Frequent-relapsing, steroid-dependent minimal change disease: is rituximab the answer?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In patients with minimal change disease, development of steroid-dependency or frequent relapses pose difficult therapeutic problems. Prolonged administration of corticosteroids or the use of additional immunosuppressive therapy can result in significant toxicity. Recent data point to the use of rituximab as an important treatment option to induce long-term remission in patients with minimal change diseases who are either frequent relapsers or require significant immunosuppression to remain in remission. Minimal change disease (MCD) accounts for the majority of cases of idiopathic nephrotic syndrome (NS) in children and up to 20% of cases of idiopathic NS in white adults [1]. On kidney biopsy, MCD is characterized by widespread effacement of epithelial cell foot processes on electron microscopy, while glomeruli appear normal on light microscopy and immunoglobulin and complement deposition are absent on immunofluorescence. Most cases of MCD are idiopathic, although drugs (such as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs), hematological malignancies (mainly Hodgkin lymphoma) and thymoma are well-recognized causes of secondary MCD. While most patients respond to corticosteroid therapy, up to 25% of treated patients have frequent relapses and up to 30% of patients become steroid dependent [2, 3]. In these patients, alternative therapies aimed at minimizing corticosteroid toxicity have been used, including alkylating agents, antimetabolites and calcineurin inhibitors. While these agents may be beneficial, some patients respond poorly or not all, and their use may be complicated by the development of serious adverse effects, e.g., infertility and malignancy with the use of cyclophosphamide. With calcineurin inhibitors, steroid dependency may be replaced by dependence on calcineurin inhibitors, requiring years of treatment and the associated risk of nephrotoxicity [3]. In some patients, these agents are used in combination, adding to the potential adverse effects. An additional problem is non-compliance, especially in young patients. As such, alternative therapies that can result in the induction of long-term remission with a favorable safety profile have been sought.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".