Novel Nanobody Shows Promise in Myasthenia Gravis - Medscape

Sarcoidosis is a systemic granulomatous disease of unknown cause. Its association with myasthenia gravis has mainly been documented in isolated case reports and small series. We report double-seronegative myasthenia gravis for the antibodies tested, associated with stage I thoracic sarcoidosis and thymic hyperplasia without thymoma. A 46-year-old woman was hospitalized in November 2021 for grade 3 exertional dyspnea according to the modified Medical Research Council scale, associated with fluctuating left-sided ptosis that worsened toward the end of the day. The neostigmine test was positive, with transient improvement in the ptosis. Low-frequency repetitive nerve stimulation demonstrated a decrement compatible with a postsynaptic neuromuscular transmission disorder. Antibodies against the acetylcholine receptor and anti-MuSK antibodies were negative, leading to the diagnosis of double-seronegative myasthenia gravis for the antibodies tested. At the same time, thoracic imaging showed multiple bilateral mediastinal and hilar lymphadenopathies without pulmonary parenchymal involvement. Mediastinoscopy with lymph node biopsy revealed non-necrotizing epithelioid and giant-cell granulom

Asthma, COPD, and CRSwNP are complex, heterogeneous conditions, often driven by multiple overlapping inflammatory pathways rather than a single one. When one pathway is blocked, another can take over, which can quickly result in inadequate disease management. This helps explain a persistent clinical challenge. Asthma affects an estimated 363 million people globally² and, despite the availability of biologic therapies, 60% of adult patients continue to live with poorly controlled symptoms, including recurrent flare-ups, wheezing, and coughing that can disrupt daily life and, in some cases, become life threatening.3 Individuals with CRSwNP experience a similar disease burden with persistent nasal congestion, with up to 40% of patients continuing to experience debilitating symptoms despite treatment, including sinus surgery.4

Pantothenate kinase-associated neurodegeneration (PKAN) is an autosomal recessive disorder and the most common form of neurodegeneration with brain iron accumulation (NBIA), whose imaging hallmark is the "eye-of-the-tiger" sign of the globus pallidus on brain MRI. We report the case of an eight-year-old girl, born to first-cousin parents, with a history of delayed walking and language acquisition, who presented with a four-month history of worsening gait instability and frequent falls. Neurological examination revealed dysarthria, lower-limb dystonia, postural tremor, brisk deep tendon reflexes, and bilateral extensor plantar responses. Brain MRI at 1.5 T showed bilateral, symmetric T2 hypointensity of the globus pallidus surrounding a central hyperintense focus, consistent with the eye-of-the-tiger sign, with marked pallidal signal loss on susceptibility-weighted imaging (SWI). The substantia nigra, dentate nuclei, cerebellum, and remaining brain parenchyma were normal, as were serum copper, ceruloplasmin, and lactate levels. This combination of a progressive extrapyramidal and pyramidal syndrome with the eye-of-the-tiger sign pointed to PKAN, pending genetic confirmation. This ca

GLOBAL dementia incidence is projected to more than double by 2050, reaching 24.7 million new cases annually, according to a meta-analysis of population-based studies. The researchers estimated 11.4 million new cases worldwide in 2023, highlighting differences by sex and country income level. The analysis included individual participant data from 38,418 people across 22 longitudinal cohorts spanning 18 countries or territories on six continents. The cohorts formed part of the Cohort Studies of Memory in an International Consortium (COSMIC), with baseline recruitment between 1990 and 2011 and follow-up data collected through 2021.

Researchers recovered the pan-drug-resistant fungus from a 28-year-old woman with a hospital-acquired surgical wound infection in Nairobi. Credit: Pexels. While a mutant fungus in the real world might not be making humans violent and turning them against each other as in the fictional world of "The Last of Us," it is raising alarm bells for public health.

An estimated 99% of farm animals in the United States are raised in confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. Often called factory farms, these facilities raise livestock in densely packed, enclosed spaces, with some housing tens of thousands of animals at one time. Yet when Kehan (Sky) Sheng, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia, used generative AI to create animal-farming visuals for her presentations, she received idyllic scenes: cows roaming on pasture, pigs rooting in mud, red barns and windmills. Sheng found an explanation deep within the technical documentation for DALL-E 3, OpenAI’s text-to-image AI model for ChatGPT: An internal language model rewrites or expands user prompts to add more details before images are generated. “The moment that I found out it is actually a prompt revision that is erasing all the reality, I was absolutely shocked,” says Sheng. “That’s insane.”In a new Technology in Society paper, Sheng and co-authors analyzed 4,800 independently generated images and found that ChatGPT defaulted to pastoral imagery when prompted to depict dairy and pig farms, even when they requested more realistic images.