Evaluation of minimal residual disease by real-time quantitative PCR of Wilms' tumor 1 expression in patients with acute myelogenous leukemia after allogeneic stem cell transplantation: correlation with flow cytometry and chimerism.

Relapse remains the main cause of treatment failure in patients with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) after allogeneic hemopoietic stem cell transplantation (SCT). The Wilms' tumor 1 gene (WT1) is reportedly overexpressed in >90% of patients with AML and thus can be useful for minimal residual disease (MRD) monitoring. The aim of this study was to evaluate the usefulness of WT1 expression as a relapse predictor marker in patients with AML after SCT and compare it with flow cytometry (FC) and chimerism studies. WT1 expression was assessed retrospectively using quantitative RT-PCR in bone marrow and peripheral blood from 21 patients. Patients were classified according to WT1 dynamics posttransplantation. Eleven of the 21 patients had low and stable WT1 levels. All of these 11 patients showed complete chimerism and negative MRD by FC and remained in complete remission with a median follow-up of 27 months (range, 18-98 months). In contrast, 10 of 21 patients showed WT1 overexpression after SCT, and 9 of these 10 patients relapsed. The incidence of relapse differed significantly between the 2 groups of patients according to WT1 expression post-SCT (P = .00003). Relapse in the 9 patients occurred at a median of 314 days (range, 50-560 days). Interestingly, in these patients, relapse was first predicted by WT1 (with negative FC and complete chimerism) in 7 patients. WT1 overexpression was correlated with disease burden in patients with AML before and after allogeneic SCT. In patients who relapsed, both medullary and extramedullary relapse were better anticipated by WT1 overexpression compared with FC and chimerism.

Prevalence of Developmental Dyslexia in Spanish University Students.

A recent concern in the field of dyslexia studies is the lack of awareness and attention to university students suffering from this condition. If this problem is serious in countries where the relative opacity of the writing system allows for an early detection and, therefore, effective interventions, it is most critical in countries where transparent spelling makes such detection difficult, except in the most severe cases. In Spain, the diagnosis of dyslexia is rare among university-level adults. The present study pursues three aims: (a) to put forward a screening instrument for the detection of university students at risk of dyslexia, (b) to determine the ratio of university students that could be at risk of dyslexia by means of two different procedures, and (c) to create awareness for a disorder that causes hitherto unrecognized difficulties for an important subgroup of the college population. Six hundred and eighty-six university students in four different fields of study within the general area of Social Sciences from a public University in Madrid completed a Spanish-adapted version of a protocol including stress assignment, spelling words and nonwords, and timed phonological working memory of reading and writing task. Results showed that between 1.6% and 6.4% of this population could be at risk of suffering dyslexia. Such risk is not evenly distributed across the four fields of study. As for gender, the first criterion used yields 1.8 males at risk for every female, but the second criterion has as many males as females at risk. Women were significantly better than men in word spelling. Spelling was best predicted by the timed phonological working memory task of reading and writing.

Análisis comparativo de estudios sobre la velocidad de nombrar en español y su relación con la adquisición de la lectura y sus dificultades / Comparative Analysis of Rapid Automatized Naming Studies in Spanish and Reading Acquisition and Reading Difficulties

La relación entre las tareas de Velocidad de Nombrar (VN) y la lectura se estudió por primera vez, en lengua inglesa, en la década de los 70, descubriéndose que los niños con dislexia eran lentos e inconsistentes en estas tareas. Posteriormente, algunos estudios han confirmado que la VN es el mejor predictor de la lectura en lenguas trasparentes, consecuentemente, se convierte en una medida de gran interés para la ortografía española. Acorde con lo expuesto, se analizan las investigaciones publicadas sobre VN y lectura en español, con el objetivo de extraer conclusiones para el diagnóstico y el tratamiento de las dificultades de lectura. Los estudios revisados muestran que la VN es un potente indicador para predecir la adquisición posterior de la lectura en edades tempranas y para discriminar entre lectores típicos y aquellos con dificultades. La VN es una medida fácil de administrar, útil tanto para el diagnóstico como para la prevención de las dificultades de lectura en nuestra lengua.

The relationship between Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) tasks and reading proficiency was first studied for English during the 70s, one finding being that children with dyslexia were slow and inconsistent in the RAN tasks. Later on, some studies have confirmed that RAN is the best predictor for transparent ortographies - and so of particular interest for Spanish. The research done so far on RAN and reading in Spanish is therefore reviewed here in order to draw conclusions for the diagnosis and treatment of reading difficulties. Our review shows that RAN is both a powerful early predictor of future reading outcomes and capable of discriminating between typical and poor readers. Being very easy to test, RAN is thus of great use in the diagnosis and prevention of reading disorders in Spanish.