Invasive Rhino-Orbito-Cerebral Mucormycosis in Pediatric Patient with Acute Leukemia.

BACKGROUND: Invasive fungal infections are a life-threatening complication of cancer treatments, especially in hemato-oncological patients. Mucormycosis is the third leading cause of invasive fungal infections after Aspergillus and Candida infections. The first clinical symptoms are usually non-specific, which can lead to a late diagnosis and delayed therapy. PURPOSE: The objective of this report is to summarize data in the literature about mucormycosis and to present a case report of a patient with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, who developed this infection at our center. Risk factors for the development of mucormycosis, clinical symptoms, radiology, laboratory results, and outcome were retrospectively evaluated. CASE: We describe a 6-years-old female patient with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. During the induction phase of therapy, the patient developed febrile neutropenia and did not respond to therapy with a combination of antibiotics and supportive treatment. Pansinusitis and orbitocellulitis developed. Examination of the biological material revealed that the etiological agent was a Rhizopus sp. The patient was treated with a combination of antimycotic drugs, but the infection disseminated to the central nervous system. She underwent radical surgical resection of the affected tissue. At this time, she is still under treatment with antimycotic and oncology agents, but is in remission of the main diagnosis and in good clinical condition. CONCLUSION: Mucormycosis is an invasive fungal infection with high morbidity and mortality. Early diagnosis and initiation of effective therapy using a combination of amphotericin B administration and surgery are necessary to obtain a favorable outcome. The authors declare they have no potential conflicts of interest concerning drugs, products, or services used in the study. The Editorial Board declares that the manuscript met the ICMJE recommendation for biomedical papers.

Comparison of Two Different Techniques Of Warfarin Dosing Determination - A Chemometrics Study.

A high prevalence of genetic polymorphisms increases sensitivity to warfarin therapy. In this study, we investigated 47 patients with effective long-term therapy by warfarin well-controlled by monitoring of International Normalised Ratio (INR). All patients were tested for gene polymorphisms VKORC1, CYP2C9*C2, and CYP2C9*C3, which were used for a dose calculation employing a program www.WarfarinDosing.org. The main goal was to investigate whether the warfarin doses determined by INR are in accordance with the doses calculated according to the pharmacogenetic algorithm. For this purpose, several chemometric tools, namely principal component analysis, cluster analysis, correlation analysis, correspondence analysis, Passing-Bablock regression, Bland-Altman method, descriptive statistics, and ANOVA were used. We also analysed the relationship between the dose of warfarin determined by INR and several constitutional and genetic factors. Statistically significant association between clinically optimized warfarin dose and indication for the treatment, age, and warfarin sensitivity determined by VKORC1, CYP2C9 gene polymorphisms were confirmed. Finally, we confirmed a good concordance between the INR determined warfarin doses and pharmacogenetic approach.