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Background: New‐onset allergic diseases, such as food allergy or atopic dermatitis, can develop after allogeneic transplantation. There are limited reports of new‐onset atopic dermatitis after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation in children and adolescents, and its treatment is yet to be established. The pathogenesis may differ from typical atopic dermatitis in terms of alloimmunity including graft‐versus‐host disease. Methods: We present five children and adolescents with new‐onset atopic dermatitis after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. The characteristics and clinical profiles of skin treatment after hematopoietic stem cell transplantation are summarized. Results: Graft‐versus‐host disease prophylaxis included systemic tacrolimus for all patients. After hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, all patients achieved complete donor chimerism of the bone marrow and had acute graft‐versus‐host disease of the skin. After engraftment, all patients had skin lesions that met the international consensus diagnostic criteria for atopic dermatitis. None of the patients met the diagnostic criteria for chronic graft‐versus‐host disease. Topical therapy and skin care based on atopic dermatitis guidelines improved skin condition and atopic dermatitis severity scores in all patients. In addition, type 2 inflammatory markers improved accordingly. Conclusion: Topical therapy and skin care may be effective for transplant‐related atopic dermatitis after hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. When extensive dermatitis is observed after hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, this treatment may avoid excessive immunosuppressive therapy if it meets the diagnostic criteria for atopic dermatitis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Acute asthma exacerbation in children is often caused by respiratory infections. In this study, a coordinated national surveillance system for acute asthma hospitalizations and causative respiratory infections was established. We herein report recent trends in pediatric acute asthma hospitalizations since the COVID‐19 pandemic in Japan. Methods: Thirty‐three sentinel hospitals in Japan registered all of their hospitalized pediatric asthma patients and their causal pathogens. The changes in acute asthma hospitalization in children before and after the onset of the COVID‐19 pandemic and whether or not COVID‐19 caused acute asthma exacerbation were investigated. Results: From fiscal years 2010–2019, the median number of acute asthma hospitalizations per year was 3524 (2462–4570), but in fiscal years 2020, 2021, and 2022, the numbers were 820, 1,001, and 1,026, respectively (the fiscal year in Japan is April to March). This decrease was observed in all age groups with the exception of the 3‐ to 6‐year group. SARS‐CoV‐2 was evaluated in 2094 patients from fiscal years 2020–2022, but the first positive case was not detected until February 2022. Since then, only 36 of them have been identified with SARS‐CoV‐2, none of which required mechanical ventilation. Influenza, RS virus, and human metapneumovirus infections also decreased in FY 2020. In contrast, 24% of patients had not been receiving long‐term control medications before admission despite the severity of bronchial asthma. Conclusion: SARS‐CoV‐2 was hardly detected in children with acute asthma hospitalization during the COVID‐19 pandemic. This result indicated that SARS‐CoV‐2 did not induce acute asthma exacerbation in children. Rather, infection control measures implemented against the pandemic may have consequently reduced other respiratory virus infections and thus acute asthma hospitalizations during this period. However, the fact that many hospitalized patients have not been receiving appropriate long‐term control medications is a major problem that should be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: There are expanding indications for oral food challenges (OFCs). Although several studies have examined the risk of OFCs, little has been reported on allergic reactions during OFCs depending on the indication. This study assessed the prevalence, severity, and treatment of allergic reactions depending on the indication for OFCs. Methods: We performed a prospective multicenter study between March 2012 and May 2013. Severity of symptoms elicited by OFCs was classified according to grading of anaphylaxis that ranges from grade 1 (most mild) to grade 5 (most severe). Results: A total of 5062 cases (median age, 3.8 years; males, 65.2%) were analyzed. Allergic reactions were elicited in 2258 (44.6%) OFCs, of which 991 (43.9%) were classified as grade 1, 736 (32.6%) were classified as grade 2, 340 (15.1%) were classified as grade 3, and 191 (8.5%) were classified as grade 4‐5. Epinephrine was administered in 7.1% (n = 160) of positive OFCs. Among the top three most common food allergens (hen's egg, cow's milk, and wheat), severity differed significantly depending on the indication for OFC, and adjusted standardized residuals indicated that severity of allergic reactions was higher for the indication to assess threshold level for oral immunotherapy. In addition, the prevalence of epinephrine use was highest for the indication to determine safe intake quantity. Conclusions: Our study suggested that prevalence, severity, and treatment of allergic reactions differ depending on the indication for OFC. Further studies are needed to determine differences in risks depending on the indication for OFC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maintenance therapy of atopic dermatitis (AD) with frequent exacerbations needs proactive use of topical corticosteroids or topical calcineurin inhibitors. However, it can be difficult for children in an unfavorable family environment. Home‐visit nursing service (HVNS) plays an important role in delivering care to people who need medical help at home. We report a boy in a difficult family situation who received HVNS to successfully manage AD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regardless of interaction with less frequent imitative caregivers, infants can obtain the vowels of the caregivers' mother tongues by finding the correspondence between their own vowels and the caregivers' vowels. This paper proposes a learning method based on auto-mirroring bias (AMB) with a self-evaluation mechanism to find such correspondence. AMB is the robot's anticipation of being imitated by its caregiver and has a role of narrowing the candidates for the correspondence. The self-evaluation mechanism biased by AMB works as outlier (incorrect mapping) rejection, expecting that the outliers appear less consistently than the correct mappings do in the interaction. Results from several computer simulations with real sound wave recording from a human experimenter show that the robot could successfully achieve being imitated by the proposed method even if interacting with a caregiver who would seldomly imitate its utterances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a formidable issue how robots can show behaviors to be considered as the corresponding human's ones since the body structure is different between robots and humans. As a simple case for such a correspondence problem, this paper presents a robot that learns to vocalize vowels through the interaction with its caregiver. Inspired by the findings of developmental psychology, we focus on the roles of maternal imitation (i.e., imitation of the robot voices by the caregiver) since it could play a role to instruct the correspondence of the sounds. Furthermore, we suppose that it causes unconscious anchoring in which the imitated voice by the caregiver is performed unconsciously, closely to one of his/her own vowels and hereby helps to make the robot's utterances to be more vowel-like. We propose a method for vowel learning with an imitative caregiver, under the assumptions that the robot knows the desired categories of the caregiver's vowels, and the rough estimate of mapping between the region of sounds that the caregiver can generate and the region that the robot can. Through experiments with a Japanese imitative caregiver, we show that a robot succeeds in acquiring more vowel-like utterances than a robot without such a caregiver, even when it is given different types of mapping functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cow's milk (CM) is a common allergen present in immunoglobulin E (IgE)-mediated food allergy in children. At the age of five months, the family doctor recommended that she should avoid CM because she had eczema and positive serum CM-specific IgE. CM, cow's milk; eHF, extensively hydrolyzed formula; OIT, oral immunotherapy; sIgE, specific IgE. [Extracted from the article]

BACKGROUND: Airway remodeling has been recently one of the main goals in asthma research because it has been implicated to influence airway behavior and evolution of asthma; hence, important in long-term followup of asthmatic patients. METHODS: Airways of fatal asthma(n = 3), non-fatal asthma(n = 3) and control cases(n = 4) were studied using morphometry and immunohistochemical and H&E staining. RESULTS: The basement membrane was thicker in the cartilaginous and membranous airways of fatal and non-fatal asthma groups compared to the control group(p < 0.05). Smooth muscle shortening was greater in airways of fatal asthma cases while submucosal gland area and mucus plug occupying ratio were greater in fatal asthma large airways compared to the two other groups(p < 0.01). Increased intact and degranulated mast cells were observed in smooth muscle and in submucosal gland of fatal asthma airways(p < 0.01) and were associated with greater degree of smooth muscle shortening and larger submucosal gland area, respectively. Eosinophil and EG2 + cell infiltrations were greatest in lamina propria of airways of fatal asthma than in non-fatal and control cases(p < 0.01), but were not associated with any airway structural change. CONCLUSION: Increased infiltration of eosinophils in the lamina propria and mast cells in smooth muscle and submucosal glands may have a role in airway remodeling of fatal asthma airways but needs further investigation. Moreover, mast cells in cartilaginous airways may participate in the regulation of smooth muscle tone and mucous gland secretion and hyperplasia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Characterization of seafood allergens is important to understand the immune response to these allergens. Moreover, a detailed comparison between atopic and nonatopic patients with adverse reactions to shrimp has never been reported. Methods: Raw and boiled shrimp extracts were analyzed by immunoblotting using sera from 9 atopic and 7 nonatopic patients with a history of adverse reactions to shrimp, and 13 control subjects. Total IgE, specific IgE and skin prick tests (SPT) to shrimp were also investigated. Results: The level of specific IgE to shrimp was higher in atopic patients than nonatopic patients (p < 0.05). Symptoms, SPT results and major allergens involved were similar in atopic and nonatopic patients. The 16.5-kD protein had the highest frequency of IgE binding followed by the 40-kD protein in these patients. Other minor IgE-binding proteins were observed at the 20-, 22-, 54-, 72-, 129- and 140-kD regions. Patients who had binding to the 16.5-kD protein had either positive (25% raw/31% cooked) or negative (13% raw/cooked) CAP-FEIA-RAST, while patients who recognized the 40-kD protein all had positive (31% raw/19% cooked) CAP-FEIA-RAST. All control subjects had negative immunoblots for these two proteins. Conclusion: The 16.5-kD protein was the most frequent protein identified regardless of CAP-FEIA-RAST results, while the 40-kD protein was only present in patients with positive CAP-FEIA-RAST. Therefore, 16.5-kD protein may be an important allergen that is clinically relevant in both atopic and nonatopic patients with adverse reactions to shrimp even if it is not detected by the CAP-FEIA-RAST system. Copyright © 2004 S. Karger AG, Basel [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a case study of a 4-year-old boy presented with two episodes of frequent vomiting after consuming one serving of BW noodles at the age of 2 and 3 years. It notes diagnosis of food protein-induced enterocolitis syndrome (FPIES) caused by buckwheat presented in noodles; and mentions that BW could cause FPIES in patients with repeated gastrointestinal symptoms.

The article presents a case study of an afebrile eight years old Japanese girl diagnosed with hypotensive shock and respiratory distress. The patient was admitted in the hospital because of cough, lethargy dyspnea and nuria wherein her physical and vital signs are assessed to help improve her condition. The patient's transthoracic echocardiogram result reveals that she experience a decrease in her ventricular wall motion with valvular abnormalities which require immediate treatment.