Systemic Treatment With Cyclosporine A in Children With Severe Vernal Keratoconjunctivitis.

Purpose: To report our experience with systemic cyclosporine as a treatment for severe vernal keratoconjunctivitis (VKC) in pediatric patients who did not respond to previous treatments.

Methods: We analyzed the medical records of 6 patients, aged 4 to 15 years, with severe VKC treated with systemic cyclosporine for VKC at Shamir Medical Center in Zerifin, Israel, between the years 2000 and 2023. The average treatment duration was 18 months.

Risk and protective factors for health behaviour in adolescence in Europe.

The purpose of the analysis was to identify the risk and protective factors for health behaviour in European adolescents from population health status and expenditure, mental health status, sexual life, social life and education indices and the existence of national strategies, programmes. National and international databases providing information on the presumed health behaviour predictors were used in the analysis. The existence of national health strategies, the level of health expenditure, the socioeconomic conditions, the level of education and literacy had significant influence on the health-risk behaviour of adolescents in the European societies.

A new monitoring system for nutritional status assessment in children at home.

Regular monitoring of children's nutritional status is essential to prevent micronutrient deficiencies, nutritional status abnormalities as stunting, wasting, overweight and obesity. Nutritional status assessment is usually performed by paediatricians by using anthropometry (body mass index, weight to height indices) and/or by body fat-mass measurement (bioimpedance analysis, dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry, computer tomography, etc.).

Identification and prediction of difficult-to-treat rheumatoid arthritis patients in structured and unstructured routine care data: results from a hackathon.

Background: The new concept of difficult-to-treat rheumatoid arthritis (D2T RA) refers to RA patients who remain symptomatic after several lines of treatment, resulting in a high patient and economic burden. During a hackathon, we aimed to identify and predict D2T RA patients in structured and unstructured routine care data.

Methods: Routine care data of 1873 RA patients were extracted from the Utrecht Patient Oriented Database.

Molecular data show conserved DNA locations distinguishing lung cancer subtypes and regulation of immune genes.

Introduction: Non-small-cell lung cancer exhibits a range of transcriptional and epigenetic patterns that not only define distinct phenotypes, but may also govern immune related genes, which have a major impact on survival.

Methods: We used open-source RNA expression and DNA methylation data of the Cancer Genome Atlas with matched non-cancerous tissue to evaluate whether these pretreatment molecular patterns also influenced genes related to the immune system and overall survival.

Results: The distinction between lung adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma are determined by 1083 conserved methylation loci and RNA expression of 203 genes which differ for >80 % of patients between the two subtypes.