ABSTRACT

Systemic candidiasis is a frequent complication in neonatal units, but congenital systemic candidiasis is an unusual diagnosis, observed in both full-term and preterm infants, with less than 50 cases reported to date. Congenital candidiasis presents with a wide spectrum of symptoms, ranging from diffuse skin eruptions to severe systemic disease, resulting in fetal demise or early neonatal death. Although management guidelines have been published almost two decades ago, due to the rarity of this type of infection, conclusive recommendations are difficult to establish, since they are based on anecdotal experience. In this paper, we present a comprehensive meta-analysis of the current scientific knowledge regarding congenital candidiasis, which spans 54 years and includes a total of 44 cases.

Vascular stress at the level of the uterus-placental unit, with chronic placental ischemia, results in intrauterine growth restriction. Expectation management can be used, when the situation allows, in cases of compensated intrauterine growth restriction. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the neonatal prognosis of preterm births with and without growth restriction and term births with growth restriction in order to improve decisional accuracy regarding the termination of pregnancy. The frequency of term birth infants with low birth weight for gestational age was ~2%. The male sex, predominated only in the group of premature infants with normal weight for the gestational age. The highest frequency of neonatal complications studied occurred in the group of preterm neonates small for gestational age (SGA) with statistical significance obtained for cardiovascular arrest acute respiratory failure, ulcer-necrotic enterocolitis, respiratory distress, cerebral edema, intraventricular hemorrhage, cerebral hemorrhage, pulmonary hemorrhage, neonatal infection, hypoglycemia, retinopathy, anemia, hemorrhagic disease, disseminated intravascular coagulation, disease of hyaline membranes, neonatal sepsis, need for intensive neonatal therapy and death. In conclusion, immediate neonatal adaptation of SGA preterm neonates is more deficient than for preterm neonates with appropriate weight for gestational age; the adaptation of preterm neonates, in turn, is more deficient than term newborns with intrauterine growth restriction. The term newborns with intrauterine growth restriction have a neonatal adaptation comparable to that of the term newborns with weight corresponding to the gestational age.

Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) remains one of the challenges in the safety profile of both authorized and candidate drugs, and predicting hepatotoxicity from the chemical structure of a substance remains a task worth pursuing. Such an approach is coherent with the current tendency for replacing non-clinical tests with in vitro or in silico alternatives. In 2016, a group of researchers from the FDA published an improved annotated list of drugs with respect to their DILI risk, constituting “the largest reference drug list ranked by the risk for developing drug-induced liver injury in humans” (DILIrank). This paper is one of the few attempting to predict liver toxicity using the DILIrank dataset. Molecular descriptors were computed with the Dragon 7.0 software, and a variety of feature selection and machine learning algorithms were implemented in the R computing environment. Nested (double) cross-validation was used to externally validate the models selected. A total of 78 models with reasonable performance were selected and stacked through several approaches, including the building of multiple meta-models. The performance of the stacked models was slightly superior to other models published. The models were applied in a virtual screening exercise on over 100,000 compounds from the ZINC database and about 20% of them were predicted to be non-hepatotoxic.

Breast cancer remains the most common cause of morbidity and mortality by cancer in females worldwide, even though it is largely preventable through population screening. Despite notable progress in the last years in the EU, breast cancer screening programs still maintain wide variations among countries and socio-economic groups. This statistical review aimed to investigate the breast cancer-related health gaps in Romanian women compared to the average EU female population after 10 years of accession (2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016). We evaluated breast cancer-related deaths, age-standardized mortality rates and contribution of breast cancer to life expectancy. Trends and percentage changes were compared between Romania and EU-27 for breast cancer, all cancer and all causes of mortality. We found a higher increase of breast cancer deaths in Romania, an increasing trend of mortality (opposite to EU) and a contribution to life expectancy at birth that increased gradually from 0.45 to 0 48 years. All these health gaps compared to EU are aggravated by the fact that no population screening for breast cancer is organized in the country. The opportunities for organizing such a program are consistent, but they should be increased in the future, in order to control the health gap between Romania and EU.