of phylogenetic tree reconstruction. Here we assess the efficacy of one such existing, widely used, metric: Relative Composition Frequency Variability (RCFV), using both real and simulated data.

Multiple abnormal peripheral blood gene expression assay results are correlated with subsequent graft loss after kidney transplantation.

Background: The aim of this study was to correlate peripheral blood gene expression profile (GEP) results during the first post-transplant year with outcomes after kidney transplantation.

Methods: We conducted a prospective, multicenter observational study of obtaining peripheral blood at five timepoints during the first post-transplant year to perform a GEP assay. The cohort was stratified based on the pattern of the peripheral blood GEP results: Tx-all GEP results normal, 1 Not-TX had one GEP result abnormal and >1 Not-TX two or more abnormal GEP results.

Long-term Outcomes Following a Comprehensive Quality Assurance and Process Improvement Endeavor to Minimize Opioid Use After Kidney Transplant.

Importance: Opioid use following kidney transplant is associated with an increased risk of graft loss and mortality. Opioid minimization strategies and protocols have shown reductions in short-term opioid use after kidney transplant.

Objective: To evaluate the long-term outcomes associated with an opioid minimization protocol following kidney transplant.

Barriers to Telehealth Utilization Among Patients of Limited Income with Chronic Conditions and a Gap in Care.

p p p p

Clinical Utility of the OmniGraf Biomarker Panel in the Care of Kidney Transplant Recipients (CLARITY): Protocol for a Prospective, Multisite Observational Study.

Background: Death with a functioning allograft has become the leading category of graft loss in kidney transplant recipients at all time points. Previous analyses have demonstrated that causes of death in kidney transplant recipients are predominated by comorbidities strongly associated with immunosuppressant medications. Adverse drug events (ADEs) have been strongly associated with nonadherence, health care utilization, and graft loss; clinicians face a difficult decision on whether making immunosuppressant adjustments in the face of ADEs will improve symptomology or simply increase the risk of acute rejection.

Relationship of binding-site occupancy, transthyretin stabilisation and disease modification in patients with tafamidis-treated transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy.

Background: Tafamidis inhibits progression of transthyretin (TTR) amyloid cardiomyopathy (ATTR-CM) by binding TTR tetramer and inhibiting dissociation to monomers capable of denaturation and deposition in cardiac tissue. While the phase 3 ATTR-ACT trial demonstrated the efficacy of tafamidis, the degree to which the approved dose captures the full potential of the mechanism has yet to be assessed.

Methods: We developed a model of dynamic TTR concentrations in plasma to relate TTR occupancy by tafamidis to TTR stabilisation.

Navigation for youth mental health and addictions: protocol for a realist review and synthesis of approaches and practices (The NavMAP standards project).

Introduction: Mental health and/or addiction (MHA) concerns affect approximately 1.2 million children and youth in Canada, yet less than 20% receive appropriate treatment for these concerns. Youth who do not receive appropriate support may disengage from care and may experience lasting MHA issues.