When hosts experience environmental stress, the quantity and quality of resources they provide for parasites may be diminished, and host longevity may be decreased. Under stress, parasites may adopt alternative strategies to avoid fitness reductions. Trematode parasites typically have complex life cycles, involving asexual reproduction in a gastropod first intermediate host. A rare phenomenon, ...

Precocious puberty constitutes a significant clinical problem due to psychological implications and health concerns as well as consequences associated with girls' fertility. Self-acceptance, peer approval, early motherhood and future fertility - these are only a few issues associated with puberty, the disorders of which may have a negative influence on personality and health. The role of imagin...

We report the findings and clinical course of ten girls aged 0.2 to 6.3 years with precocious pseudopuberty due to autonomous ovarian cysts. We found elevated oestrogen levels in five patients and failure of gonadotropin response to GnRH stimulation in four patients during the first episode, of the disease. In one patient, a GnRH stimulation test was not performed. Pelvic ultrasound examination...

BACKGROUND The onset of puberty is first detected as an increase in pulsatile secretion of gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH). Early activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis results in central precocious puberty. The timing of pubertal development is driven in part by genetic factors, but only a few, rare molecular defects associated with central precocious puberty have been ide...

The evolutionarily conserved miR-302 family of microRNAs is expressed during early mammalian embryonic development. Here, we report that deletion of miR-302a-d in mice results in a fully penetrant late embryonic lethal phenotype. Knockout embryos have an anterior neural tube closure defect associated with a thickened neuroepithelium. The neuroepithelium shows increased progenitor proliferation,...

Forty-six intellectually precocious (M age = 74 months) and 250 intellectually typical (M age = 75 months) children were administered a standardized working memory battery, speed of processing measures, and tasks that assessed skill at number line estimation and strategies used to solve simple and complex addition problems. Precocious children had an advantage over same-age peers for all compon...

Tricho-dento-osseous syndrome (TDO), an uncommon form of ectodermal dysplasia is an autosomal dominant genetic disorder which is characterized by inherited defects in tissues arising from epithelial-mesenchymal interaction. Genetic studies have revealed that it is caused by mutation in the DLX3 gene. TDO presents with a great phenotypic heterogeneity and studies have suggested that this heterog...

We report a 20 month old female patient with diploid-triploid mixoploidy (46,XX/69,XXX) syndrome with hypothyroidism and precocious puberty. The triploid cell line was only expressed in the fibroblast culture and comprised the majority (95%) of the cells. Chromosome analysis of the fetal blood sample and peripheral blood sample were normal. The patient shows typical features of full triploidy (...

STUDY OBJECTIVES We analyzed the potential predictive factors for precocious puberty, observed in some cases of childhood narcolepsy with cataplexy (NC) and for obesity, a much more common feature of NC, through a systematic assessment of pubertal staging, body mass index (BMI), and metabolic/endocrine biochemical analyses. DESIGN Cross-sectional on consecutive recruitment. SETTING Hospital...

Mucopolysaccharidosis type IH (MPS IH) is a rare autosomal recessive lysosomal storage disorder. Haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) has been proposed for the treatment of MPS IH patients and offers the possibility to grow into their adulthood. Precocious puberty has been described in few MPS patients. We report, to the best of our knowledge and for the first time, the initiation of...