Groups take aim at US preterm birth rate.

This is the second report on the continuing efforts of LAGID to increase the recognition and registration of patients with primary immunodeficiency diseases in 12 Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. This report reveals that from a total of 3321 patients registered, the most common form of primary immunodeficiency disease was predominantly antibody deficiency (53.2%) with IgA deficiency reported as the most frequent phenotype. This category was followed by 22.6% other well-defined ID syndromes, 9.5% combined T- and B-cell inmunodeficiency, 8.6% phagocytic disorders, 3.3% diseases of immune dysregulation, and 2.8% complement deficiencies. All countries that participated in the first publication in 1998 reported an increase in registered primary immunodeficiency cases, ranging between 10 and 80%. A comparison of the estimated minimal incidence of X-linked agammaglobulinemia, chronic granulomatous disease, and severe combined immunodeficiency between the first report and the present one shows an increase in the reporting of these diseases in all countries. In this report, the estimated minimal incidence of chronic granulomatous disease was between 0.72 and 1.26 cases per 100,000 births in Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay and the incidence of severe combined immunodeficiency was 1.28 and 3.79 per 100,000 births in Chile and Costa Rica, respectively. However, these diseases are underreported in other participating countries. In addition to a better diagnosis of primary immunodeficiency diseases, more work on improving the registration of patients by each participating country and by countries that have not yet joined LAGID is still needed.

Birth Rate↗

PubMed2006

Mutually catalyzed birth of population and assets in exchange-driven growth.

We propose an exchange-driven aggregation growth model of population and assets with mutually catalyzed birth to study the interaction between the population and assets in their exchange-driven processes. In this model, monomer (or equivalently, individual) exchange occurs between any pair of aggregates of the same species (population or assets). The rate kernels of the exchanges of population and assets are K(k,l) = Kkl and L(k,l) = Lkl , respectively, at which one monomer migrates from an aggregate of size k to another of size l. Meanwhile, an aggregate of one species can yield a new monomer by the catalysis of an arbitrary aggregate of the other species. The rate kernel of asset-catalyzed population birth is I(k,l) = Iklmu [and that of population-catalyzed asset birth is J(k,l) = Jklnu], at which an aggregate of size k gains a monomer birth when it meets a catalyst aggregate of size l . The kinetic behaviors of the population and asset aggregates are solved based on the rate equations. The evolution of the aggregate size distributions of population and assets is found to fall into one of three categories for different parameters mu and nu: (i) population (asset) aggregates evolve according to the conventional scaling form in the case of mu < or = 0 (nu < or = 0), (ii) population (asset) aggregates evolve according to a modified scaling form in the case of nu = 0 and mu > 0 (mu = 0 and nu > 0 ), and (iii) both population and asset aggregates undergo gelation transitions at a finite time in the case of mu = nu > 0.

Birth Rate↗