For patients with celiac disease, following a gluten-free diet is complicated and often challenging.
“Our patients are navigating a gluten-free diet without any feedback to guide them,” says Jocelyn Silvester, MD, PhD, director of research at the Celiac Disease Program at Boston Children’s Hospital. “Symptoms are not a reliable indicator of gluten exposure. Many patients may not have any symptoms at all.”
For clinicians, assessing how well patients are doing on a gluten-free diet can be equally difficult. “There are no good measures of how well the gluten-free-diet is working or how well patients are following the diet,” Silvester says.
Moreover, tolerance to gluten can vary in celiac disease. Some children have symptoms despite being (apparently) on a gluten-free diet. Others have no symptoms after a gluten exposure, yet show severe atrophy of the nutrient-absorbing villi on intestinal biopsy. Villous atrophy poses a risk for complications, such as poor growth, anemia and osteoporosis. …
Magnification of pulmonary vein tissue showing signs of pulmonary vein stenosis (plump abnormal cells stained dark magenta). Credit: Boston Children’s Hospital Department of Pathology
Pulmonary vein stenosis (PVS) is a rare disease in which abnormal cells build up inside the veins responsible for carrying oxygen-rich blood from the lungs to the heart. It restricts blood flow through these vessels, eventually sealing them off entirely if left untreated. Typically affecting young children, the most severe form of PVS progresses very quickly and can cause death within a matter of months after diagnosis.
Until recently, treatment options have been limited to keeping the pulmonary veins open through catheterization or surgery. Yet this approach only removes the cells but does nothing to prevent their regrowth. Now, a clinical trial shows that adding chemotherapy to a treatment regimen including catheterization and surgery can deter abnormal cellular growth and finally give children with PVS a chance to grow up.
“Through this approach, we’ve created the first-ever population of survivors who are living with severe PVS,” saysChristina Ireland, RN, MS, FNP, who has managed enrolling patients in the trial and treating new patients since the trial ended. “We’ve changed this disease from an acute killer to a chronic, manageable condition.” …
Clostridium difficile, also called “C. diff,” causes severe gastrointestinal tract infections and tops the CDC’s list of urgent drug-resistant threats. In work published in Nature in 2016, Min Dong, PhD, and colleagues found the elusive portal that enables a key C. diff toxin, toxin B, to enter the intestines’ outer cells and break down the intestinal barrier (above right).
Interestingly, the same portal, known as the Frizzled receptor, also receives signals that maintain the intestine’s stem cells. When toxin B docks, it blocks these signals, carried by a molecule known as Wnt. But exactly how it all works remained a puzzle — until new research published today in Science.
Liang Tao, PhD in Dong’s lab, working with the labs of Rongsheng Jin, PhD, at UC-Irvine, and Xi He, PhD, at Boston Children’s, captured the crystal structure of a fragment of toxin B (in orange above) as it joined to the Frizzled receptor (in green). The structure revealed lipid molecules within the Frizzled receptor (in yellow and red) that play a central role. Normally, when Wnt binds to Frizzled, it nudges these lipids aside. But the team showed that when the toxin fragment binds to Frizzled, it locks these lipids in place, preventing Wnt from engaging with the cell.
Just as stem cells rely on Wnt signaling for growth and regeneration, so do many cancers. Now that its mechanism is known, Dong thinks this toxin B fragment, which by itself isn’t toxic, could be a useful anti-cancer therapeutic. They’re currently developing a new generation of Wnt signaling modulators and testing them in animal models of cancer. (For further information, contact Rajinder.Khunkun@childrens.harvard.edu of Boston Children’s Technology & Innovation Development Office.)
David Ludwig, MD, PhD, an endocrinologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, has written popular books espousing a low-glycemic, low-carbohydrate diet for weight control. He has argued that high-glycemic diets are contributing to the epidemic of type 2 diabetes. But he hadn’t given much thought to carbohydrate restriction for type 1 diabetes until 2016.
At a conference, Ludwig met a surgeon with type 1 diabetes who maintains normal hemoglobin A1c levels (indicating high blood sugar control) on a very-low-carbohydrate diet. This surprised and impressed him: he had never seen any patient with type 1 diabetes able to completely normalize their hemoglobin A1cs. Moreover, most diabetes experts discourage very-low-carb diets, believing they pose a risk for hypoglycemia, or a dangerous drop in blood sugar. …
A mock-up of the ExSpiron monitoring a toddler’s breathing
Children can be at risk for compromised breathing after surgery or from conditions like asthma, congestive heart failure or sleep apnea. Opioid therapy and sedation for medical procedures can also depress breathing. Unless a child is sick enough to have a breathing tube, respiratory problems can be difficult to detect early. Yet early detection can mean the difference between life and death.
“There is currently no real-time objective measure,” says Viviane Nasr, MD, an anesthesiologist with Boston Children’s Hospital’s Division of Cardiac Anesthesia. “Instead, respiratory assessment relies on oximetry data, a late indicator of respiratory decline, and on subjective clinical assessment.”
A new device, recently cleared by the FDA for children 1 year and older in medical settings, provides an easy, noninvasive way to tell how much air the lungs are receiving in real time. It can signal problems as much as 15-30 minutes before standard pulse oximetry picks up low blood oxygenation, according to one study. …
During the 1918 influenza pandemic, the average life expectancy in the U.S. dropped below 40 years old. Today, public health and medical professionals need to be actively preparing for the next great pandemic, according to leaders of the Massachusetts Medical Society, The New England Journal of Medicine and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who delivered the keynote address at a Boston-based meeting on April 27 called Epidemics Going Viral: Innovation vs. Nature. Here’s recap of what we heard from various panelists.
The five key drivers of epidemics are population growth/urbanization, travel, animals, environmental/climate changes and conflicts/natural disasters, according to Harvey Fineberg, MD, PhD, President of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and former president of the Institute of Medicine. When it comes to predicting and preventing the next epidemic, Fineberg believes that data from a social media platform like Twitter isn’t going to help identify the next big outbreak.
But John Brownstein, PhD, an epidemiologist and Chief Innovation Officer at Boston Children’s Hospital, disagreed with that idea.
“I believe it’s possible for Twitter to find the next microbe,” Brownstein said. “This information comes in real time and at global scale.” Attendees who were live tweeting with the hashtag #epidemicsgoviral were quick to highlight this difference of opinion.
Uber flu shot, “a cool millennial thing to do”
Anne Schuchat, MD, deputy director of the Centers of Disease Control, busted the myth that non-vaccination rates are rising. She explained that media stories about anti-vaccination supporters can make it seem as though vaccination rates are falling when they actually aren’t.
“Less than one percent of kids aren’t vaccinated in the U.S.,” Schuchat said.
But some vaccinations, like the annual flu shot, still have big gaps to close. Brownstein described how a partnership with Uber — dispatching flu vaccines and nurses to people’s homes — was able to influence people to get their first-ever flu shot. …
EEG nets are easily slipped over an infant’s head and cause no discomfort. (Credit: Nelson Lab)
The earlier autism can be diagnosed, the more effective interventions typically are. But the signs are often subtle or can be misinterpreted at young ages. As a result, many children aren’t diagnosed until age 2 or even older. Now, a study shows that electroencephalograms (EEGs), which measure the brain’s electrical activity, can accurately predict or rule out autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in babies as young as 3 months old. It appears today in Scientific Reports.
The beauty of EEG is that it’s already used in many pediatric neurology or developmental pediatric settings. “EEGs are low-cost, non-invasive and relatively easy to incorporate into well-baby checkups,” says study co-author Charles Nelson, PhD, director of the Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience at Boston Children’s Hospital. “Their reliability in predicting whether a child will develop autism raises the possibility of intervening very early, well before clear behavioral symptoms emerge.” …
Their plan is to optimize the ability for CAR T-cell therapies, which use a patient’s genetically modified T cells to combat cancer, to more specifically kill tumor cells without setting off an immune response “storm” known as cytokine release syndrome. The key ingredient is a unique small molecule that greatly enhances the specificity of the tumor targeting component of the therapy. …
Image: Wikimedia Commons. (Source: The Cell Nucleus and Aging: Tantalizing Clues and Hopeful Promises. Scaffidi P, Gordon L, Misteli T. PLoS Biology Vol. 3/11/2005, e395 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0030395)
Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome, better known as progeria, is a highly rare genetic disease of premature aging. It takes a cruel toll: Children begin losing body fat and hair, develop the thin, tight skin typical of elderly people and suffer from hearing loss, bone problems, hardening of the arteries, stiff joints and failure to grow. They die at an average age of 14½, typically from heart disease resembling that of old age.
This is the third year that Jacob Works has made the trip down to Boston Children’s Hospital from Maine. With research assistant Haley Medeiros, he looks at pictures, answers questions, manipulates blocks and mimes actions like knocking on a door. His father, Travis, and another research assistant look on through a window.
“At first, we had to practically bribe him with an iPad with every task,” Travis says. “This year he’s more excited, because he understands more and is more confident and able to share more.”
Jacob, 11, was diagnosed in 2011 with Phelan-McDermid Syndrome, a rare genetic condition that typically causes children to be born “floppy,” with low muscle tone, and to have little or no speech, developmental delay and, often, autism-like behaviors. At the time, Jacob was one of about 800 known cases. But through chromosomal microarray testing, introduced in just the past decade for children with autism symptoms, more cases are being picked up. …
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