Nevin Manimala

Epilepsy Res. 2022 Mar 15;182:106908. doi: 10.1016/j.eplepsyres.2022.106908. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVES: To investigate structural connectivity after total callosotomy.

METHODS: Deterministic fiber tracking (tractography) of whole brain white matter was performed on 13 epilepsy patients pre- and post-callosotomy. The analysis of structural connectivity was based on graph theory and network-based analysis with a focus on the inter- and intrahemispheric networks. Clinical demographic data including seizure patterns and outcomes were scored for the identification of correlations.

RESULTS: After total callosotomy, structural interhemispheric networks were significantly interrupted. Specific changes were observed in the structural intrahemispheric networks in both hemispheres: 3 edges presented with significant decreases in the left hemisphere, whereas 2 edges presented with significant decreases in the right hemisphere. No global changes were observed in the network density, average weighted strength, average characteristic path length, or global efficiency of intrahemispheric networks. The intrahemispheric hubs and nodal efficiency were minimal changed after callosotomy.

CONCLUSION: While there was a significant decrease in structural interhemispheric connectivity post-callosotomy, we observed synchronously decremented changes of intrahemispheric edges in each hemisphere. This study suggests that white matter maintains the structural connectivity intrahemispherically although functional connectivity recovered after total callosotomy.

PMID:35349891 | DOI:10.1016/j.eplepsyres.2022.106908

Arch Gerontol Geriatr. 2022 Mar 20;101:104688. doi: 10.1016/j.archger.2022.104688. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Multimorbidity has negative impacts on the health outcomes of older adults. Previous research has discovered different patterns of multimorbidity. However, evidence is scarce for associations between multimorbidity patterns and disability/frailty, especially evidence from longitudinal studies. This study aimed to explore the relationship between multimorbidity patterns and disability/frailty among older adults in Taiwan.

METHODS: This population-based cohort study used data from the Taiwan Longitudinal Study on Aging. It included 2,194 older adults (age >50 years) who were followed from 1996 to 2011. The participants’ multimorbidity patterns in 1996 were determined by latent class analysis; their incident disability and frailty were ascertained in 2011. Multivariate logistic regression was used to analyze the relationship between multimorbidity patterns and disability/frailty.

RESULTS: In 1996, the participants’ average age was 62 years. Four multimorbidity patterns were discovered through latent class analysis, as follows: (1) Cardiometabolic group (n = 222), (2) Arthritis-cataract group (n = 112), (3) Multimorbidity group (n = 189), and (4) Relatively healthy group (n = 1671). After adjusting for age, sex, social participation, alcohol consumption, self-rated health, admission in the past year, and depression, participants in the Cardiometabolic group had a greater risk of incident disability (odds ratio: 1.78; 95% confidence interval: 1.26-2.52), compared with the Relatively healthy group. No statistically significant relationships were found between multimorbidity patterns and frailty. Subgroup analysis showed that females in the Cardiometabolic and Multimorbidity groups had greater risks of developing disability.

CONCLUSION: This 16-year, population-based cohort study showed that distinct multimorbidity patterns among older adults in Taiwan were associated with incident disability during later life but were not related to frailty.

PMID:35349876 | DOI:10.1016/j.archger.2022.104688

Mar Pollut Bull. 2022 Mar 26;178:113592. doi: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2022.113592. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Microplastics (MPs) are widespread in the water column of several aquatic ecosystems. Thus, the sampling methodology is considered as a basic factor influencing MPs abundance. In this baseline, a total of 67 investigations were chosen to conduct a quantitative analysis between two sampling methods: Trawl and bulk. The aim is to report a general overview of the MPs abundance and characteristic differences based on the sampling procedures and provide methodological recommendations. MPs abundance reported by bulk studies is 3500 higher than trawl studies. Furthermore, the morphological types and polymers abundances were statistically affected by the type of sampling tool. Conversely, MPs size ranges were significantly different between sampling procedures, suggesting that trawling underestimates the smaller MPs fractions. The analysis confirms that the sampling methods should be selected based on the research objectives. In this sense, it is recommended to combine both types of sampling procedures to obtain comprehensive data.

PMID:35349867 | DOI:10.1016/j.marpolbul.2022.113592

Psychiatry Res. 2022 Mar 19;311:114510. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2022.114510. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

The mechanisms through which exposure to differing trauma types become biologically embedded to shape the risk for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is unclear. DNA methylation (5-mC), particularly in stress-relevant genes, may play a role in this relationship. Here, we conducted path analysis using generalized structural equation modeling to investigate whether blood-derived 5-mC in Nuclear Factor of Activated T Cells 1 (NFATC1) mediates the prospective association between each of five different trauma types (“assaultive violence”, “other injury or shocking experience”, “learning of trauma to loved one”, “sudden, unexpected death of a close friend or relative”, and “other”) and lifetime PTSD. All five trauma types were significantly associated with reduced methylation at NFATC1 CpG site, cg17057218. Two of the five trauma types were significantly associated with increased methylation at NFATC1 CpG site, cg22324981. Moreover, methylation at cg17057218 significantly mediated 21-32% of the total effect for four of the five trauma types, while methylation at cg22324981 mediated 27-40% of the total effect for two of the five trauma types. These CpG sites were differentially associated with transcription factor binding sites and chromatin state signatures. NFATC1 5-mC may be a potential mechanism in the relationship between some trauma types and prospective risk for PTSD.

PMID:35349860 | DOI:10.1016/j.psychres.2022.114510

Heart Lung. 2022 Mar 26;54:61-67. doi: 10.1016/j.hrtlng.2022.02.009. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is a progressive disorder with significant physical, psychological, and social consequences and adversely affects the persons’ quality of life (QOL).

OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to determine the health literacy (HL) and QOL of persons with COPD and some of the contributing factors.

METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted from May to December 2019 on 270 persons with COPD referring to Shahid-Beheshti Hospital of Kashan, Iran. Data were collected using a demographic questionnaire, the 33-item Health Literacy Questionnaire of the Urban Population of Iran (with a total score ranging from 33 to 165, higher score indicates higher HL) and the 50-item St. George’s Respiratory Questionnaire for assessing the QOL (with a total score ranging from zero to 100, greater score means lower QOL). Descriptive statistics, Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficient, Chi-square test, t-test, analysis of variance, and linear regression analysis were used to analyze the data.

RESULTS: The mean age and the mean duration of COPD were 59.48±13.31 and 3.85±3.47 years, respectively. The mean HL score and the mean QOL were 81.44±23.89 and 57.41±10.70, respectively. A significant correlation was found between HL and QOL (r=-0.21, p<0.001).

CONCLUSION: Participants had moderate levels of HL and QOL. There was a significant correlation between HL and QOL. Health care providers are recommended to take effective steps to improve the HL of persons with COPD by developing comprehensive educational programs for them.

PMID:35349857 | DOI:10.1016/j.hrtlng.2022.02.009

Med Image Anal. 2022 Mar 17;78:102418. doi: 10.1016/j.media.2022.102418. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Automatic and accurate prostate ultrasound segmentation is a long-standing and challenging problem due to the severe noise and ambiguous/missing prostate boundaries. In this work, we propose a novel polar transform network (PTN) to handle this problem from a fundamentally new perspective, where the prostate is represented and segmented in the polar coordinate space rather than the original image grid space. This new representation gives a prostate volume, especially the most challenging apex and base sub-areas, much denser samples than the background and thus facilitate the learning of discriminative features for accurate prostate segmentation. Moreover, in the polar representation, the prostate surface can be efficiently parameterized using a 2D surface radius map with respect to a centroid coordinate, which allows the proposed PTN to obtain superior accuracy compared with its counterparts using convolutional neural networks while having significantly fewer (18%∼41%) trainable parameters. We also equip our PTN with a novel strategy of centroid perturbed test-time augmentation (CPTTA), which is designed to further improve the segmentation accuracy and quantitatively assess the model uncertainty at the same time. The uncertainty estimation function provides valuable feedback to clinicians when manual modifications or approvals are required for the segmentation, substantially improving the clinical significance of our work. We conduct a three-fold cross validation on a clinical dataset consisting of 315 transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) images to comprehensively evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The experimental results show that our proposed PTN with CPTTA outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with statistical significance on most of the metrics while exhibiting a much smaller model size. Source code of the proposed PTN is released at https://github.com/DIAL-RPI/PTN.

PMID:35349838 | DOI:10.1016/j.media.2022.102418

Complement Ther Clin Pract. 2022 Mar 23;47:101575. doi: 10.1016/j.ctcp.2022.101575. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: and purpose:Intrauterine adhesion (IUA) and re-adhesion were common problems in women of childbearing age. The aim of our research was to evaluate the efficacy of hyaluronic acid gel on preventing IUA and improving the fertility.

METHODS: A systematic search for randomized controlled trial (RCT) articles that tested the effectiveness of using hyaluronic acid gel during intrauterine surgery in prevention of IUA and improvement of fertility was performed in PubMed, Medline, Embase, the Cochrane Library and clinicaltrials.gov until December 2020. Data were extracted independently and analyzed using RevMan statistical software version 5.3.

RESULTS: Twelve articles (11 studies) were deemed eligible for inclusion. There was a significantly reduced proportion of IUA after using hyaluronic acid gel during intrauterine operation (OR 0.39, 95% CI 0.29 to 0.52). It has significantly reduced the incidence of moderate-to-severe IUA after using hyaluronic acid gel, but no effect on the mild IUA. In addition, our analysis showed that the hyaluronic acid gel group was associated with a significant increased incidence of pregnancy (OR 1.64, 95% CI 1.08 to 2.50).

CONCLUSION: Our analysis confirmed that using hyaluronic acid gel during intrauterine operation seemed to be more helpful for patients with high risk of IUA. However, larger and well-designed studies would be desired in the future to confirm its efficacy and safety in protecting fertility.

PMID:35349823 | DOI:10.1016/j.ctcp.2022.101575

Am J Hum Genet. 2022 Mar 22:S0002-9297(22)00101-X. doi: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2022.03.005. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Since 2005, genome-wide association (GWA) datasets have been largely biased toward sampling European ancestry individuals, and recent studies have shown that GWA results estimated from self-identified European individuals are not transferable to non-European individuals because of various confounding challenges. Here, we demonstrate that enrichment analyses that aggregate SNP-level association statistics at multiple genomic scales-from genes to genomic regions and pathways-have been underutilized in the GWA era and can generate biologically interpretable hypotheses regarding the genetic basis of complex trait architecture. We illustrate examples of the robust associations generated by enrichment analyses while studying 25 continuous traits assayed in 566,786 individuals from seven diverse self-identified human ancestries in the UK Biobank and the Biobank Japan as well as 44,348 admixed individuals from the PAGE consortium including cohorts of African American, Hispanic and Latin American, Native Hawaiian, and American Indian/Alaska Native individuals. We identify 1,000 gene-level associations that are genome-wide significant in at least two ancestry cohorts across these 25 traits as well as highly conserved pathway associations with triglyceride levels in European, East Asian, and Native Hawaiian cohorts.

PMID:35349783 | DOI:10.1016/j.ajhg.2022.03.005

Global Spine J. 2022 Mar 29:21925682221084969. doi: 10.1177/21925682221084969. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

STUDY DESIGN: This is a meta-analysis and systematic review of the available literature.

OBJECTIVE: In the case of severe foraminal stenosis, conducting uncinate process resection (UPR) during ACDF could achieve complete nerve root decompression and significant relief of neurological symptoms for CR. However, there is some controversy regarding its necessity and safety. This study aims to compare the safety and efficacy of ACDF with UPR and ACDF.

METHODS: The following electronic databases were searched: Medline, PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Evidence Based Medicine Reviews, VIP, and CNKI. And the following data items were considered: baseline demographics, efficacy evaluation indicators, radiographic outcome, and surgical details.

RESULTS: 10 studies were finally identified, including 746 patients who underwent ACDF with UPR compared to 729 patients who underwent ACDF. The group of ACDF with UPR had statistically longer intraoperative time (95% CI: 4.83, 19.77, P = .001) and more intraoperative blood loss (95% CI: 12.23, 17.76, P < .001). ACDF with UPR obtained a significantly better improvement of Arm VAS at postoperative first follow-up (95% CI: -1.85, -.14 P = .02). There was no significant difference found in improvement of Neck VAS at postoperative latest follow-up (95% CI: -.88, .27, P = .30), improvement of Arm VAS at postoperative latest follow-up (95% CI: -.59, -.01, P = .05), improvement of NDI (95% CI: -2.34, .33, P = .14), JOA (95% CI: -.24, .43, P = .56), change of C2-C7 lordosis (95% CI: -.87, 1.33, P = .68), C2-C7 SVA (95% CI: -.73, 5.08, P = .14), T1 slope (95% CI: -2.25, 1.51, P = .70), and fusion rate (95% CI: .83, 1.90 P = .29).

CONCLUSION: ACDF with UPR is an effective and necessary surgical method for CR patients with severe foraminal stenosis.

PMID:35349779 | DOI:10.1177/21925682221084969

Brain Behav. 2022 Mar 29:e2549. doi: 10.1002/brb3.2549. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

PURPOSE: There are few studies on the gender differences in mental health, happiness, and their related factors among the older population through the structural equation model (SEM) in Iran. We conducted this study to evaluate the factors affecting mental health and happiness in the elderly using an SEM by gender differences.

METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted on 739 elderly people in 2019 in Karaj, Iran. Sociodemographic, Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL90-R), and the Oxford Happiness Inventory were applied to evaluate the relationships between happiness, mental health, and sociodemographic factors by using statistical path analysis with Lisrel 8.8 and SPSS-17.

RESULTS: Overall, 55.5% of the participants in the study were female. The SCL90 (p value = .000) and happiness (p value = .000) scores showed significant differences between men and women. Fit indices confirmed the high model fitness, desirability, and logical relationships between the variables according to the conceptual model in both men (X2 = 3.2, df = 1) and women (X2 = 5.4, df = 2) groups. According to the path analysis, among the variables that affected happiness just through the direct path, education had the most positive causal relationship in men (B = .13) and women (B = .16), but mental health problems in men (B = -.33) and women (B = -.26), as well as the distance from home to the healthcare center in men (B = -.13) and women (B = -.11), had the most negative causal relationship with happiness respectively. Age was the only variable that was negatively related to happiness through direct and indirect paths in the women (B = -.188).

CONCLUSION: We provided an empirical model that illustrates the relationships between happiness, mental health, and related factors in the older population. Gender differences in path analysis showed that age negatively affects the happiness of older women but not men.

PMID:35349774 | DOI:10.1002/brb3.2549