Nevin Manimala

J Med Biogr. 2021 Oct 21:9677720211046588. doi: 10.1177/09677720211046588. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

William Wilde, father of Oscar Wilde, made a significant contribution to ophthalmology and otology. Qualified as a surgeon. educated in statistics and showing sympathy for the Irish population, Wilde was appointed a Commissioner for the 1851 Census, which covered the time of the Irish Famine (1845-1852). Wilde, steeped in Irish mythology, used his knowledge to develop a close rapport with the Irish peasantry. However, his life was a paradox; he supported the British Government’s approach to the Famine and at the same time he showed humanity to the Irish peasantry. In his personal life he was implicated in an abortive libel case involving a young female patient who had accused him of rape. Wilde lived as though he had two separate lives: on the one hand the successful surgeon, famine Commissioner and cataloguer of Irish antiquities, and the other a countryman and disciple of Irish mythology. Wilde was highly preceptive especially in his views on the recording of medical data and outcomes in clinical practice. We argue that Wilde was probably unmatched in the variety of his talents but was also perplexing in the various actions he took during his life and that indeed Wilde was an enigma.

PMID:34672235 | DOI:10.1177/09677720211046588

Expert Rev Vaccines. 2021 Oct 21. doi: 10.1080/14760584.2021.1994858. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: : V114 (15-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine [PCV15]) and a 20-valent PCV (PCV20) are approved for adults (≥18 years of age) in the United States. We present methodologies to indirectly compare immune responses to V114 versus PCV20.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: : Indirect treatment comparison and matching-adjusted indirect comparison (MAIC) were performed to estimate immune responses to V114 and PCV20 for 13 serotypes (STs) shared with a 13-valent PCV (PCV13) among pneumococcal-vaccine naïve adults aged ≥60 years. Data from three V114 studies were pooled (V114, N=2,196; PCV13, N=843). In the MAIC analysis, data were reweighted, matching participant age and sex in NCT03760146 (PCV20, N=1,507; PCV13, N=1,490). Opsonophagocytic activity (OPA) geometric mean titer (GMT) ratios of V114/PCV20 at 30 days post-vaccination used PCV13 as common comparator.

RESULTS: : V114 was non-inferior to PCV20 (lower bound of OPA GMT ratio V114/PCV20 >0.5) for all PCV13 STs and statistically superior (lower bound of OPA GMT ratio V114/PCV20 >1.2) for five STs (3, 6A, 6B, 18C, and 23F) shared with PCV13. V114 was associated with 77% greater OPA GMT for ST3 versus PCV20.

CONCLUSION: : V114 was non-inferior to PCV20 for all PCV13 STs and statistically superior for five STs covered in all three vaccines.

PMID:34672224 | DOI:10.1080/14760584.2021.1994858

J Comp Eff Res. 2021 Oct 21. doi: 10.2217/cer-2021-0195. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Aim: To evaluate the effects of 12-week Pilates training program on cardiac autonomic modulation. Materials & methods: A randomized controlled trial of a 12-week Pilates training program was conducted. A total of 54 men were randomly allocated to either a control or a Pilates group. Initially, the RR intervals were captured for 20 min for later analysis of heart rate variability (HRV). The training protocol was then initiated, in which the Pilates group performed 36 sessions of the Pilates method for approximately 60 min each session, three-times a week, totaling 12 weeks. The control group was instructed to maintain their normal activities during this period. One week after the end of the training, the final evaluations were performed with the capture of RR intervals in both the groups. Linear indices in the time (SDNN and rMSSD) and frequency (low frequency [LF] and high frequency [HF]) domains, and the Poincaré plot (SD1 and SD2) were used. Nonlinear indices were also analyzed (approximate entropy and detrended fluctuation analysis). Descriptive statistics and generalized mixed models were performed. Results: There was a group effect for LF (ms²) and a time effect for SD2. There was a training effect observed by the time*group interactions in which an increase in global HRV indices was found for the Pilates group after 12 weeks (SDNN: mean difference [MD] = 9.82; standard deviation [SD] = 18.52; ES = -0.514; LF [ms²]: MD = 334.23; SD = 669.43; ES = -0.547; SD2: MD = 14.58; SD = 24.28; ES = -0.693). Conclusion: A 12-week Pilates training program promotes significant improvement in global modulation of HRV in the Pilates group considering the significant increase in SDNN, LF (ms²) and SD2 indices. Trial registration number: NCT03232866.

PMID:34672201 | DOI:10.2217/cer-2021-0195

Geospat Health. 2021 Oct 20;16(2). doi: 10.4081/gh.2021.1004.

ABSTRACT

There is a vast amount of geo-referenced data in many fields of study including ecological studies. Geo-referencing is usually by point referencing; that is, latitudes and longitudes or by areal referencing, which includes districts, counties, states, provinces and other administrative units. The availability of large geo-referenced datasets for modelling has necessitated the development and application of spatial statistical methods. However, spatial varying coefficients models exploring the abundance of tick counts remain limited. In this study we used data that was collected and prepared by researchers in the Department of Biological Sciences from the Old Dominion University, Virginia, USA. We modelled tick life-stage counts and abundance variability from 12 sampling locations, with 5 different habitats (numbered 1-5), three habitat types; namely: woods, edges and grass; collected monthly from May 2009 through December 2018. Spatio-temporal Poisson and spatio-temporal negative binomial (NB) count data models were fitted to the data and compared using the deviance information criteria (DIC). The NB model outperformed the Poisson models with all its DIC values being smaller than those of the Poisson model. Results showed that the covariates varied spatially across counties. There was a decreasing time (in years) effect over the study period. However, even though the time effect was decreasing over the study period, space-time interaction effects were seen to be increasing over time in York County.

PMID:34672184 | DOI:10.4081/gh.2021.1004

Geospat Health. 2021 Oct 19;16(2). doi: 10.4081/gh.2021.982.

ABSTRACT

In the late 1960s, Indonesia established community health centres (CHCs) throughout the country to provide basic healthcare services for the poor. However, CHC expenditures and investments vary widely at the sub-provincial level, among administrative areas known as cities and regencies, raising concern that facilities and services do not correspond to population needs. This study aimed to examine spatial and socioeconomic inequalities in the availability of CHCs in the Jakarta region. We used spatial and statistical analysis methods at the village level to investigate these inequalities based on CHC data from the Ministry of Health and socioeconomic data from Indonesia Statistics. Results show that CHCs and the healthcare workers within them are unevenly distributed. In areas with high need, the availability of CHCs and healthcare workers were found to be low. There is a mismatch in healthcare services and delivery for low-income, unemployed populations at the village level that needs to be addressed. The findings discussed in this paper suggest that Jakarta Department of Health should coordinate with local public health districts to determine locations for new CHCs and assign healthcare workers to each CHC based on need as this would improve access to essential health services for the low-income population.

PMID:34672179 | DOI:10.4081/gh.2021.982

Geospat Health. 2021 Oct 19;16(2). doi: 10.4081/gh.2021.980.

ABSTRACT

In the last few decades, public health surveillance has increasingly applied statistical methods to analyze the spatial disease distributions. Nevertheless, contact tracing and follow up control measures for tuberculosis (TB) patients remain challenging because public health officers often lack the programming skills needed to utilize the software appropriately. This study aimed to develop a more user-friendly application by applying the CodeIgniter framework for server development, ArcGIS JavaScript for data display and a web application based on JavaScript and Hypertext Preprocessor to build the server’s interface, while a webGIS technology was used for mapping. The performance of this approach was tested based on 3325 TB cases and their sociodemographic data, such as age, gender, race, nationality, country of origin, educational level, employment status, health care worker status, income status, residency status, and smoking status between 1st January 2013 and 31st December 2017 in Gombak, Selangor, Malaysia. These data were collected from the Gombak District Health Office and Rawang Health Clinic. Latitude and longitude of the location for each case was geocoded by uploading spatial data using Google Earth and the main output was an interactive map displaying location of each case. Filters are available for the selection of the various sociodemographic factors of interest. The application developed should assist public health experts to utilize spatial data for the surveillance purposes comprehensively as well as for the drafting of regulations aimed at to reducing mortality and morbidity and thus minimizing the public health impact of the disease.

PMID:34672178 | DOI:10.4081/gh.2021.980

Am J Perinatol. 2021 Oct 20. doi: 10.1055/a-1674-6198. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: While administration of antenatal corticosteroids prior to term elective cesarean deliveries has been shown in international randomized controlled trials to decrease the rates of respiratory distress syndrome and transient tachypnea of the newborn, this is not standard practice in the United States. We aim to determine if administration of antenatal corticosteroids for fetal lung maturation within one week of scheduled early term cesarean delivery resulted in decreased composite respiratory morbidity.

STUDY DESIGN: Historical cohort study including women who underwent scheduled early term cesarean delivery of a singleton, non-anomalous neonate at Mount Sinai Hospital between May 2015 and August 2019, comparing those who completed a course of antenatal corticosteroids within one week of delivery to those who did not. The primary outcome was composite respiratory morbidity defined as respiratory distress syndrome, transient tachypnea of the newborn and NICU admission for respiratory morbidity. Maternal and neonatal characteristics were compared between groups using T-tests or Wilcoxon-Rank Sum tests for continuous measures and Chi-square or Fisher’s exact tests for categorical measures, as appropriate. The outcomes were assessed using logistic regression.

RESULTS: History of preterm birth was significantly higher in those who received antenatal corticosteroids compared to those who did not (24.0% vs. 10.9%, p=0.01). Neonates who were not exposed to antenatal corticosteroids were more likely to experience the composite respiratory morbidity compared to those who were exposed (RR 4.1, 95% CI 1.2-13.7; p=0.02). Between 37 and 38 weeks, neonates who did not receive steroids were at increased risk of composite respiratory morbidity (RR 11.7, 95% CI 1.5-89.0, p<0.01), however there was no difference for those born between 38 and 39 weeks.

CONCLUSION: Betamethasone course administered prior to planned early term cesarean delivery was associated with a statistically significant reduction in the neonatal composite respiratory morbidity compared to routine management.

PMID:34670323 | DOI:10.1055/a-1674-6198

Tierarztl Prax Ausg K Kleintiere Heimtiere. 2021 Oct;49(5):349-356. doi: 10.1055/a-1584-4965. Epub 2021 Oct 20.

ABSTRACT

TOPIC AND AIMS: Canine atopic dermatitis (AD) is an inflammatory and pruritic skin disease and in most cases associated with IgE antibodies against environmental allergens. To date, the only causative therapeutic option is allergen immunotherapy (AIT). Offending allergens for AIT can be identified by intradermal testing (IDT) or serum allergen-specific IgE testing. The aim of the study was to evaluate positive IDT results considering the atopic dogs’ clinical history.

MATERIAL AND METHODS: An IDT was performed on 48 atopic dogs and their owners completed a detailed questionnaire about the seasonal course of their pruritus. Results of IDT were correlated with the seasonal occurrence of pruritus.

RESULTS: The most common positive IDT reactions were observed to mite allergens (33.3-62.5 %). Prevalence of positive reactions to individual tree, grass and weed pollen ranged between 8.3 % and 25 %. Moulds and epithelial allergens produced positive reactions in only 0-6.3 %. A correlation between positive IDT reactions and course of pruritus could neither be found for perennial nor for seasonal allergens.

CONCLUSION: The evaluation of IDT reactions may not be an optimal method for identification of clinically relevant allergens in canine AD.

CLINICAL RELEVANCE: The results of this study emphasise the importance of considering clinical history in addition to allergy test results in the formulation of an allergen extract for desensitisation.

PMID:34670310 | DOI:10.1055/a-1584-4965

Brief Bioinform. 2021 Oct 20:bbab422. doi: 10.1093/bib/bbab422. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Fungal infections or mycosis cause a wide range of diseases in humans and animals. The incidences of community acquired; nosocomial fungal infections have increased dramatically after the emergence of COVID-19 pandemic. The increase in number of patients with immunodeficiency / immunosuppression related diseases, resistance to existing antifungal compounds and availability of limited therapeutic options has triggered the search for alternative antifungal molecules. In this direction, antifungal peptides (AFPs) have received a lot of interest as an alternative to currently available antifungal drugs. Although the AFPs are produced by diverse population of living organisms, identifying effective AFPs from natural sources is time-consuming and expensive. Therefore, there is a need to develop a robust in silico model capable of identifying novel AFPs in protein sequences. In this paper, we propose Deep-AFPpred, a deep learning classifier that can identify AFPs in protein sequences. We developed Deep-AFPpred using the concept of transfer learning with 1DCNN-BiLSTM deep learning algorithm. The findings reveal that Deep-AFPpred beats other state-of-the-art AFP classifiers by a wide margin and achieved approximately 96% and 94% precision on validation and test data, respectively. Based on the proposed approach, an online prediction server is created and made publicly available at https://afppred.anvil.app/. Using this server, one can identify novel AFPs in protein sequences and the results are provided as a report that includes predicted peptides, their physicochemical properties and motifs. By utilizing this model, we identified AFPs in different proteins, which can be chemically synthesized in lab and experimentally validated for their antifungal activity.

PMID:34670278 | DOI:10.1093/bib/bbab422

Chin Med J (Engl). 2021 Oct 19. doi: 10.1097/CM9.0000000000001815. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Circular RNA (circRNA) is a type of closed circular noncoding RNA (ncRNA), mostly formed by back-splicing or alternative splicing of pre-messenger RNA (mRNA). The aim of this study was to explore the expression profile of circRNA in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) of patients with ankylosing spondylitis (AS) and discover potential molecular markers of AS.

METHODS: The circRNA microarray technology was used to detect the expression of circRNAs in the peripheral blood of 6 patients with AS and 6 healthy controls (HC). To screen the differentially expressed circRNAs by fold change (FC) and P value, these differentially expressed circRNAs were analyzed by bioinformatics. In 60 cases of AS and 30 cases of HC, 4 circRNAs were subjected to real-time fluorescence quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR), and their correlation with various clinical indicators was analyzed. Finally, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to analyze their potential as AS diagnostic markers.

RESULTS: The microarray results showed that there were 1369 significantly differently expressed (P < 0.05, FC > 1.5) circRNAs between the AS and HC groups (675 upregulated and 694 downregulated). The results of bioinformatics analysis suggested that they were mainly involved in “enzyme binding,” “adenosine ribonucleotide binding,” “MAPK signaling pathway”, etc. The RT-qPCR results showed that the expressions of hsa_circRNA_001544 (U = 486.5, P < 0.05) and hsa_circRNA_102532 (U = 645, P < 0.05) were significantly different between the AS group and the HC group. The AS group was further divided into two subgroups: active AS (ASA) and stable AS (ASS). After analysis, it was found that compared with the HC group, hsa_circRNA_001544 was significantly increased in both ASA (U = 214, P < 0.05) and ASS groups (U = 273, P < 0.05), while hsa_circRNA_008961 (U = 250, P < 0.05) and hsa_circRNA_102532 (U = 295, P < 0.05) were only significantly increased in the ASA group. Furthermore, hsa_circRNA_012732 was significantly different between the ASA and ASS groups (U = 194, P < 0.05), and there was no statistical significance among the remaining groups. Correlation analysis results showed that hsa_circRNA_012732 was negatively correlated with Bath Ankylosing Spondylitis Disease Activity Index (BASDAI), high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP), and globulin (GLOB) and positively correlated with lymphocyte count (LY), mean corpusular volume, and albumin (ALB), and hsa_circRNA_008961 was negatively correlated with platelet (PLT) count. ROC curve analysis showed that hsa_circRNA_001544 (95% CI = 0.610-0.831, P < 0.05) and hsa_circRNA_102532 (95% CI = 0.521-0.762, P < 0.05) were statistically significant, and their area under curve (AUC) values were 0.720 and 0.642, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS: There are differentially expressed circRNAs in PBMCs of AS patients, and they may be involved in the occurrence and development of AS. Among these differentially expressed circRNAs, hsa_circRNA_012732 has the potential to become an indicator of disease activity, and hsa_circRNA_001544 has the potential to become a molecular marker for AS diagnosis.

PMID:34670246 | DOI:10.1097/CM9.0000000000001815