Hereditary Disease Foundation

Primary hyperoxaluria (PH) is a rare autosomal recessive disorder characterized by an abnormal increase in urinary oxalate excretion. Primary hyperoxaluria type 1 (PH1), the most common PH subtype, is caused by a deficiency of the liver-specific enzyme alanine:glyoxylate aminotransferase, which is localized to peroxisomes. In Japan, the status of PH1 has not been studied in two decades, and few longitudinal studies of PH1 patients have been conducted worldwide. This study aims to analyze the present situation regarding PH1 in Japan. We conducted a literature review of PH1 cases reported in Japan between 2003 and 2023. Twenty patients were diagnosed with PH1 during the study period, including 7 males, 12 females, and 1 patient with an unspecified sex. The median ages at symptom onset and diagnosis were 4.21 years (range: 0.17–47) and 5.5 years (range: 0.17–43), respectively. Ten patients (50%) were diagnosed before age 18, four (44%) of whom had already progressed to end-stage renal disease (ESRD). Among the six patients diagnosed after 18 years, all had ESRD or progressed to ESRD soon after diagnosis. The overall survival (OS) rate was 81% at 5, 10 and 20 years post-diagnosis. The mean observation period was 5.62 years (range: 0–32.6). Few longitudinal studies on PH1 patients have been conducted in Japan or worldwide. Over the past 20 years, the median ages at both symptom onset and diagnosis have significantly decreased, and the OS rate has increased. Early diagnosis and intervention may contribute to better outcomes for PH1 patients in Japan.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00240-025-01931-w.

Introduction: When a pathogenic BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation is identified in a family, cascade genetic testing of family members is recommended since the results may inform screening or treatment decisions in men and women. However, rates of cascade testing are low, and men are considerably less likely than women to pursue cascade testing. To facilitate cascade testing in men, we designed a Web-based genetic education tool that addressed barriers to cascade testing, was individually tailored, delivered proactively, and could be used in lieu of pretest genetic counseling to streamline the cascade testing process. Methods: We randomized 63 untested men from hereditary cancer families to Web-based genetic education (WGE) versus enhanced usual care (EUC). WGE participants were provided access to a genetic education website after which they could accept or decline genetic testing or opt for pretest genetic counseling. EUC participants received an informational brochure and a letter informing them of their eligibility for genetic testing and recommending they schedule genetic counseling. The primary outcome was the uptake of genetic testing. Results: Men in the WGE group were more likely to complete genetic counseling and/or genetic testing (43% vs. 12.1%; χ2 [n = 63, df = 1] = 7.77, p = 0.005). WGE participants were also more likely to complete genetic testing compared to men in the EUC group (30% vs. 9.1%; χ2 [n = 63, df = 1] = 4.46, p = 0.03). Conclusion: This preliminary trial suggests that a streamlined approach to genetic testing using proactively delivered genetic education may reduce barriers to cascade testing for at-risk men, leading to increased uptake. These results should be interpreted cautiously given the select sample and high rate of non-response.

The importance of sparse data management is growing with data produced by large-scale experimental and observational facilities that contain small amounts of non-zero values. In this document, we explore different design options to support sparse data in HDF5, one of the most popular high-performance I/O libraries and file formats used for scientific data. We discuss several use cases and requirements. Our main hard design constraint is that any changes to the HDF5 dataset API would be a burden on users and not acceptable. The remaining options are discussed below. We provide a rationale for what we believe is the strongest candidate and describe how its potential benefits can be simulated with the existing HDF5 library. We have conducted a set of computational experiments the results of which are reported here. They show that our candidate meets all relevant requirements and gives us a certain degree of confidence for an HDF5 library-native implementation.

The landscape of genetic testing in ovarian cancer patients has changed dramatically in recent years. The therapeutic benefits of poly ADP-ribose polymerase (PARP) inhibitors in treatment of BRCA1/2-related ovarian cancers has resulted in an increased demand and urgency for genetic testing results, while technological developments have led to widespread use of multi-gene cancer panels and development of tumour testing protocols. Traditional genetic counselling models are no longer sustainable and must evolve to match the rapid evolution of genetic testing technologies and developments in personalized medicine. Recently, representatives from oncology, clinical genetics, molecular genetics, pathology, and patient advocacy came together to create a national multi-disciplinary Canadian consortium. By aligning stakeholder interests, the BRCA Testing to Treatment (BRCA TtoT) Community of Practice aims to develop a national strategy for tumour and germline BRCA1/2 testing and genetic counselling in women with ovarian cancer. This article serves to provide an overview of the recent evolution of genetic assessment for BRCA1/2-associated gynecologic malignancies and outline a Canadian roadmap to facilitate change, improve genetic testing rates, and ultimately improve outcomes for hereditary ovarian cancer patients and their families.

Emerging high performance computing (HPC) systems are expected to be deployed with an unprecedented level of complexity due to a deep system memory and storage hierarchy. Efficient and scalable methods of data management and movement through this hierarchy is critical for scientific applications using exascale systems. Moving toward new paradigms for scalable I/O in the extreme-scale era, we introduce novel object-centric data abstractions and storage mechanisms that take advantage of the deep storage hierarchy, named Proactive Data Containers (PDC). In this paper, we formulate object-centric PDCs and their mappings in different levels of the storage hierarchy. PDC adopts a client-server architecture with a set of servers managing data movement across storage layers. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PDC system, we have measured performance of benchmarks and I/O kernels from scientific simulation and analysis applications using PDC programming interface, and compared the results with existing highly tuned I/O libraries. Using asynchronous I/O along with data and metadata optimizations, PDC demonstrates up to 23X speedup over HDF5 and PLFS in writing and reading data from a plasma physics simulation. PDC achieves comparable performance with HDF5 and PLFS in reading and writing data of a single timestep at small scale, and outperforms them at a scale of larger than ten thousand cores. In contrast to existing storage systems, PDC offers user-space data management with the flexibility to allocate the number of PDC servers depending on the workload.

News for version 3.19.2 This version was created so that we can bind a DOI with the release, otherwise it is the same as verion3.19.1 (that version's NEWS is shown below). Portability issues: Updated gnulib and mkstemps fixed as per user reports. Removed a test for block_size in HTTPCacheTest that failed on Fedora ppc64le system with XFS system Branches/tickets merged: hyrax390 (CppUnit test improvements)