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Nevin Manimala Statistics

Salivary Biomarker Evaluation of Chronic Pancreatitis Patients Reveals Alterations in Human Proteins, Cytokines, Prostaglandin E2 Levels, and Bacterial Diversity

Pancreas. 2022 Aug 1;51(7):723-732. doi: 10.1097/MPA.0000000000002113.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVES: Chronic pancreatitis (CP) is a chronic fibroinflammatory condition of the pancreas difficult to diagnose in early stages. Novel biomarkers useful to facilitate early diagnosis or treatment responses may be found in biofluids. Although saliva can be easily and noninvasively collected from patients, useful salivary biomarkers from CP patients have not yet been identified.

METHODS: Here, we analyzed the proteome by quantitative proteomics, cytokine/chemokine levels by Luminex analysis, prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) levels by a mass spectrometry-based assay, and bacterial species diversity by 16S ribosomal ribonucleic acid sequencing in saliva samples from confirmed CP patients and healthy controls.

RESULTS: Our results indicate the presence of various differentially expressed proteins, cytokines/chemokines, and a loss of oral bacterial diversity in the saliva of CP patients. The PGE2 levels trend toward elevation in CP patients. Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve models for proteomic, cytokine, and PGE2 assays ranged from 0.59 to 0.90.

CONCLUSIONS: Collectively, our studies identify a range of putative CP biomarkers and alterations in human saliva requiring further validation. The biomarker discovery approaches we used might lead to identification of biomarkers useful for CP diagnosis and monitoring.

PMID:36395395 | DOI:10.1097/MPA.0000000000002113

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Nevin Manimala Statistics

Assessment of Patient-Reported Outcomes at Return-to-Sport Following Lateral Ankle Sprain Injuries: A Report from the Athletic Training Practice-Based Research Network

J Athl Train. 2022 Nov 17. doi: 10.4085/1062-6050-0111.22. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

CONTEXT: There is limited evidence regarding the assessment of single-item patient-reported outcomes when patients are medically cleared to return-to-sport following a lateral ankle sprain (LAS) injury.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate self-report of improvement in health status, pain, function, and disability at return-to-sport following a LAS.

DESIGN: Descriptive study.

SETTING: Sixty-nine athletic training facilities across 24 states.

PATIENTS OR OTHER PARTICIPANTS: Six hundred and thirty-seven patients (male=53.2%) were included in our final analysis. Patients were diagnosed with a LAS, restricted from sport following injury, and subsequently medically cleared to return-to-sport within 60 days were included.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Descriptive statistics were used to summarize scores for health status (Global Rating of Change), pain (Numeric Pain Rating Scale), function (Global Rating of Function), and disability (Global Rating of Disability). Mann-Whitney U Tests were used to compare score differences between sexes. A Kaplan-Meier analysis was performed to provide a visual depiction of sex differences in time to return-to-sport.

RESULTS: Most patients sustained a LAS injury while participating in basketball, football, or soccer and cleared to return-to-sport 8 days following injury. Over two-thirds of patients reported a meaningful improvement in health status between time of injury and return-to-sport. However, many reported some level of deficits related to pain (65.1%), function (86.2%), and disability (35.8%) at return-to-sport. No differences were noted between males and females for pain (p=.90), function (p=.68), change (p=.45), or disability (p=.21) at return-to-sport. Males, however, returned to sport slightly sooner than females (p=.025).

CONCLUSIONS: Despite self-perceived improvements in health status from time of injury, patients typically return-to-sport with deficits in pain, function, and disability following a LAS. Patients may be returning to unrestricted sport participation before they feel their bodies have fully recovered from the injury.

LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: Level III; retrospective cohort study.

PMID:36395375 | DOI:10.4085/1062-6050-0111.22

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Nevin Manimala Statistics

Introducing “DoPP”: A Graphical User-Friendly Application for the Rapid Species Identification of Psychoactive Plant Materials and Quantification of Psychoactive Small Molecules Using DART-MS Data

Anal Chem. 2022 Nov 17. doi: 10.1021/acs.analchem.2c01614. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

The widespread abuse of “legal high” psychoactive plants continues to be of global concern because of their negative impacts on public health and safety. In forensic science, a major challenge in controlling these substances is the paucity of methods to rapidly identify them. We report the development of the Database of Psychoactive Plants (DoPP), a new user-friendly tool featuring an architecture for the identification of plant unknowns, and the necessary regression statistics for the development and validation of psychoactive compound quantification. The application relies on the knowledge that terrestrial plants exhibit species-specific chemical signatures that can be revealed by direct analysis in real time─high-resolution mass spectrometry (DART-HRMS). Subsequent automated machine learning processing of libraries of these spectra enables rapid discrimination and species identification. The chemical signature database includes 57 available plant species. The rapid acquisition of mass spectra and the ability to sample the materials in their native form enabled the generation of the vast amounts of spectral replicates required for database construction. For the identification of sample unknowns, a data analysis workflow was developed and implemented using the DoPP tool. It utilizes a hierarchical classification tree that integrates three machine learning methods, namely, random forest, k-nearest neighbors, and support vector machine, all of which were fused using posterior probabilities. The results show accuracies of 98 and 99% for 10-fold cross-validation and external validation, respectively, which make the classification model suitable for identity prediction of real samples.

PMID:36395354 | DOI:10.1021/acs.analchem.2c01614

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Nevin Manimala Statistics

Effectiveness of short-term isothermic-heat acclimation (4 days) on physical performance in moderately trained males

PLoS One. 2022 Nov 17;17(11):e0270093. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0270093. eCollection 2022.

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION: A typical heat acclimation (HA) protocol takes 5-7 d of 60-90 minutes of heat exposure. Identifying the minimum dose of HA required to elicit a heat adapted phenotype could reduce financial constraints on participants and aid in the tapering phase for competition in hot countries. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate a 4 d HA regimen on physical performance.

METHODS: Twelve moderately trained males were heat acclimated using controlled hyperthermia (Tre>38.5°C), with no fluid intake for 90 min on 4 consecutive days, with a heat stress test (HST) being completed one week prior to (HST2), and within one-week post (HST3) HA. Eleven completed the control study of HST1 versus HST2, one week apart with no intervention. Heat stress tests comprised of cycling for 90 min @ 40% Peak Power Output (PPO); 35°C; 60%RH followed by 10 minutes of passive recovery before an incremental test to exhaustion. Physical performance outcomes time to exhaustion (TTE), PPO, end rectal temperature (Tre END), and heart rate (HREND) was measured during the incremental test to exhaustion.

RESULTS: Physiological markers indicated no significant changes in the heat; however descriptive statistics indicated mean resting Tre lowered 0.24°C (-0.54 to 0.07°C; d = 2.35: very large) and end-exercise lowered by 0.32°C (-0.81 to 0.16; d = 2.39: very large). There were significant improvements across multiple timepoints following HA in perceptual measures; Rate of perceived exertion (RPE), Thermal Sensation (TS), and Thermal Comfort (TC) (P<0.05). Mean TTE in the HST increased by 142 s (323±333 to 465±235s; P = 0.04) and mean PPO by 76W (137±128 to 213±77 W; P = 0.03).

CONCLUSION: Short-term isothermic HA (4 d) was effective in enhancing performance capacity in hot and humid conditions. Regardless of the level of physiological adaptations, behavioural adaptations were sufficient to elicit improved performance and thermotolerance in hot conditions. Additional exposures may be requisite to ensure physiological adaptation.

PMID:36395344 | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0270093

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Nevin Manimala Statistics

Oral health and oral health-related quality of life in patients with chronic peripheral facial nerve palsy with synkineses-A case-control-study

PLoS One. 2022 Nov 17;17(11):e0276152. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0276152. eCollection 2022.

ABSTRACT

Facial nerve palsy (FP) is the most common cranial nerve lesion, leading to partial or complete immobility of the affected half of face. If food residues on tooth surfaces cannot be removed by natural self-cleaning mechanisms that this is likely to lead to an increase dental plaque formation and the risk of dental, periodontal and general diseases. It was the aim of this study to assess oral health, oral hygiene with the influence of handedness and oral health related quality of life in patients with chronic peripheral FP. This study included 86 people. Patients with FP (n = 43) in an FP-group (FPG) were matched with 43 participants without ever diagnosed FP in a control group (CG). Oral health and oral hygiene were assessed in a clinical examination performed in hospital. Decayed-missing-filled-teeth-index, periodontal-screening-index, approximal plaque index and sulcus bleeding index were used to evaluate dental caries and periodontal health status. Oral health-related quality of life data (OHQoL) was collected with the Oral health impact profile (Germany-14) by interview. Oral health parameters in the FPG were significantly worse than in the CG. The median revealed 14.3% more proximal plaque (p = 0.014), 20.8% more sulcus bleeding (p = 0.002) and more than twice as much caries (p = 0.024). The paretic side compared to the non-paretic side of patients was significantly more affected by inflammatory periodontal diseases (p = 0.032) and had a higher prevalence of caries (p = 0.163). Right-handed patients with right-sided FP performed worse than right-handed patients with left-sided FP (p = 0.004). Patients with FP described a greater limitation of OHQoL than patients without this disease (p < 0.001). In conclusion, facial nerve palsy affects oral health, oral hygiene and OHQoL of patients while handedness influences oral hygiene and oral health.

PMID:36395343 | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0276152

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Nevin Manimala Statistics

Soft disorder modulates the assembly path of protein complexes

PLoS Comput Biol. 2022 Nov 17;18(11):e1010713. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010713. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

The relationship between interactions, flexibility and disorder in proteins has been explored from many angles over the years: folding upon binding, flexibility of the core relative to the periphery, entropy changes, etc. In this work, we provide statistical evidence for the involvement of highly mobile and disordered regions in complex assembly. We ordered the entire set of X-ray crystallographic structures in the Protein Data Bank into hierarchies of progressive interactions involving identical or very similar protein chains, yielding 40205 hierarchies of protein complexes with increasing numbers of partners. We then examine them as proxies for the assembly pathways. Using this database, we show that upon oligomerisation, the new interfaces tend to be observed at residues that were characterised as softly disordered (flexible, amorphous or missing residues) in the complexes preceding them in the hierarchy. We also rule out the possibility that this correlation is just a surface effect by restricting the analysis to residues on the surface of the complexes. Interestingly, we find that the location of soft disordered residues in the sequence changes as the number of partners increases. Our results show that there is a general mechanism for protein assembly that involves soft disorder and modulates the way protein complexes are assembled. This work highlights the difficulty of predicting the structure of large protein complexes from sequence and emphasises the importance of linking predictors of soft disorder to the next generation of predictors of complex structure. Finally, we investigate the relationship between the Alphafold2’s confidence metric pLDDT for structure prediction in unbound versus bound structures, and soft disorder. We show a strong correlation between Alphafold2 low confidence residues and the union of all regions of soft disorder observed in the hierarchy. This paves the way for using the pLDDT metric as a proxy for predicting interfaces and assembly paths.

PMID:36395332 | DOI:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010713

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Nevin Manimala Statistics

Evaluating the technical efficiency of neonatal health service among primary hospitals of northwest Ethiopia: Using two-stage data envelopment analysis and Tobit regression model

PLoS One. 2022 Nov 17;17(11):e0277826. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0277826. eCollection 2022.

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION: Most cases of neonatal mortality are preventable but a substantial number of cases get complicated and become irreversible not only due to scarcity but also due to inefficient utilization of available resources in the health service. However, limited evidence shows the efficiency level of health facilities in Ethiopia. Therefore, this study aimed to assess the technical efficiency of neonatal health service and its associated factors among primary hospitals in three zones of Northwest Ethiopia.

METHODS: A facility-based cross-sectional study was conducted among fifteen randomly selected primary hospitals from March 17 to April 17, 2021. Input data on non-salary recurrent costs, salary costs, and the number of beds, and output data on neonatal admissions, outpatient visits, and referrals for the 2019/20 fiscal year were collected using a document review. In the first stage of analysis, input-oriented data envelopment analysis with a variable return-to-scale assumption was employed to estimate the efficiency scores using DEAP 2.1. A Tobit regression model was fitted in the second stage to identify the associated factors with technical efficiency. Variables with a p-value <0.05 were declared as statistically associated factors.

RESULTS: In this study, 80% of the primary hospitals were pure technical efficient whereas 46.67% of the facilities were scale efficient with all of the scale inefficient hospitals operating below their scale. The mean pure technical and scale efficiency score of primary hospitals was 0.948±0.113 and 0.887±0.143, respectively. Total catchment population, incentive packages for the clinical staff, and the educational status of the manager were positively associated with the technical efficiency of hospitals. On the other hand, technical efficiency was negatively associated with the presence of a health facility that provides neonatal health services near the hospital and the distance of the manager’s residence.

CONCLUSION: Though most of the primary hospitals in Northwest Ethiopia were technical efficient, more than half of them were working below their scale of operation. Our results also indicated that introducing the performance-based provision of incentive packages for clinical staff and employing master’s and above-educated health professionals as a manager might improve the efficient utilization of resources in primary hospitals.

PMID:36395289 | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0277826

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Nevin Manimala Statistics

Incidence of extubation failure and its predictors among adult patients in intensive care unit of low-resource setting: A prospective observational study

PLoS One. 2022 Nov 17;17(11):e0277915. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0277915. eCollection 2022.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Previous studies have found an association between various predictors and extubation failure (EF) in intensive care units (ICUs). However, this problem remains unexplored in low-resource settings, where predicting the extubation outcomes are more challenging. This study investigates the incidence of EF and its predictors among patients who received mechanical ventilation (MV).

METHODS: This is a prospective observational study of 123 patients’ ≥ 18 years of age receiving MV for ≥ 48 hours and tolerated spontaneous breathing trials (SBTs) in the ICU of a low-resource setting. We collected data on the baseline characteristics and clinical profiles before and after SBTs. Patients were categorized into extubation failure (EF) and extubation success (ES) groups. Multivariate logistic regression analyses were performed to identify independent predictors for EF. A p-value < 0.05 is considered statistically significant.

RESULTS: We included 123 patients, and 42 (34.15%) had developed EF. The identified predictors for EF: Moderate to copious secretions (adjusted odds ratio [AOR]: 3.483 [95% confidence interval [CI] 1.10-11.4]), age > 60 years of age ([AOR]: 4.157 [95% CI 1.38-12.48]), and prolonged duration of MV ≥ 10 days ([AOR]: 4.77 [95% CI 1.55-14.66]).

CONCLUSION: Moderate to copious secretions, patients > 60 years of age, and prolonged duration of MV ≥ 10 days were the best predictors of EF. Based on our findings, we recommend that the identified predictors could help in the decision-making process of extubation from MV.

PMID:36395287 | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0277915

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Nevin Manimala Statistics

Impact of built environment on residential online car-hailing trips: Based on MGWR model

PLoS One. 2022 Nov 17;17(11):e0277776. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0277776. eCollection 2022.

ABSTRACT

With the development of smart mobile devices and global positioning technology, people’s daily travel has become increasingly dependent on online car-hailing. Meanwhile, it has also become possible to use multi-source data to explore the factors influencing urban residents’ car-hailing trips. Using online data on car-hailing trajectories, points of interest (POIs) data and other auxiliary data, the paper explores how the built environment impacts online car-hailing passengers. Within a 200 x 200m research grid, the unique spatiotemporal patterns of weekday car-hailing trips during a one-week period are analyzed, using statistics on pick-ups and drop-offs at different time of the day. By combining these data with built environment variables and various economic and traffic indicators, a multi-scale geographically weighted regression (MGWR) model is developed for different time scales. The MGWR model outperforms the classical geographically weighted regression (GWR) model and the ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model in terms of goodness of fit and all other aspects. More importantly, this study finds a high degree of temporal and spatial heterogeneity in the impact of built environment factors on local car-hailing trips across different regions, and the paper analyzes the business residence coefficient in detail. The study provides valuable insights to help improve the level of urban transportation services, as well as urban transportation planning and construction.

PMID:36395284 | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0277776

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Nevin Manimala Statistics

Effect of 1.5% potassium oxalate on sensitivity control, color change, and quality of life after at-home tooth whitening: A randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial

PLoS One. 2022 Nov 17;17(11):e0277346. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0277346. eCollection 2022.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: This clinical trial evaluated the effect of 1.5% potassium oxalate (PO) in controlling sensitivity and color change after at-home tooth whitening. It also evaluated the influence of PO on health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and the degree of patient satisfaction after bleaching treatment.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: Fifty volunteers were randomized into two groups (n = 25): At-home bleaching gel with 22% carbamide peroxide for 45 min + placebo gel (GP) or 1.5% PO (GPO) for 10 min. The intensity of tooth sensitivity was assessed daily through the visual analog scale. The color analysis was performed three times: baseline, 21 days, and 1 month after the last application of the whitening gel. The impact of the oral condition on the patient’s quality of life (OIDP) was used to measure the impact caused by the whitening treatment in relation to the individuals’ ability to carry out their daily activities and its influence on HRQOL.

RESULTS: No difference in tooth sensitivity was observed (p > 0.05). In addition, there was no difference in color change between groups (p > 0.05). However, there was an intragroup statistical difference throughout the evaluation period (p <0.05). The OIDP analysis showed a statistical difference between the groups (p > 0.05) and there was no difference between the groups regarding the degree of satisfaction with the bleaching (p > 0.05).

CONCLUSIONS: The 1.5% PO was effective in preventing sensitivity and did not interfere with tooth whitening. Desensitizing therapy had a positive impact on quality of life and patient satisfaction.

PMID:36395262 | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0277346