COVID-19 and children

In December 2019, the world became aware of an epidemic of a very severe infection caused by a new coronavirus. Later, WHO declared a pandemic. The pediatricians were ready for the worst. The novel infection was expected to promptly spread among the most vulnerable population, children. But the clinicians soon understood that the situation is unbelievable: adults develop severe disease and die, while the children remain almost excluded from the infection spreading. 9 months have passed in the “new reality”. The humankind was learning to respond to the new infection challenge by empirical search for the potential therapeutic and diagnostic solutions and conducting wide clinical studies in parallel. A few questions have been answered because of consolidated and/or isolated actions of researchers and clinicians at the national, regional, and international levels. However, most aspects of how the new coronavirus affects the humans, including children, is still unclear and our knowledge of these aspects cannot be transferred in the routine practice. This review presents latest understanding of the course of the novel coronavirus infection in children, its treatment and outcomes.

Should the Argument About Aspirin Dosing be About Frequency Rather the Dose?

Aspirin is known to have inter-individual variability in its pharmacodynamic response. Clinical investigators continue their empirical search for the optimum aspirin dose to safely prevent athero-thrombosis. Several patient populations have an accompanied accelerated platelet turnover that is associated with a time-dependent loss of aspirin efficacy. Increasing the dosing frequency has been shown to elicit better and more sustained platelet inhibition compared to a dose increase in these patient populations. This review explores the role of accelerated platelet turnover in aspirin pharmacodynamics and the benefits of multiple daily aspirin dosing

Empirical search and characterization of contemporaneity using breaks and regime switching

This paper describes a technique to determine the contemporaneity of two economic events. It is also possible to determine some characteristics of the contemporaneity, as a descriptive stage previous to causality analysis and model estimations. As an illustration, a case of contemporaneity between news and volatility in finan- cial markets is shown. The main result of the exercise is a Laffer curve relationshipbetween corruption and volatility given news.