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Patients with autoimmune pulmonary alveolar proteinosis received inhaled molgramostim or matching placebo for 24 weeks. Patients receiving molgramostim had greater improvement in pulmonary gas transfer and alleviation of symptoms than those receiving placebo.

12 plant species traditionally used by the Mapuche people in Chile to treat wounds and inflammations have been evaluated for their direct blood platelet inhibition. Seven of the 12 tested plant species showed platelet inhibitory effect in sheep blood, and four of these were also able to inhibit the ADP- (5.0 μM) and collagen- (2.0 μg/mL) induced aggregations in human blood. These four species in respective extracts (in brackets) were Blechnum chilense (MeOH), Luma apiculata (H2O), Amomyrtus luma (DCM : MeOH 1 : 1) and Cestrum parqui (DCM : MeOH 1 : 1). The platelet aggregating inhibitory effects of A. luma (DCM : MeOH 1 : 1), and L. apiculata (H2O) were substantial and confirmed by inhibition of platelet surface activation markers.

Abstract ObjectiveTo evaluate baseline predictors for the development of persistent microalbuminuria and macroalbuminuria prospectively in patients with type 1 diabetes. DesignProspective observational study of an inception cohort. SettingOutpatient diabetic clinic in a tertiary referral centre, Gentofte, Denmark. Participants286 patients (216 adults) newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes consecutively admitted to the clinic between 1 September 1979 and 31 August 1984. Main outcome measuresPersistent microalbuminuria and persistent macroalbuminuria. ResultsDuring the median follow up of 18.0 years (range 1.0-21.5 years), total of 4706 patient years of follow up, 79 of 277 (29%) patients developed persistent microalbuminuria. 27 of 79 progressed further to persistent macroalbuminuria. The cumulative incidence of persistent microalbuminuria and persistent macroalbuminuria was 33.6% (95% confidence interval 27.2% to 40.0%) and 14.6% (8.9% to 20.3%), respectively. Significant predictors for the development of persistent microalbuminuria were a 10-fold increase in urinary albumin excretion rate (relative risk 3.78, 1.57 to 9.13), being male (2.41, 1.43 to 4.06), a 10 mm Hg increase in mean arterial blood pressure (1.38, 1.20 to 1.57), a 1% increase in haemoglobin A1c(1.18, 1.04 to 1.32), and a 1 cm increase in height (0.96, 0.95 to 0.98). 28 patients with microalbuminuria (35%) regressed to normoalbuminuria either transiently (n = 15) or permanently (n = 13). ConclusionsAround one third of patients newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes develop persistent microalbuminuria within the first 20 years of diabetes. Several potentially modifiable risk factors predict the development of persistent microalbuminaria and persistent macroalbuminuria.

We consider succinct data structures for representing a set of \\(n\\) horizontal line segments in the plane given in rank space to support \\emph{segment access}, \\emph{segment selection}, and \\emph{segment rank} queries. A segment access query finds the segment \\((x_1, x_2, y)\\) given its \\(y\\)-coordinate (\\(y\\)-coordinates of the segments are distinct), a segment selection query finds the \\(j\\)th smallest segment (the segment with the \\(j\\)th smallest \\(y\\)-coordinate) among the segments crossing the vertical line for a given \\(x\\)-coordinate, and a segment rank query finds the number of segments crossing the vertical line through \\(x\\)-coordinate \\(i\\) with \\(y\\)-coordinate at most \\(y\\), for a given \\(x\\) and \\(y\\). This problem is a central component in compressed data structures for persistent strings supporting random access. Our main result is data structure using \\(2n\\lg{n} + O(n\\lg{n}/\\lg{\\lg{n}})\\) bits of space and \\(O(\\lg{n}/\\lg{\\lg{n}})\\) query time for all operations. We show that this space bound is optimal up to lower-order terms. We will also show that the query time for segment rank is optimal. The query time for segment selection is also optimal by a previous bound. To obtain our results, we present a novel segment wavelet tree data structure of independent interest. This structure is inspired by and extends the classic wavelet tree for sequences. This leads to a simple, succinct solution with \\(O(\\log n)\\) query times. We then extend this solution to obtain optimal query time. Our space lower bound follows from a simple counting argument, and our lower bound for segment rank is obtained by a reduction from 2-dimensional counting.

Relative Lempel-Ziv (RLZ) parsing is a dictionary compression method in which a string \\(S\\) is compressed relative to a second string \\(R\\) (called the reference) by parsing \\(S\\) into a sequence of substrings that occur in \\(R\\). RLZ is particularly effective at compressing sets of strings that have a high degree of similarity to the reference string, such as a set of genomes of individuals from the same species. With the now cheap cost of DNA sequencing, such data sets have become extremely abundant and are rapidly growing. In this paper, instead of using a single reference string for the entire collection, we investigate the use of different reference strings for subsets of the collection, with the aim of improving compression. In particular, we form a rooted tree (or hierarchy) on the strings and then compressed each string using RLZ with parent as reference, storing only the root of the tree in plain text. To decompress, we traverse the tree in BFS order starting at the root, decompressing children with respect to their parent. We show that this approach leads to a twofold improvement in compression on bacterial genome data sets, with negligible effect on decompression time compared to the standard single reference approach. We show that an effective hierarchy for a given set of strings can be constructed by computing the optimal arborescence of a completed weighted digraph of the strings, with weights as the number of phrases in the RLZ parsing of the source and destination vertices. We further show that instead of computing the complete graph, a sparse graph derived using locality sensitive hashing can significantly reduce the cost of computing a good hierarchy, without adversely effecting compression performance.