Within the pediatric population, bronchial asthma is one of the most prevalent chronic respiratory system diseases. The number of exacerbations, severity, and duration of symptoms all have a significant impact on children’s life quality. In the last decades, the prevention and management strategies of this pathology have focused on maintaining or even increasing the pulmonary function to maximum levels in early childhood, as it has been demonstrated that functional deficits at this level occurring before school age cause pathological manifestations later, in adulthood. The epithelium of the airways and implicitly that of the lung is the first barrier against the lesions caused by pro-oxidative factors. Both oxidative and antioxidative factors can be of endogenous origin (produced by the body) or exogenous (from the environment or diet). Good functioning of antioxidant defense mechanisms from the molecular level to the tissue level, and a balance between pro-oxidative factors and anti- oxidative factors, influence the occurrence of compensatory mechanisms at the level of the respiratory epithelium, causing the delay of local responses to the stress induced by chronic inflammation (bronchial remodeling, thickening of airway smooth muscles, bronchoconstriction, bronchial hyper-reactivity). These mechanisms underlie the pathophysiological changes in asthma. Numerous studies carried out among the pediatric population inclusively have demonstrated the effectiveness of antioxidants in the prophylaxis, slowing down and preventing the progression of this pathology. This review complements the scientific articles, aiming at emphasizing the complexity of oxidative physio-pathological pathways and their importance in the occurrence, development, and therapeutic response in asthma, providing a good understanding of the relationship between oxidative and antioxidative factors, and being a source of future therapeutic strategies.

Background: Survival prediction in patients with brain metastases remains a major clinical challenge, where timely and individualized prognostic estimates are critical for guiding treatment strategies and patient counseling. Methods: We propose a novel hybrid deep learning framework that integrates volumetric MRI-derived imaging biomarkers with structured clinical and demographic data to predict overall survival time. Our dataset includes 148 patients from three institutions, featuring expert-annotated segmentations of enhancing tumors, necrosis, and peritumoral edema. Two convolutional neural network backbones—ResNet-50 and EfficientNet-B0—were fused with fully connected layers processing tabular data. Models were trained using mean squared error loss and evaluated through stratified cross-validation and an independent held-out test set. Results: The hybrid model based on EfficientNet-B0 achieved state-of-the-art performance, attaining an R² score of 0.970 and a mean absolute error of 3.05 days on the test set. Permutation feature importance highlighted edema-to-tumor ratio and enhancing tumor volume as the most informative predictors. Grad-CAM visualizations confirmed the model’s attention to anatomically and clinically relevant regions. Performance consistency across validation folds confirmed the framework’s robustness and generalizability. Conclusions: This study demonstrates that multimodal deep learning can deliver accurate, explainable, and clinically actionable survival predictions in brain metastases. The proposed framework offers a promising foundation for integration into real-world oncology workflows to support personalized prognosis and informed therapeutic decision-making.

Mg-based biodegradable materials, used for medical applications, have been extensively studied in the past decades. The in vitro cytocompatibility study showed that the proliferation and viability (as assessed by quantitative MTT-assay—3-(4,5-dimethyltiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyl tetrazolium bromide) were not negatively affected with time by the addition of Mn as an alloying element. In this sense, it should be put forward that the studied alloys don’t have a cytotoxic effect according to the standard ISO 10993-5, i.e., the level of the cells’ viability (cultured with the studied experimental alloys) attained both after 1 day and 5 days was over 82% (i.e., 82, 43–89, 65%). Furthermore, the fibroblastic cells showed variable morphology (evidenced by fluorescence microscopy) related to the alloy sample’s proximity (i.e., related to the variation on the Ca, Mg, and Mn ionic concentration as a result of alloy degradation). It should be mentioned that the cells presented a polygonal morphology with large cytoplasmic processes in the vicinity of the alloy’s samples, and a bipolar morphology in the remote region of the wells. Moreover, the in vitro results seem to indicate that only 0.5% Mn is sufficient to improve the chemical stability, and thus the cytocompatibility; from this point of view, it could provide some flexibility in choosing the right alloy for a specific medical application, depending on the specific parameters of each alloy, such as its mechanical properties and corrosion resistance. In order to assess the in vivo compatibility of each concentration of alloy, the pieces were implanted in four rats, in two distinct body regions, i.e., the lumbar and thigh. The body’s reaction was followed over time, 60 days, both by general clinical examinations considering macroscopic changes, and by laboratory examinations, which revealed macroscopic and microscopic changes using X-rays, CT(Computed Tomography), histology exams and SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy). In both anatomical regions, for each of the tested alloys, deformations were observed, i.e., a local reaction of different intensities, starting the day after surgery. The release of hydrogen gas that forms during Mg alloy degradation occurred immediately after implantation in all five of the groups examined, which did not affect the normal functionality of the tissues surrounding the implants. Imaging examinations (radiological and CT) revealed the presence of the alloy and the volume of hydrogen gas in the lumbar and femoral region in varying amounts. The biodegradable alloys in the Mg-Ca-Mn system have great potential to be used in orthopedic applications.

Introduction: The aim of this study was to assess the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on mental health on a sample of 37 patients with psoriasis in Brăila County. Methods: A cross-sectional study on a sample of 37 patients with psoriasis was conducted by questionnaires e-mailed to patients. The study was conducted between November 20th, 2020 - January 15th, 2021. Mental health was measured using the Hamilton Anxiety Assessment Scale (HAS). Data collected on predictors included, but were not limited to, sex, age, background, marital status, level of education, smoking, alcohol consumption, comorbidities, period of self-isolation, severity of psoriasis, and type of treatment for psoriasis. Results: There were 37 participants included. Factors associated with poor mental health were: place of origin (54% from urban areas), sex (62.1% women), age (67.5% between 65 and 80 years old), period of self-isolation (81% in self-isolation for more than 14 days), comorbidities (75.6% with multiple comorbidities) and form of treatment for psoriasis (48.6% are systemically administered treatment for psoriasis). Conclusions: In this sample of patients with psoriasis from Brăila County who isolate or socially distance themselves, urban patients, women, elderly, those with comorbidities and those who are systemically administered treatment for psoriasis were associated with a high score on the Hamilton anxiety assessment scale. However, we have to admit that our research has some limitations. First, the number of participants included in the study was small. Secondly, we used an online way to conduct the study. Thirdly, we used a self-assessment scale to assess the anxiety symptoms of psoriasis patients, which might have some deviation from the outcome. Looking beyond the current situation, it is essential to evaluate and restructure the way we think about patient’s care.

Background: Dental caries arise from a multifactorial interplay between microbial dysbiosis, host immune responses, and enamel degradation visible on radiographs. Deep learning excels in image-based caries detection; however, integrative analyses that combine radiographic, microbiome, and transcriptomic data remain rare because public cohorts are seldom aligned. Objective: To determine whether three independent deep-learning pipelines—radiographic segmentation, microbiome regression, and transcriptome regression—can be reproducible implemented on non-aligned datasets, and to demonstrate the feasibility of estimating microbiome heritability in a matched twin cohort. Methods: (i) A U-Net with ResNet-18 encoder was trained on 100 annotated panoramic radiographs to generate a continuous caries-severity score from a predicted lesion area. (ii) Feed-forward neural networks (FNNs) were trained on supragingival 16S rRNA profiles (81 samples, 750 taxa) and gingival transcriptomes (247 samples, 54,675 probes) using randomly permuted severity scores as synthetic targets to stress-test preprocessing, training, and SHAP-based interpretability. (iii) In 49 monozygotic and 50 dizygotic twin pairs (n = 198), Bray–Curtis dissimilarity quantified microbial heritability, and an FNN was trained to predict recorded TotalCaries counts. Results: The U-Net achieved IoU = 0.564 (95% CI 0.535–0.594), precision = 0.624 (95% CI 0.583–0.667), recall = 0.877 (95% CI 0.827–0.918), and correlated with manual severity scores (r = 0.62, p < 0.01). The synthetic-target FNNs converged consistently but—as intended—showed no predictive power (R² ≈ −0.15 microbiome; −0.18 transcriptome). Twin analysis revealed greater microbiome similarity in monozygotic versus dizygotic pairs (0.475 ± 0.107 vs. 0.557 ± 0.117; p = 0.0005) and a modest correlation between salivary features and caries burden (r = 0.25). Conclusions: Modular deep-learning pipelines remain computationally robust and interpretable on non-aligned datasets; radiographic severity provides a transferable quantitative anchor. Twin-cohort findings confirm heritable patterns in the oral microbiome and outline a pathway toward future clinical translation once patient-matched multi-omics are available. This framework establishes a scalable, reproducible foundation for integrative caries research.

(1) Background: Multiple sclerosis (MS), a chronic progressive neurological disorder which affects the central nervous system (CNS), can result in disorders of all the functions controlled by the CNS: motor, sensory, cognitive and emotional. Physical therapy (PT), conducted through proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF) techniques, can be customized to the individual patient’s needs and has the potential to improve the patient’s evolution. This study aims to establish if PT based on PNF techniques has a beneficial role in MS treatment. (2) Methods: We performed a prospective study on 40 patients who were diagnosed with MS and previously treated only with MS drug treatment (DT). These patients have participated in a PT program throughout one year. At the beginning and at the end of our study, after one year, we have assessed the following parameters: timed walk for 25 feet (Timed 25-Foot Walk test- T25FW test), dexterity of the upper limbs (9-Hole Peg Test—9HPT), disability level (Expanded Disability Status Scale—EDSS) and cognitive function (Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test—PASAT. (3) Results: In subjects in the early stages of MS, lower limb mobility improved significantly, T25FW decreasing from 6.46 to 5.80 (p < 0.001) and upper limb ability increased significantly in the dominant hand, 9HPT decreasing from 17.73 to 16.97 (p = 0.006) and not significantly in the non-dominant hand, 9HPT decreasing from 17.73 to 17.50 (p = 0.255). Furthermore, among these subjects, cognitive performance improved; their PASAT increased from 52.14 to 54.14 (p = 0.036), while the level of disability of these subjects improved only slightly, the EDSS scale evolving from 3.08 to 2.91 (p = 0.650). (4) Conclusions: In patients with early forms of MS, combining DT with a PT program based on PNF techniques results in: regaining muscle strength in the lower limbs, improving coordination while walking, correcting dexterity in the upper limbs and increasing the ability to concentrate.