WikiJournal of Medicine/Volume 4 Issue 1

The virus is transmitted by the faecal-oral route. It infects and damages the cells that line the small intestine and causes gastroenteritis (which is often called "stomach flu" despite having no relation to influenza). Although rotavirus was discovered in 1973 by Ruth Bishop and her colleagues by electron micrograph images and accounts for approximately one third of hospitalisations for severe diarrhoea in infants and children, its importance has historically been underestimated within the public health community, particularly in developing countries. In addition to its impact on human health, rotavirus also infects animals, and is a pathogen of livestock. Rotavirus is usually an easily managed disease of childhood, but in 2013, rotavirus caused 37 percent of deaths of children from diarrhoea and 215,000 deaths worldwide, and almost two million more become severely ill. Most of these deaths occurred in developing countries. In the United States, before initiation of the rotavirus vaccination programme, rotavirus caused about 2.7 million cases of severe gastroenteritis in children, almost 60,000 hospitalisations, and around 37 deaths each year. Following rotavirus vaccine introduction in the United States, hospitalisation rates have fallen significantly. Public health campaigns to combat rotavirus focus on providing oral rehydration therapy for infected children and vaccination to prevent the disease. The incidence and severity of rotavirus infections has declined significantly in countries that have added rotavirus vaccine to their routine childhood immunisation policies.

Methods: We searched multiple electronic databases as well as grey literature to search for randomised controlled trials (RCTs) on vitamin D as an adjunct in infants and children with CAP. We used the Cochrane methodology for assessing risk of bias and, where adequate data was available, conducted a meta-analysis using a fixed or random-effects model as applicable. We assessed overall evidence quality using the GRADE approach. Findings: We screened 272 unique papers and 25 clinical trial registry records and identified three completed and three ongoing trials based on our inclusion criteria. Two completed trials were from India and one from Afghanistan. These three RCTs included a total of 977 participants. Baseline and follow-up vitamin D status was reported in only one RCT. There was no significant effect of vitamin D noted on clinical cure rates (risk ratio (RR) 1.01; 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.91, 1.13; one study, 200 participants, low quality on GRADE), and all-cause mortality (RR 1.01; 95% CI 0.23, 4.41; three trials, 977 participants, low quality on GRADE). Pooled analyses was not possible for the outcomes of time to clinical recovery of pneumonia and total duration of hospital stay, but none of the trials which studied them demonstrated any significant effect of vitamin D on these outcomes individually. Conclusions: There is insufficient evidence available from RCTs to justify the routine use of vitamin D in infants and children with CAP currently and more research is needed to understand several issues related to this. Registration: PROSPERO ID 2014:CRD42014010259

In Alzheimer's disease (and other forms of dementia), the hippocampus is one of the first regions of the brain to suffer damage; short-term memory loss and disorientation are included among the early symptoms. Damage to the hippocampus can also result from oxygen starvation (hypoxia), encephalitis, or medial temporal lobe epilepsy. People with extensive, bilateral hippocampal damage may experience anterograde amnesia (the inability to form and retain new memories). In rodents as model organisms, the hippocampus has been studied extensively as part of a brain system responsible for spatial memory and navigation. Many neurons in the rat and mouse hippocampus respond as place cells: that is, they fire bursts of action potentials when the animal passes through a specific part of its environment. Hippocampal place cells interact extensively with head direction cells, whose activity acts as an inertial compass, and conjecturally with grid cells in the neighboring entorhinal cortex. Since different neuronal cell types are neatly organized into layers in the hippocampus, it has frequently been used as a model system for studying neurophysiology. The form of neural plasticity known as long-term potentiation (LTP) was first discovered to occur in the hippocampus and has often been studied in this structure. LTP is widely believed to be one of the main neural mechanisms by which memories are stored in the brain.