Symptomatic fibroid uterus in a 15-year-old girl

A 15 year-old gravida 1, abortus 1 black girl presented with chief complaints of menorrhagia, severe dysmenorrhea, and progressively worsening abdominal pain, which was caused by a very large uterine leiomyoma. The symptoms began 6 months earlier, shortly after a 10-week spontaneous abortion at age 14. A solitary 25-cm uterine leiomyoma was removed uneventfully with an abdominal laparotomy. In the English literature of the past 50 years, this case represents the sixth, and we believe, the largest, documented uterine fibroid among teenagers, which required corrective surgery.

Antiviral and antitumor peptides from insects

Insects can rapidly clear microbial infections by producing a variety of immune-induced molecules including antibacterial and/or antifungal peptides/polypeptides. In this report, we present the isolation, structural characterization, and biological properties of two variants of a group of bioactive, slightly cationic peptides, referred to as alloferons. Two peptides were isolated from the blood of an experimentally infected insect, the blow fly Calliphora vicina (Diptera), with the following amino acid sequences: HGVSGHGQHGVHG (alloferon 1) and GVSGHGQHGVHG (alloferon 2). Although these peptides have no clear homologies with known immune response modifiers, protein database searches established some structural similarities with proteins containing amino acid stretches similar to alloferon. In vitro experiments reveal that the synthetic version of alloferon has stimulatory activities on natural killer lymphocytes, whereas in vivo trials indicate induction of IFN production in mice after treatments with synthetic alloferon. Additional in vivo experiments in mice indicate that alloferon has antiviral and antitumoral capabilities. Taken together, these results suggest that this peptide, which has immunomodulatory properties, may have therapeutic capacities. The fact that insects may produce cytokine-like materials modulating basic mechanisms for human immunity suggests a source of anti-infection and antitumoral biopharmaceuticals.