Adverse impact of a high CD4/CD8 ratio in the allograft may be overcome by methotrexate- but not mycophenolate- or post-transplant cyclophosphamide-based graft versus host disease prophylaxis.

INTRODUCTION: A high CD4/CD8 T cell ratio in hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) allografts was observed to predict graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) and nonrelapse mortality (NRM) but has not been comparatively examined in settings of various GVHD-prophylaxis regimens. METHODS: This retrospective monocentric study included all consecutive HSCT performed with peripheral blood stem cells between January 2000 and June 2021. The impact of the graft CD4/CD8 ratio was analyzed in three cohorts with different GVHD-prophylaxis platforms. RESULTS: In the cyclosporine/mycophenolate-mofetil (CSA/MMF) cohort (n = 294, HLA-matched HSCT), a high (>75th percentile) CD4/CD8 ratio was associated with increased overall mortality (HR: 1.56; p = .01), increased NRM (HR: 1.85; p = .01) and GVHD-associated mortality (HR: 2.13; p = .005). In the post-transplant cyclophosphamide (PTCy)/tacrolimus/MMF cohort (n = 113, haploidentical-related or mismatched-unrelated HSCT), a high CD4/CD8 ratio was associated with increased overall mortality (HR 2.07; p = .04) and aGVHD3-4 (HR: 2.24; p = .02). By contrast, in the CSA/methotrexate (CSA/MTX) cohort (n = 185, HLA-matched HSCT) the CD4/CD8 ratio had no significant impact on any of the investigated endpoints. CONCLUSION: A high CD4/CD8 ratio in the allograft has an adverse impact on GVHD and survival in CSA/MMF- and PTCy-based HSCT, while MTX-based prophylaxis may largely alleviate this important risk factor.

Multi-Label Sentiment Analysis on 100 Languages With Dynamic Weighting for Label Imbalance.

We investigate cross-lingual sentiment analysis, which has attracted significant attention due to its applications in various areas including market research, politics, and social sciences. In particular, we introduce a sentiment analysis framework in multi-label setting as it obeys Plutchik's wheel of emotions. We introduce a novel dynamic weighting method that balances the contribution from each class during training, unlike previous static weighting methods that assign non-changing weights based on their class frequency. Moreover, we adapt the focal loss that favors harder instances from single-label object recognition literature to our multi-label setting. Furthermore, we derive a method to choose optimal class-specific thresholds that maximize the macro-f1 score in linear time complexity. Through an extensive set of experiments, we show that our method obtains the state-of-the-art performance in seven of nine metrics in three different languages using a single model compared with the common baselines and the best performing methods in the SemEval competition. We publicly share our code for our model, which can perform sentiment analysis in 100 languages, to facilitate further research.

EXPRESSION PROFILES OF MIR-155-5P AND MIR-518B MICRORNAS IN CIRCULATING LEUKOCYTES OF THE PREGNANT PATIENTS WITH PREECLAMPSIA AND POLYCYSTIC OVARY SYNDROME.

Context: Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is associated with increased prevalence of preeclampsia (PE); microRNAs (miRs) could play an important role in the pathogenesis of PE and PCOS. Objective: To investigate the expression levels of miRs 155-5p and 518b in blood leukocytes of patients with PE and PCOS. Design: Using real-time quantitative PCR method, miR-155-5p and miR-518b were examined from PE, PCOS, PE+PCOS, and controls. Subjects and Methods: The relative expression of the target miRs in patient samples was compared to control samples. The results were calculated as relative quantification values. Results: Confounding variables were controlled using analyses for covariance. Significant differences were observed in miR-155-5p (p=0.008) and miRNA-518 (p=0.016) expression levels among the groups. miR-155-5p (p=0.014) and miR-518b (p=0.036) were upregulated in PCOS patients and miR-518b (p=0.028) were increased in cases with PCOS+PE. Near significant difference was found (p=0.06) in miR-518b expression levels in cases with PE, compared to controls. miR-518b was observed to be positively correlated with alanine transaminase in cases with PE (r=0.80; P=0.017) and PE+PCOS (r=0.80, p=0.017). Conclusions: Our preliminary findings suggested that expression profiling of miR-155-5p and miR-518b in blood leukocytes were upregulated in pregnant women with PCOS. Moreover, miR-518b was found to be related to PE in cases with PCOS.

Elastic properties of aorta in patients with primary hyperparathyroidism.

In this study, we aimed to evaluate whether hyperpara thyroidism affects the elastic properties of aorta, calculated as aortic distensibility and aortic stiffness index. Eighteen patients with hyperparathyroidism were enrolled in the study. The control group consisted of 18 healthy subjects with similar baseline characteristics. All subjects underwent echocardiographic examination. Internal aortic root diameters were measured at 3 cm above the aortic valve by the use of two-dimensional guided M-mode transthoracic echocardiography, and arterial blood pressure was measured simultaneously from the brachial artery by sphygmomano metry. Two indexes of the aortic elastic properties were measured which are aortic distensibility and aortic stiffness index. The mean aortic stiffness index of hyperparathyroidic patients was higher (3.04 +/- 1.26 vs. 2.36 +/- 1.09; p = 0.048), and aortic distensibility was lower (15.62 +/- 5.84 vs. 22.64 +/- 14.54; p = 0.035) than the control group. The left ventricular (LV) mass index (242.44 +/- 46.3 vs. 212.8 +/- 43.97; p = 0.048), although it has failed to reach statistical significance, and LV wall stress (57.81 +/- 18.22 vs. 46.57 +/- 15.72; p = 0.08) of these patients was also higher than control group. Hyperparathyroidism increases aortic stiffness index and decreases aortic distensibility of primary hyper parathyroidic patients compared with normal population. The affected aortic elastic properties can be a factor in increased LV mass index and wall stress.