Nevin Manimala

Environ Res. 2023 Oct 6:117230. doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2023.117230. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Air pollution is a growing concern worldwide, with significant impacts on human health. Multiple myeloma is a type of blood cancer with increasing incidence. Studies have linked air pollution exposure to various types of cancer, including leukemia and lymphoma, however, the relationship with multiple myeloma incidence has not been extensively investigated.

METHODS: We pooled four European cohorts (N = 234,803) and assessed the association between residential exposure to nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), fine particles (PM_2.5), black carbon (BC), and ozone (O₃) and multiple myeloma. We applied Cox proportional hazards models adjusting for potential confounders at the individual and area-level.

RESULTS: During 4,415,817 person-years of follow-up (average 18.8 years), we observed 404 cases of multiple myeloma. The results of the fully adjusted linear analyses showed hazard ratios (95% confidence interval) of 0.99 (0.84, 1.16) per 10 μg/m³ NO₂, 1.04 (0.82, 1.33) per 5 μg/m³ PM_2.5, 0.99 (0.84, 1.18) per 0.5 10^-5 m^-1 BCE, and 1.11 (0.87, 1.41) per 10 μg/m³ O₃.

CONCLUSIONS: We did not observe an association between long-term ambient air pollution exposure and incidence of multiple myeloma.

PMID:37806476 | DOI:10.1016/j.envres.2023.117230

Urology. 2023 Oct 5:S0090-4295(23)00838-5. doi: 10.1016/j.urology.2023.08.042. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: To review the status of comparative effectiveness studies for kidney stone disease with focus on study outcome, type, population, time trends, and patient centered approaches.

METHODS: A systematic scoping review was performed for articles published between January 1, 2005, and March 30, 2021, using keywords relevant to kidney stone disease. Studies published in English that compared two or more alternative methods for prevention, diagnosis, treatment, monitoring, or care delivery were included. Two reviewers independently reviewed abstracts and an arbitrator resolved discrepancies. Nine reviewers abstracted information from full-length studies. Descriptive statistics were summarized, and linear regression was performed to evaluate temporal trends of study characteristics.

RESULTS: We reviewed 1773 abstracts and 707 full-length manuscripts focused on surgical intervention (440); medical expulsive therapy (MET) (152); analgesic control (80); and homeopathic, diagnostics, and/or prophylaxis (84). Randomized controlled trials were common across all outcome categories, including surgery (41.6%), MET (60.2%), analgesic control (81.3%), homeopathic (41.2%), diagnostic (47.6%), and prophylaxis (49.1%). Patient reported outcomes (PRO) were utilized in 71.7% and 95% of MET and analgesic control studies, respectively, but in the minority of all other study themes. Over time, meta-analyses and multi-center studies increased [P < 0.001].

CONCLUSIONS: Surgical and MET themes dominate published comparative literature in kidney stone disease. There is substantial variation in use of PROs across surgical themes. Multi-centered studies and those generating higher level evidence have increased over time but opportunities exist to improve collaborative, high-quality, and patient-centered research in kidney stone disease.

PMID:37806455 | DOI:10.1016/j.urology.2023.08.042

J Acad Nutr Diet. 2023 Oct 6:S2212-2672(23)01577-0. doi: 10.1016/j.jand.2023.10.001. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: The British Columbia Farmers’ Market Nutrition Coupon Program (BC FMNCP) provides households with low incomes with coupons to purchase healthy foods from farmers’ markets.

OBJECTIVE: To examine the impact of the BC FMNCP on the short-term household food insecurity, malnutrition risk, mental well-being, sense of community (secondary outcomes), and subjective social status (exploratory outcome) of adults with low incomes post-intervention and 16 weeks post-intervention.

DESIGN: Secondary analyses from a pragmatic randomized controlled trial conducted in 2019 that collected data at baseline, post-intervention, and 16 weeks post-intervention.

PARTICIPANTS/SETTING: Adults ≥18 years with low incomes were randomized to a FMNCP group (n=143) or a no-intervention control group (n=142).

INTERVENTION: Participants in the FMNCP group received 16 coupon sheets valued at $21 Canadian dollars (CAD)/sheet over 10-15 weeks to purchase healthy foods from farmers’ markets and were eligible to participate in nutrition skill-building activities.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Outcomes included short-term household food insecurity (modified version of Health Canada’s 18-item Household Food Security Survey Module), malnutrition risk (Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool), mental well-being (Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale), sense of community (Brief Sense of Community Scale), and subjective social status (MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status community scale).

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS: Mixed effects linear regression and multinomial logistic regression examined between-group differences in outcomes post-intervention and 16 weeks post-intervention.

RESULTS: The risk of marginal and severe short term household food insecurity was lower among those in the FMNCP group compared to those in the control group (relative risk ratio (RRR) 0.15, p=0.01 and RRR 0.16, p=0.02) post-intervention, with sustained reductions in severe household food insecurity 16 weeks post-intervention (RRR 0.11, p=0.01). No statistically significant differences were observed in malnutrition risk, mental well-being, sense of community, or subjective social status post-intervention or 16 weeks post-intervention.

CONCLUSIONS: The BC FMNCP reduced short-term household food insecurity but was not found to improve malnutrition risk or psychosocial well-being among adults with low incomes compared to a no-intervention control group.

PMID:37806435 | DOI:10.1016/j.jand.2023.10.001

Rhinology. 2023 Oct 8. doi: 10.4193/Rhin23.172. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) are questionnaires designed to assess a patient’s perception of their medical condition. The 22-item Sino-Nasal Outcomes Test (SNOT-22), the Rhinosinusitis Disability Index (RSDI) and the mini-Rhinoconjunctivitis Quality of Life Questionnaire (MiniRQLQ) are validated PROMs commonly used to assess rhinologic conditions. The objective of this study is to determine if responses on these PROMs may be influenced by priming respondents with positive or negative health-related questionnaires.

METHODS: Nine hundred patients were prospectively randomized to one of nine groups. Groups A, D and G were positively primed prior to completing the SNOT-22, the RSDI and MiniRQLQ, respectively. Groups B, E, and H were negatively primed. Groups C, F, and I served as control groups, completing the PROMs without priming. Priming was performed by administering a survey designed to make patients think about their health-related quality of life in a positive or negative way.

RESULTS: Patients who were primed negatively had statistically significantly worse scores on the SNOT-22, RSDI and MiniRQLQ when compared to patients who were primed positively. When compared to the control group, patients who were primed negatively had statistically worse scores on the SNOT-22 and RSDI. There was no significant difference in scores between the positive priming and the control groups for any PROM.

CONCLUSIONS: Priming subjects regarding their health-related quality of life impacts their responses on rhinologic PROMs. Further study is required to understand the clinical and research implications of this novel finding and to clarify the optimal manner for administering and interpreting PROMs.

PMID:37805987 | DOI:10.4193/Rhin23.172

Bull Math Biol. 2023 Oct 8;85(11):111. doi: 10.1007/s11538-023-01214-8.

ABSTRACT

Coordination of cell behaviour is key to a myriad of biological processes including tissue morphogenesis, wound healing, and tumour growth. As such, individual-based computational models, which explicitly describe inter-cellular interactions, are commonly used to model collective cell dynamics. However, when using individual-based models, it is unclear how descriptions of cell boundaries affect overall population dynamics. In order to investigate this we define three cell boundary descriptions of varying complexities for each of three widely used off-lattice individual-based models: overlapping spheres, Voronoi tessellation, and vertex models. We apply our models to multiple biological scenarios to investigate how cell boundary description can influence tissue-scale behaviour. We find that the Voronoi tessellation model is most sensitive to changes in the cell boundary description with basic models being inappropriate in many cases. The timescale of tissue evolution when using an overlapping spheres model is coupled to the boundary description. The vertex model is demonstrated to be the most stable to changes in boundary description, though still exhibits timescale sensitivity. When using individual-based computational models one should carefully consider how cell boundaries are defined. To inform future work, we provide an exploration of common individual-based models and cell boundary descriptions in frequently studied biological scenarios and discuss their benefits and disadvantages.

PMID:37805982 | DOI:10.1007/s11538-023-01214-8

Updates Surg. 2023 Oct 8. doi: 10.1007/s13304-023-01661-x. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

The best nonoperative or operative anal fissure (AF) treatment is not yet established, and several options have been proposed. Aim is to report the surgeons’ practice for the AF treatment. Thirty-four multiple-choice questions were developed. Seven questions were about to participants’ demographics and, 27 questions about their clinical practice. Based on the specialty (general surgeon and colorectal surgeon), obtained data were divided and compared between two groups. Five-hundred surgeons were included (321 general and 179 colorectal surgeons). For both groups, duration of symptoms for at least 6 weeks is the most important factor for AF diagnosis (30.6%). Type of AF (acute vs chronic) is the most important factor which guide the therapeutic plan (44.4%). The first treatment of choice for acute AF is ointment application for both groups (59.6%). For the treatment of chronic AF, this data is confirmed by colorectal surgeons (57%), but not by the general surgeons who prefer the lateral internal sphincterotomy (LIS) (31.8%) (p = 0.0001). Botulin toxin injection is most performed by colorectal surgeons (58.7%) in comparison to general surgeons (20.9%) (p = 0.0001). Anal flap is mostly performed by colorectal surgeons (37.4%) in comparison to general surgeons (28.3%) (p = 0.0001). Fissurectomy alone is statistically significantly most performed by general surgeons in comparison to colorectal surgeons (57.9% and 43.6%, respectively) (p = 0.0020). This analysis provides useful information about the clinical practice for the management of a debated topic such as AF treatment. Shared guidelines and consensus especially focused on operative management are required to standardize the treatment and to improve postoperative results.

PMID:37805973 | DOI:10.1007/s13304-023-01661-x

Biostatistics. 2023 Oct 6:kxad028. doi: 10.1093/biostatistics/kxad028. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Joint modeling of longitudinal data such as quality of life data and survival data is important for palliative care researchers to draw efficient inferences because it can account for the associations between those two types of data. Modeling quality of life on a retrospective from death time scale is useful for investigators to interpret the analysis results of palliative care studies which have relatively short life expectancies. However, informative censoring remains a complex challenge for modeling quality of life on the retrospective time scale although it has been addressed for joint models on the prospective time scale. To fill this gap, we develop a novel joint modeling approach that can address the challenge by allowing informative censoring events to be dependent on patients’ quality of life and survival through a random effect. There are two sub-models in our approach: a linear mixed effect model for the longitudinal quality of life and a competing-risk model for the death time and dropout time that share the same random effect as the longitudinal model. Our approach can provide unbiased estimates for parameters of interest by appropriately modeling the informative censoring time. Model performance is assessed with a simulation study and compared with existing approaches. A real-world study is presented to illustrate the application of the new approach.

PMID:37805939 | DOI:10.1093/biostatistics/kxad028

J Chem Inf Model. 2023 Oct 8. doi: 10.1021/acs.jcim.3c01153. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

AmberTools is a free and open-source collection of programs used to set up, run, and analyze molecular simulations. The newer features contained within AmberTools23 are briefly described in this Application note.

PMID:37805934 | DOI:10.1021/acs.jcim.3c01153

World J Surg. 2023 Oct 8. doi: 10.1007/s00268-023-07207-x. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVES: Ultrasound tends to present very high sensitivity but relatively low specificity and positive predictive value (PPV), which would result in unnecessary breast biopsies. The purpose of this study is to analyze the diagnostic performance of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) (S-Detect) system in differentiating breast lesions and reducing unnecessary biopsies in non-university hospitals in less-developed regions of China.

METHODS: The study was a prospective multicenter study from 8 hospitals. The ultrasound images, and cine, CAD analysis, and BI-RADS were recorded. The accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, PPV, negative predictive value (NPV), and area under the curve (AUC) were analyzed and compared between CAD and radiologists. The Youden Index (YI) was used to determine optimal cut-off for the number of planes to downgrade.

RESULTS: A total of 491 breast lesions were included in the study. Less-experienced radiologists combined CAD was superior to less-experienced radiologists alone in AUC (0.878 vs 0.712, p < 0.001), and specificity (81.3% vs 44.6%, p < 0.001). There was no statistical difference in AUC (0.891 vs 0.878, p = 0.346), and specificity (82.3% vs 81.3%, p = 0.791) between experienced radiologists and less-experienced radiologists combined CAD. With CAD assistance, the biopsy rate of less-experienced radiologists was significantly decreased (100.0% vs 25.6%, p < 0.001), and malignant rate of biopsy was significantly increased (15.0% vs 43.9%, p < 0.001).

CONCLUSIONS: CAD system can be an effective auxiliary tool in differentiating breast lesions and reducing unnecessary biopsies for radiologists from non-university hospitals in less-developed regions of China.

PMID:37805926 | DOI:10.1007/s00268-023-07207-x

Georgian Med News. 2023 Jul-Aug;(340-341):264-269.

ABSTRACT

It is essential to study disorders of the immune system in chronic encephalopathies of various genesis, considering that the mechanisms of brain damage remain unknown in their molecular basis. Among numerous inflammatory mediators, cytokines are particular in regulating immunological interactions. Many factors, including the genetic ones, determine these pro-inflammatory proteins’ activity. The aim of study was to study the prevalence of IL1β C3953T gene polymorphism and TNFα G308A gene polymorphism in patients with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), microvascular ischemic disease of the brain (or cerebral small vessel disease, (SVD)), chronic alcohol-induced encephalopathy (AIE) and postinfectious encephalopathy (PIE), and to evaluate the impact of a particular genotype presence on the occurrence and/or progression of encephalopathy. The molecular genetic study of polymorphic variants – C3953T of the IL1β gene and G308A of the TNFα gene was applied for 96 patients with encephalopathies of various genesis (CTE n=26, CAIE n=26, SVD n=18, and PIE n=26). The patients were undergoing treatment in the neurological departments of the Communal Non-commercial Enterprise “Ternopil Regional Clinical Psychoneurological Hospital” of Ternopil Regional Council (Ternopil, Ukraine) during 2021-2022. The control group consisted of 12 healthy persons, who were representative in terms of age and sex. Statistical processing of the results was carried out using the STATISTICA 10.0 software package. The frequency distribution analysis of the genotypes of the polymorphic variant C3953T of the IL1β gene and G308A of the TNFα gene in patients with CTE, SVD, CAIE, and PIE compared to individuals of the control group was performed. The statistically significant differences were found only in patients with PIE: 26.92% vs. 83.33% – carriers of the C/ C genotype, 61.54% versus 16.67% – carriers of the C/T genotype and 11.54% versus 0% – carriers of the T/T genotype and 53.85% versus 91.67% – carriers of the G/G genotype, 46 .15% versus 8.33% – carriers of the G/A genotype and 0.0% versus 0.0% – carriers of the A/A genotype, respectively. In addition, in the group of patients with PIE, the distribution of genotype frequencies of the polymorphic variant C3953T of the IL1β gene probably differed from the data of patients with CTE, SVD, and PIE (χ2=28.64; p<0.001), and in the group of patients with CAIE, the distribution of genotype frequencies of the polymorphic variant G308A of the TNFα gene probably differed from the data of patients with SVD and PIE (χ2=24.91; p=0.002). Analyzing the odds ratio and its confidence interval for the genotypes of polymorphic variants C3953T of the IL1β gene and G308A of the TNFα gene in patients with CTE, SVD, CAIE, and PIE, it was established that the presence of the C/T genotype of the IL1β gene increases the risk of encephalopathy in patients with PIE by 8.0 times, and the presence of the G/A genotype of the TNFα gene increases the risk of encephalopathy in patients with PIE by 9.4 times. For the first time in the Ukrainian population, an analysis of the frequency distribution of the genotypes of the polymorphic variant C3953T of the IL1β gene and G308A of the TNFα gene in patients with chronic encephalopathies of various genesis was performed. Statistically, significant differences were found only in patients with PIE compared to healthy individuals. At the same time, the presence of the C/T genotype of the IL1β gene increases the risk of the occurrence and/or progression of PIE by 8.0 times, and the presence of the G/A genotype of the TNFα gene by 9.4 times, which indicates the feasibility of including the corresponding single-nucleotide polymorphisms in the genetic panel of the study patients with PIE.

PMID:37805909