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Aim To compare clinical and pathological characteristics as well as prognosis between diabetic nephropathy (DN) and non-diabetic renal disease (NDRD) so as to explore potential diagnostic criteria of DN and provide some guidance for the treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients with kidney involvement. Methods T2DM patients with renal impairment who underwent kidney biopsy were included in this study, who were classified into 3 groups (DN, NDRD, DN with NDRD) based on their renal pathological diagnosis. Baseline clinical characteristics as well as follow-up data were collected and analyzed among 3 groups. Logistic regression was performed to determine the best predictors for DN diagnosis. Additional 34 MN patients without diabetes were enrolled by propensity score matching method to compare serum PLA2R antibody titer and kidney outcomes between diabetic MN patients and MN alone. Results Among 365 patients with type 2 diabetes who underwent kidney biopsy, 179 (49.0%) patients were diagnosed with NDRD alone and 37 (10.1%) patients with NDRD combined DN. Risk factors for DN development in T2DM patients were longer time since diabetes diagnosis, higher level of serum creatinine, absence of hematuria and presence of diabetic retinopathy by multivariate analysis. Lower rate of proteinuria remission and higher risk of renal progression were observed in DN group compared with NDRD group. Membranous nephropathy was the most common NDRD in diabetic patients. There was no difference in serum PLA2R antibody positiveness or titer between MN patients with or without T2DM. There was lower remission rate but similar renal progression in diabetic MN when age, gender, baseline eGFR, albuminuria and IFTA score were adjusted. Conclusions Non-diabetic renal disease is not uncommon in T2DM patients with renal impairment, which has better prognosis with proper treatment. Coexisting diabetic status does not exert negative impact on renal progression in MN patients, and immunosuppressive agents should be administered when necessary.

Introduction AL amyloidosis has become a common secondary cause in elderly male patients presenting with nephrotic syndrome. Daratumumab-CyBorD regimen is approved as the standard first-line regimen for AL-amyloidosis. We aim to analyze the prognosis of patients treated with bortezomib-based regimen and other alternative regimens. Method We retrospectively collected the baseline and follow up data of newly diagnosed AL amyloidosis patients. Hematological and renal response rate were compared among different regimens and overall survival and renal survival were analyzed. Subgroup analysis of Mayo stage III patients was also performed. Results 72 cases were included, 48.6% of whom had cardiac involvement. Overall response rate in patients treated with bortezomib-based regimen was 67.4%, including 27.9% complete response (CR). Renal outcomes such as proteinuria response rate and incidence of end stage renal disease (ESRD) were not different between bortezomib and thalidomide-based therapy.Median follow up for whole cohort was 22 months,and 13(18.1%) patients died at the end of follow-up, while 7 patients(9.7%) progressed to dialysis. Median overall survival (OS) was not reached in both regimens and 1 year survival rates were 90.4% and 80.0% respectively in bortezomib and thalidomide based therapy(P = 0.127). Patients treated with bortezomib-based treatment had longer organ deterioration progression-free survival (MOD-PFS).There was no difference in response rate and OS between patients treated with cyclophosphamide, bortezomib,dexamethasone(CVD) and bortezomib, dexamethasone (VD). Mayo stage III patients who were treated with VD regimen had longer OS compared with TD or CTD regimen. Conclusion Bortezomib-based regimen had high efficacy in promoting rapid hematologic responses and reducing the risk of major organ deterioration in AL amyloidosis, which was also effective among patients with cardiac insufficiency. Addition of cyclophosphamide into VD regimen could not further improve the overall remission or survival of AL amyloidosis.

Background. The modernization of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) demands systematic data mining using medical records. However, this process is hindered by the fact that many TCM symptoms have the same meaning but different literal expressions (i.e., TCM synonymous symptoms). This problem can be solved by using natural language processing algorithms to construct a high-quality TCM symptom normalization model for normalizing TCM synonymous symptoms to unified literal expressions. Methods. Four types of TCM symptom normalization models, based on natural language processing, were constructed to find a high-quality one: (1) a text sequence generation model based on a bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) neural network with an encoder-decoder structure; (2) a text classification model based on a Bi-LSTM neural network and sigmoid function; (3) a text sequence generation model based on bidirectional encoder representation from transformers (BERT) with sequence-to-sequence training method of unified language model (BERT-UniLM); (4) a text classification model based on BERT and sigmoid function (BERT-Classification). The performance of the models was compared using four metrics: accuracy, recall, precision, and F1-score. Results. The BERT-Classification model outperformed the models based on Bi-LSTM and BERT-UniLM with respect to the four metrics. Conclusions. The BERT-Classification model has superior performance in normalizing expressions of TCM synonymous symptoms.

Objective To verify serum PLA2R antibody and glomerular PLA2R antigen expression in membranous nephropathy as well as to explore their relationship with clinical presentation and disease prognosis. Methods We retrospectively analyzed 155 patients clinical figures who were diagnosed with primary membranous nephropathy by kidney biopsy. Patients were divided into 6 groups according to their serum PLA2R antibody or glomerular PLA2R antigen positiveness and the level of serum PLA2R antibody titer. Both clinical features and pathological characteristics were recorded, and remission rate as well as time to response were compared among groups. Correlation between clinical figures and titer of PLA2R antibody or semi-quantity of PLA2R antigen were detected. Results Among patients with positive serum PLA2R antibody and tissue PLA2R antigen, higher baseline PLA2R antibody levels were associated with lower remission rate and longer remission time. A positive correlation between time to partial remission and serum PLA2R antibody titer was found. Among patients with serum PLA2R antibody titer

For a market impact model, price manipulation and related notions play a role that is similar to the role of arbitrage in a derivatives pricing model. Here, we give a systematic investigation into ...

For a market impact model, price manipulation and related notions play a role that is similar to the role of arbitrage in a derivatives pricing model. Here, we give a systematic investigation into such regularity issues when orders can be executed both at a traditional exchange and in a dark pool. To this end, we focus on a class of dark-pool models whose market impact at the exchange is described by an Almgren--Chriss model. Conditions for the absence of price manipulation for all Almgren--Chriss models include the absence of temporary cross-venue impact, the presence of full permanent cross-venue impact, and the additional penalization of orders executed in the dark pool. When a particular Almgren--Chriss model has been fixed, we show by a number of examples that the regularity of the dark-pool model hinges in a subtle way on the interplay of all model parameters and on the liquidation time constraint. The paper can also be seen as a case study for the regularity of market impact models in general.

In this chapter, we derive the Markowitz-optimal trading trajectory for a trader who wishes to sell a large position of Kunits on some contingent claim. To do so, we first use a Taylor expansion of the derivative with respect to the price of the underlying asset at time zero. We then use up to the second-order approximation to solve the mean-variance optimization problem.