170,931 research outputs found
Calcineurin inhibitors in renal transplantation still needed but in reduced doses: a review.
Despite their contribution in the success of organ transplantation, calcineurin inhibitors (CNIs) may be responsible for frequent and severe side effects that can affect graft survival and life expectancy. In this article, we have reviewed registry studies and randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that seek to avoid, withdraw, or minimize CNIs in renal transplant recipients. Attempts to completely avoid CNIs by administering mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) and/or sirolimus (SRL) have resulted in increased risks of rejection and side effects, with small advantage to improve renal graft function. Early withdrawal of CNIs after transplantation using administration of MMF can improve graft function but may be associated with a greater risk of acute or chronic rejection and graft failure. RCTs in which CNIs were replaced a few months after transplantation by SRL reported improved graft function among SRL-treated patients, but such a treatment was complicated by iatrogenic toxicity. Late replacement of CNIs with SRL did not produce a particular advantage and again was complicated by more frequent side effects. On the basis of these trials, it seems that CNI elimination can trigger rejection or side effects. Recent RCTs showed that minimization of CNI doses in association with everolimus does not increase the risk of rejection, allows one to obtain good graft function, and is well tolerated. Such an approach seems therefore preferable to complete elimination of CNIs with substitution of the current immunosuppressive drugs
Insufficienza renale acuta e o subacuta richiedente dialisi in corso di malattia ateroembolica renale: impatto sulla sopravvivenza del paziente e del rene.
Predictors of renal and patient outcomes in atheroembolic renal disease: a prospective study.
[Clinical diagnosis of Autosomal Dominant Polycystic Kidney Disease]
Autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) is the most common genetic disorder related to kidney. ADPKD is usually easy to diagnose in people who have a family history of ADPKDs developing typical symptoms, including flank, abdominal pain or macroscopic hematuria. In this setting, diagnosis in adults at risk for ADPKD is commonly performed by ultrasonography, which reveals two enlarged kidneys with multiple bilateral cysts. ADPKD may be more difficult to diagnose in the absence of family history or in subjects with atypical presentation, including asymmetric or focal renal imaging findings, discordant disease within family, early onset of ADPKD and development of ESRD before 30 yr of age. The presence of a total of three or more renal cysts for at-risk subjects aged 15-39 years and two cysts or more in each kidney for at-risk subjects aged 40-59 years are sufficient for the diagnosis of ADPKD. The absence of any renal cyst is sufficient for disease exclusion only for at-risk subjects aged 40 years or older. If the family history is negative, the diagnosis of ADPKD can be made in a patient with enlarged kidneys, numerous cysts, presence of liver cysts and absence of findings suggesting a different cystic disease. If the imaging diagnosis is not clear or showing atypical manifestations in subjects, molecular genetic testing should be performed
Soil transmitted helminth (STH) infections in an indigenous community in Ortigueira, Paraná, Brazil and relationship with its nutritional status
Delivery of nucleic acids through embryo microinjection in the worldwide agricultural pest insect, ceratitis capitata
The Mediterranean fruit fly (medfly) Ceratitis capitata (Wiedemann) (Diptera: Tephritidae) is a pest species with extremely high agricultural relevance. This is due to its reproductive behavior: females damage the external surface of fruits and vegetables when they lay eggs and the hatched larvae feed on their pulp. Wild C. capitata populations are traditionally controlled through insecticide spraying and/or eco-friendly approaches, the most successful being the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT). The SIT relies on mass-rearing, radiation-based sterilization and field release of males that retain their capacity to mate but are not able to generate fertile progeny. The advent and the subsequent rapid development of biotechnological tools, together with the availability of the medfly genome sequence, has greatly boosted our understanding of the biology of this species. This favored the proliferation of new strategies for genome manipulation, which can be applied to population control. In this context, embryo microinjection plays a dual role in expanding the toolbox for medfly control. The ability to interfere with the function of genes that regulate key biological processes, indeed, expands our understanding of the molecular machinery underlying medfly invasiveness. Furthermore, the ability to achieve germ-line transformation facilitates the production of multiple transgenic strains that can be tested for future field applications in novel SIT settings. Indeed, genetic manipulation can be used to confer desirable traits that can, for example, be used to monitor sterile male performance in the field, or that can result in early life-stage lethality. Here we describe a method to microinject nucleic acids into medfly embryos to achieve these two main goals
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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