QUESTION One of my male patients is receiving ribavirin-interferon alpha 2B (Pegetron) combination therapy for chronic hepatitis C. His wife recently found out she is 6 weeks pregnant. They are concerned that the medications might have affected his sperm. How should I advise them? ANSWER To the best of our knowledge, paternal exposure to ribavirin-interferon alpha 2B has no adverse effects on...

Testosterone (T) mediates a trade-off, or negative correlation, between paternal behavior and aggression in several seasonally breeding avian species. However, the presence or absence of a T-mediated trade-off in mammals has received less attention. We examined the relationship between paternal behavior and territorial aggression in the biparental California mouse, Peromyscus californicus. In c...

While the survival value of paternal care is well understood, little is known about its physiological basis. Here we investigate the neuroendocrine contributions to paternal care in the monogamous cichlid, Amatitlania nigrofasciata. We first explored the dynamic range of paternal care in three experimental groups: biparental males (control fathers housed with their mate), single fathers (mate r...

Previous studies on relatively small samples of individuals with trisomy 21 caused by paternally derived errors have shown that: (1) advanced paternal age is not a risk factor for chromosome 21 nondisjunction (NDJ), (2) absence of recombination, but not the location of recombination is associated with paternal NDJ and (3) there is an excess of males among live-births with paternally derived tri...

Immunologic function was evaluated in 12 patients with Hodgkin's disease and 5 patients with lymphocytic lymphoma who had been successfully treated with either chemotherapy, radiation therapy, or both of these modalities 3-42 mo previously. Only two of the patients were found to have total anergy to a battery of six recall skin test antigens and all were responsive to skin testing with phytohem...

For almost three decades, the association between paternal sensitivity and infant-father attachment security has been studied. The first wave of studies on the correlates of infant-father attachment showed a weak association between paternal sensitivity and infant-father attachment security (r = .13, p < .001, k = 8, N = 546). In the current paper, a meta-analysis of the association between pat...

Leflunomide (LEF), used for rheumatoid arthritis, inhibits dihydro-orotate dehydrogenase (DHODH) and tyrosine kinase (TK) enzymes and has anti-inflammatory, lymphocyte proliferation regulatory, immunosuppression and chondroprotective effects. The most common adverse effects are gastrointestinal disorders, weight loss, hypertension, skin infection, and neurological and hematological toxicity. It...

Recent studies have demonstrated that epigenetic changes resulting from malnutrition might play important roles in transgenerational links with metabolic diseases. Previously, we observed that exposure to a high-fat diet (HFD) in utero caused a metabolic syndrome-like phenomenon through epigenetic modifications of the adiponectin and leptin genes that persisted for multiple generations. Recent ...

INTRODUCTION The prediction of therapeutic response to rituximab in rheumatoid arthritis is desirable. We evaluated whether analysis of B lymphocyte subsets by flow cytometry would be useful to identify non-responders to rituximab ahead of time. METHODS Fifty-two patients with active rheumatoid arthritis despite therapy with TNF-inhibitors were included in the national rituximab registry. DAS...