Mixed effects modelling of excess mortality and COVID-19 lockdowns in Thailand.

Accurate mortality data are critical for understanding the impact of COVID-19 and learning lessons from crisis responses. But published statistics risk misrepresenting deaths due to limited testing, underreporting, and lack of subnational data, especially in developing countries. Thailand experienced four COVID-19 waves between January 2020 and December 2021, and used a color-coded, province-level system for lockdowns.

Dosimetric impact of mechanical movements of the Linac gantry during treatments with small fields.

Objective: Current accepted linac Quality Assurance (QA) guidelines used for Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT) suggest a mechanical isocentre tolerance level of 1 mm. However, this tolerance level has not been well-established for the specific case of small field stereotactic VMAT. This study aims to evaluate the clinical impact of mechanical uncertainty on this treatment modality by modelling systematic gantry sag derived isocentre variance in the Treatment Planning System (TPS).

COVID-19 lockdown policy and heterogeneous responses of urban mobility: Evidence from the Philippines.

Throughout 2020, national and subnational governments worldwide implemented nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to contain the spread of COVID-19. These included community quarantines, also known as lockdowns, of varying length, scope, and stringency that restricted mobility. To assess the effect of community quarantines on urban mobility in the Philippines, we analyze a new source of data: cellphone-based origin-destination flows made available by a major telecommunication company.

The COVID-19 crisis will exacerbate maternal and child undernutrition and child mortality in low- and middle-income countries.

The economic crisis and food and health system disruptions related to the COVID-19 pandemic threaten to exacerbate undernutrition in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). We developed pessimistic, moderate and optimistic scenarios for 2020-2022 and used three modelling tools (MIRAGRODEP, the Lives Saved Tool and Optima Nutrition) to estimate the impacts of pandemic-induced disruptions on child stunting, wasting and mortality, maternal anaemia and children born to women with a low body mass index (BMI) in 118 LMICs. We estimated the cost of six nutrition interventions to mitigate excess stunting and child mortality due to the pandemic and to maximize alive and non-stunted children, and used the human capital approach to estimate future productivity losses.

Robotic nephroureterectomy in a horseshoe kidney for upper tract urothelial carcinoma.

Upper tract urothelial carcinoma represents a small proportion (5%-10%) of all urothelial cancers. Although there are several management options, in undifferentiated or high-risk cases, surgery in the form of nephroureterectomy is the gold standard. Horseshoe kidney is the most common congenital renal fusion anomaly affecting 1 in 400-600 patients.

Sanitation, financial incentives and health spillovers: A cluster randomised trial.

Poor sanitation and its consequent negative health outcomes continue to plague the developing world. Drawing on the finding that financial subsidies have changed behaviour in other health contexts, we conducted a clustered randomised trial in 160 villages in Lao PDR to evaluate the effectiveness of combining financial incentives with Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), a widely-conducted behaviour change program. Villages were randomly allocated to four groups, all of which received CLTS but differed in the type of subsidy offered (none, household, village or both).

Epigenetic changes in human model KMT2A leukemias highlight early events during leukemogenesis.

Chromosomal translocations involving KMT2A gene are one of the most common genetic alterations found in pediatric acute myeloid leukemias (AML) although the molecular mechanisms that initiate the disease remain incompletely defined. To elucidate these initiating events we have used a human model system of AML driven by the KMT2A-MLLT3 (KM3) fusion. More specifically, we investigated changes in DNA methylation, histone modifications, and chromatin accessibility at each stage of our model system and correlated these with expression changes.

Pediatric leukemia: Moving toward more accurate models.

Leukemia is a complex genetic disease caused by errors in differentiation, growth, and apoptosis of hematopoietic cells in either lymphoid or myeloid lineages. Large-scale genomic characterization of thousands of leukemia patients has produced a tremendous amount of data that have enabled a better understanding of the differences between adult and pediatric patients. For instance, although phenotypically similar, pediatric and adult myeloid leukemia patients differ in their mutational profiles, typically involving either chromosomal translocations or recurrent single-base-pair mutations, respectively.

Evaluation of the Impact of the Linac MLC and Gantry Sag in volumetric modulated arc therapy.

Purpose: Mechanical sag in the radiotherapy linear accelerator gantry and multi-leaf collimator (MLC) carriage effectively causes systematic deviations in the isocenter with respect to gantry angle. To minimize the impact of this error on treatment, a tolerance value of a 1-mm mechanical isocenter shift is commonly accepted for intensity-modulated radiation therapy quality assurance (QA). However, this tolerance value has not been firmly established for volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) treatments.

Mining Cancer Transcriptomes: Bioinformatic Tools and the Remaining Challenges.

The development of next-generation sequencing technologies has had a profound impact on the field of cancer genomics. With the enormous quantities of data being generated from tumor samples, researchers have had to rapidly adapt tools or develop new ones to analyse the raw data to maximize its value. While much of this effort has been focused on improving specific algorithms to get faster and more precise results, the accessibility of the final data for the research community remains a significant problem.

Isolated duodenal rupture due to go-karting accidents--braking news.

Introduction: Isolated duodenal injury due to blunt abdominal trauma is extremely rare. We present a series of three such injuries due to go-karting accidents, which presented to our hospital over 5 months.

Case Reports: Between October 2007 and February 2008, three cases of D3/D4 duodenal rupture presented to our hospital after go-karting accidents.