Efficacy and Safety of Botulinum Toxin A for Treating Bladder Hyperactivity in Children and Adolescents with Neuropathic Bladder Secondary to Myelomeningocele

We verified the efficacy and safety of botulinum toxin A (BTX-A) in treating bladder overactivity in children with neurogenic bladder (NB) secondary to myelomeningocele (MMC). Forty-seven patients (22, females; 25, males; age range, 5–17 years; mean age, 10.7 years) with poorly compliant/overactive neurogenic bladder on clean intermittent catheterization (CIC) and resistance or noncompliant to anticholinergics were injected with 200 IU of BTX-A intradetrusor. All patients experienced a significant 66.45% average increase of leak point volume (Wilcoxon paired rank test = 7.169 e-10) and a significant 118.57% average increase of specific bladder capacity at 20 cm H2O (Wilcoxon paired rank test = 2.466 e-12). Ten patients who presented with concomitant uni/bilateral grade II–IV vesicoureteral reflux were treated at the same time with Deflux. No patient presented with major perioperative or postoperative problems. Twenty-two patients needed a second and 18 a third injection of BTX-A after 6–9 months for the reappearance of symptoms. After a mean follow-up of 5.7 years, 38 out of 47 patients achieved dryness between CICs, and 9 patients improved their incontinence but still need pads. Our conclusion is that BTX-A represents a viable alternative to more invasive procedure in treatment of overactive NB secondary to MMC.

Rodent Carcinogenicity Dataset

The rodent carcinogenicity dataset was compiled from the Carcinogenic Potency Database (CPDBAS) and was applied for the classification of quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) models for the prediction of carcinogenicity based on the counter-propagation artificial neural network (CP ANN) algorithm. The models were developed within EU-funded project CAESAR for regulatory use. The dataset contains the following information: common information about chemicals (ID, chemical name, and their CASRN), molecular structure information (SDF files and SMILES), and carcinogenic (toxicological) properties information: carcinogenic potency (TD50_Rat_mg; carcinogen/noncarcinogen) and structural alert (SA) for carcinogenicity based on mechanistic data. Molecular structure information was used to get chemometrics information to calculate molecular descriptors (254 MDL and 784 Dragon descriptors), which were further used in predictive QSAR modeling. The dataset presented in the paper can be used in future research in oncology, ecology, or chemicals' risk assessment.