The prevalence of obesity in children with CHD: what has changed over the past decade in Southwestern Ontario?

Objective: To assess the prevalence of obesity and investigate any changes in body mass index in children with CHD compared to age-matched healthy controls, in Southwestern Ontario.

Methods: The body mass index z-scores of 1259 children (aged 2-18) with CHD were compared with 2037 healthy controls. The body mass index z-scores of children who presented to our paediatric cardiology outpatient clinic from 2018 to 2021 were compared with previously collected data from 2008 to 2010.

Left atrial appendage aneurysm in pediatrics: Case study and literature review.

Left atrial appendage aneurysm (LAAA) is a rare cardiac pathology that is often identified in adulthood. There are a myriad of presentations related to atrial appendage enlargement, but most are asymptomatic. Pediatric cases of LAAA are extremely rare.

Translating Precision Health for Pediatrics: A Scoping Review.

Precision health aims to personalize treatment and prevention strategies based on individual genetic differences. While it has significantly improved healthcare for specific patient groups, broader translation faces challenges with evidence development, evidence appraisal, and implementation. These challenges are compounded in child health as existing methods fail to incorporate the physiology and socio-biology unique to childhood.

Access to novel drugs and therapeutics for children and youth: Eliciting citizens' values to inform public funding decisions.

Introduction: The unique evidentiary, economic and ethical challenges associated with health technology assessment (HTA) of precision therapies limit access to novel drugs and therapeutics for children and youth, for whom such challenges are amplified. We elicited citizens' perspectives about values-based criteria relevant to the assessment of paediatric precision therapies to inform the development of a child-tailored HTA framework.

Methods: We held four citizen panels virtually in May-June 2021, informed by a plain-language citizen brief summarizing global and local evidence about the challenges, policy and programmatic options and implementation strategies related to enhancing access to precision therapies for Canadian children and youth.

Assessing the Educational and Supportive Care Needs of Canadian Metastatic Melanoma Patients and Survivors Attending an Outpatient Clinic.

The rapid development of metastatic melanoma treatment options has significantly improved overall survival, but paralleled patient educational and supportive care resources have fallen behind. Particularly, the need for grassroots programs targeting environments outside urban centers has grown. Accordingly, an environmental scan of the Durham region in Ontario, Canada, showed the lack of melanoma-specific resources for outpatients.

Pharmacogenomic-based personalized medicine: Multistakeholder perspectives on implementational drivers and barriers in the Canadian healthcare system.

Pharmacogenomics (PGx)-based personalized medicine (PM) is increasingly utilized to guide treatment decisions for many drug-disease combinations. Notably, London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) has pioneered a PGx program that has become a staple for London-based specialists. Although implementational studies have been conducted in other jurisdictions, the Canadian healthcare system is understudied.

Analysis of TERT Isoforms across TCGA, GTEx and CCLE Datasets.

Reactivation of the multi-subunit ribonucleoprotein telomerase is the primary telomere maintenance mechanism in cancer, but it is rate-limited by the enzymatic component, telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT). While regulatory in nature, TERT alternative splice variant/isoform regulation and functions are not fully elucidated and are further complicated by their highly diverse expression and nature. Our primary objective was to characterize TERT isoform expression across 7887 neoplastic and 2099 normal tissue samples using The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the Genotype-Tissue Expression Project (GTEx), respectively.

Cabozantinib real-world effectiveness in the first-through fourth-line settings for the treatment of metastatic renal cell carcinoma: Results from the International Metastatic Renal Cell Carcinoma Database Consortium.

Background: Cabozantinib is approved for metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC) based on the METEOR and CABOSUN trials. However, real-world effectiveness and dosing patterns of cabozantinib are not well characterized.

Methods: Patients with mRCC treated with cabozantinib between 2011 and 2019 were identified and stratified using the International mRCC Database Consortium (IMDC) risk groups.

Dynamic regulation of connexins in stem cell pluripotency.

Characterization of the pluripotent "ground state" has led to a greater understanding of species-specific stem cell differences and has imparted an appreciation of the pluripotency continuum that exists in stem cells in vitro. Pluripotent stem cells are functionally coupled via connexins that serve in gap junctional intercellular communication (GJIC) and here we report that the level of connexin expression in pluripotent stem cells depends upon the state in which stem cells exist in vitro. Human and mouse pluripotent stem cells stabilized in a developmentally primitive or "naïve" state exhibit significantly less connexin expression compared with stem cells which are "primed" for differentiation.