This Christmas themed word scramble, titled ‘Christmas Gift’, is rated ‘hard’. Word Scramble puzzles are a wonderful exercise to do for brain injury rehabilitation from AE. These word scramble worksheets are a great activity to help AE patients of all ages develop their problem solving and analytical skills. These Christmas word scramble worksheets feature holiday words to unscramble and a picture to color. This word scramble is printable. The word list is provided at the bottom of the worksheet so you can check your answers.

Puzzles offered at this link range from easy>medium level of difficulty>hard>super hard.

Other rehabilitation/educational activities provided at this link are coloring pages, connect the dots, crafts, crossword puzzles, maze worksheets, pattern worksheets, story starters, sudoku puzzles, word decoders, and word scrambles.

In summary, a robust and well-designed seroprevalence study using residual serum samples from across the US has found that herd immunity to SARS-Cov-2 is nowhere in sight, even as the COVID-19 pandemic has raged on for a year. The good news is that the limited number of reinfections of SARS-CoV-2 to date, and the experience with natural infections with other viruses, suggests that protective immunity to COVID-19 should result, a harbinger for the success of vaccines. The bad news is that, like the 1918 influenza pandemic, achieving herd immunity through natural infections will take years of painful sacrifice that are tallied in numerous deaths, severe long-term health sequelae, and widespread economic disruption and hardship. Let us hope that safe and effective vaccines help avoid the consequences of naturally developing herd immunity to COVID-19, as they have reliably done for so many other respiratory viruses. 

Results:

Autoantibodies against neuronal cells were detected in CSF from 8 individuals (4% of all encephalitis patients): 7 (3.5%) had anti-NMDAR and 1 (0.5%) had anti-GABA B. RT-PCR/PCR identified human herpesvirus type 1 (HSV-1; 300 copies/mL) and the representative of Enterovirus genus (550 copies/mL) in 1 patient each. Torque Teno virus (TTV) was found in another patient using metagenomic analysis, and its presence was confirmed by specific PCR.

Conclusions:

We detected the presence of HSV, TTV, and Enterovirus genus in CSF samples from 3 out of 8 AE patients. These findings support the concept of viral involvement in the pathogenesis of this disease.

The Mayo Clinic Rochester, MN did a study over 11 years with 122 AE patients with LGI1.

Conclusions: Corticosteroids appeared to be more effective acutely than IVIG in improving LGI1 antibody encephalitis in this retrospective comparison of immunotherapies. While improvement with immunotherapy is frequent, most patients have residual long-term memory deficits.

Glucocorticoids are highly effective drugs that are used very widely to inhibit inflammation and to modulate the immune system. Their great importance in the treatment of various rheumatic diseases is undisputed. However, although their introduction into clinical medicine was more than 70 years ago, we have understood only a fraction of their mechanisms of action. Detailed in Table 1. However, our understanding of glucocorticoid-mediated immunoregulation still has substantial gaps, not only but especially regarding the effects of glucocorticoids in specific cell types and their key cellular targets in particular disease states, and the actions these hormones broadly induce in cells and tissues versus those that are unique to the immune system.

In this 2019 paper, Immune regulation by glucocorticoids can be linked to cell type-dependent transcriptional responses, the authors report that glucocorticoid effects are highly dependent on cell type with regard to the regulation of genes and signaling pathways. They found methylprednisolone to induce cell-specific differences in the expression of more than 9000 unique genes or ∼17% of the human transcriptome. These results lead to a fundamentally new mechanistic understanding of the effects of glucocorticoids.

The 2020 study, Local steroid activation is a critical mediator of the anti-inflammatory actions of therapeutic glucocorticoids is certainly of great importance. It reveals a completely new, previously unknown component of the anti-inflammatory effect of glucocorticoids, namely and concisely, that systemically inactivated glucocorticoid molecules are peripherally reactivated by the enzyme, 11beta-HSD1 to induce profound anti-inflammatory effects.

It is to be hoped that a deepening of the knowledge gained with regard to glucocorticoid treatment and the proof of its relevance to clinical medicine will in the future lead to a further improvement in the therapeutic options for treating patients with rheumatoid arthritis, and other rheumatic and inflammatory diseases, ultimately leading to a better benefit-risk ratio.

December 11, 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued the first emergency use authorization (EUA) for a vaccine for the prevention of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in individuals 16 years of age and older. The emergency use authorization allows the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine to be distributed in the U.S.

FACT SHEET FOR HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS ADMINISTERING VACCINE

“Contraindications, Do not administer Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine to individuals with a known history of a severe allergic reaction (e.g., anaphylaxis) to any component of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine (see Full EUA Prescribing Information).

Warnings Appropriate medical treatment used to manage immediate allergic reactions must be immediately available in the event an acute anaphylactic reaction occurs following administration of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine.

Immunocompromised persons, including individuals receiving immunosuppressant therapy, may have a diminished immune response to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine. Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine may not protect all vaccine recipients”.