Tag: statistics

Anal Bioanal Chem. 2022 Mar 17. doi: 10.1007/s00216-022-03925-8. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Cannabis is an ancient plant that has been used for therapeutic and recreational purposes. Nowadays, industrial hemp, a variety with low concentration of the psychoactive cannabinoid Δ⁹-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and high concentration of non-psychoactive cannabinoids, is getting more and more interest in the food, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic industry. However, cannabis not only contains cannabinoids as bioactive components but also other metabolites like terpenes and phenolic compounds, and the content of these interesting secondary metabolites greatly differs with the genetic variety of the plant. Due to the huge complexity of composition of the cannabis matrix, in this work, a comprehensive two-dimensional liquid chromatography (LC × LC) method has been developed as a very power separation technique coupling a pentafluorophenyl (PFP) and a C18 in the first and second dimensions. Two industrial hemp strains (cookie and gelato) were analyzed to determine the difference in their content of cannabinoids and phenolic compounds. To do this, a new demodulation process was applied for the first time to transform 2D raw data into 1D data which allowed carrying out the chemometric analysis needed to determine the statistical differences between the hemp strains. The cookie strain presented a total of 41 cannabinoid markers, while the gelato strain presented more representative phenolic compounds, in total 24 phenolic compounds were detected as potential markers of this sample. These differences in the chemical composition could determine the industrial destiny of the different hemp strains.

PMID:35301579 | DOI:10.1007/s00216-022-03925-8

Curr Genet. 2022 Mar 17. doi: 10.1007/s00294-022-01234-2. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Reorganization of cellular proteins into subcellular compartments, such as the concentration of RNA-binding proteins into cytoplasmic stress granules and P-bodies, is a well-recognized, widely studied physiological process currently under intense investigation. One example of this is the induction of the yeast Nab3 transcription termination factor to rearrange from its pan-nucleoplasmic distribution to a granule at the nuclear periphery in response to nutrient limitation. Recent work in many cell types has shown that protein condensation in the nucleus is functionally important for transcription initiation, RNA processing, and termination. However, little is known about how subnuclear compartments form. Here, we have quantitatively analyzed this dynamic process in living yeast using a high-throughput computational tool and fluorescence microscopy. This analysis revealed that Nab3 granule accumulation varies in penetrance across yeast strains. A concentrated single granule is formed from at least a quarter of the nuclear Nab3 drawn from the rest of the nucleus. Levels of granule accumulation were inversely correlated with a growth defect in the absence of glucose. Importantly, the basis for some of the variation in penetrance was attributable to a defect in mitochondrial function. This publicly available computational tool provides a rigorous, reproducible, and unbiased examination of Nab3 granule accumulation that should be widely applicable to a variety of fluorescent images. Thousands of live cells can be readily examined enabling rigorous statistical verification of significance. With it, we describe a new feature of inducible subnuclear compartment formation for RNA-binding transcription factors and an important determinant of granule biogenesis.

PMID:35301575 | DOI:10.1007/s00294-022-01234-2

Homeopathy. 2022 Mar 17. doi: 10.1055/s-0041-1739397. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION: Acne is estimated to affect 9.4% of the global population, making it the 8^th most prevalent disease worldwide. Acne vulgaris (AV) is among the diseases that directly affect quality of life. This trial evaluated the efficacy of individualized homeopathic medicines (IHM) against placebo in AV.

METHODS: In this double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial conducted at the National Institute of Homoeopathy, India, 126 patients suffering from AV were randomized in a 1:1 ratio to receive either IHM (verum) in centesimal potencies or identical-looking placebo (control). The primary outcome measure was the Global Acne Grading System score; secondary outcomes were the Cardiff Acne Disability Index and Dermatology Life Quality Index questionnaires – all measured at baseline and 3 months after the intervention. Group differences and effect sizes (Cohen’s d) were calculated on the intention-to-treat sample.

RESULTS: Overall, improvements were greater in the IHM group than placebo, with small to medium effect sizes after 3 months of intervention; however, the inter-group differences were statistically non-significant. Sulphur (17.5%), Natrum muriaticum (15.1%), Calcarea phosphorica (14.3%), Pulsatilla nigricans (10.3%), and Antimonium crudum (7.1%) were the most frequently prescribed medicines; Pulsatilla nigricans, Tuberculinum bovinum and Natrum muriaticum were the most effective of those used. No harms, unintended effects, homeopathic aggravations or any serious adverse events were reported from either group.

CONCLUSION: There was non-significant direction of effect favoring homeopathy against placebo in the treatment of AV.

TRIAL REGISTRATION: CTRI/2018/11/016248; UTN: U1111-1221-8164.

PMID:35299272 | DOI:10.1055/s-0041-1739397

Rheumatol Ther. 2022 Mar 17. doi: 10.1007/s40744-022-00435-y. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION: To compare perceptions of disease control and treatment satisfaction between patients with psoriatic arthritis (PsA) in North America and Europe, and between participating countries within each region.

METHODS: Data were collected from patients with self-reported PsA diagnoses using an online survey. Results from questions on perceptions of overall health, disease severity, PsA symptoms, PsA impacts, and treatment satisfaction/preferences were reported using descriptive statistics and Chi-square tests.

RESULTS: A total of 456 patients from North America (Canada, n = 155; US, n = 301) and 417 patients from Europe (France, n = 123; Spain, n = 135; UK, n = 159) were included in this analysis. Patients in North America were more likely to rate their overall health as excellent/good compared with those in Europe (49 vs. 14%), but also rate their disease as severe (27 vs. 15%). Despite treatment, patients in North America and Europe still experienced musculoskeletal (92 vs. 91%) and skin/nail (62 vs. 58%) symptoms. Similar proportions of patients in North America vs. Europe experienced a social impact (81 vs. 85%); more patients in Europe vs. North America experienced PsA-related work impacts (83 vs. 74%). Satisfaction with PsA medication was more common in North America (89%) vs. Europe (79%), and more common in Spain (91%) vs. the UK (82%) or France (66%). Across all regions and countries, ≥ 75% of patients agreed that symptoms were controlled. However, ≥ 66% wished they had more medication choices, and ≥ 84% wanted to change something about their medication.

CONCLUSIONS: Although perception of overall health and disease severity varied, many patients from both regions still experienced symptoms despite receiving medications for PsA, wished they had greater choice of medications, and/or would like to change an aspect of their medications. While these survey findings are subject to selection bias, they do indicate there is scope to improve the treatment of PsA.

PMID:35299259 | DOI:10.1007/s40744-022-00435-y

J Natl Cancer Inst. 2022 Mar 17:djac054. doi: 10.1093/jnci/djac054. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: In the US, cancer disproportionately impacts Black and African American individuals. Identifying genetic factors underlying cancer disparities has been an important research focus and requires data that are equitable in both quantity and quality across racial groups. It is widely recognized that DNA databases quantitatively under-represent minorities. However, the differences in data quality between racial groups have not been well studied.

METHODS: We compared the qualities of germline and tumor exomes between ancestrally African and European patients in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) of seven cancers with at least 50 self-reported Black patients in the context of sequencing depth, tumor purity, and qualities of germline variants and somatic mutations.

RESULTS: Germline and tumor exomes from ancestrally African patients were sequenced at statistically significantly lower depth in six out of the seven cancers. For three cancers, most ancestrally European exomes were sequenced in early sample batches at higher depth whereas ancestrally African exomes were concentrated in later batches and sequenced at much lower depth. For the other three cancers, the reasons of lower sequencing coverage of ancestrally African exomes remain unknown. Furthermore, even when the sequencing depths were comparable, African exomes had disproportionally higher percentages of positions with insufficient coverage, likely due to the known European bias in the human reference genome that impacted exome capture kit design.

CONCLUSIONS: Overall and positional lower sequencing depths of ancestrally African exomes in TCGA led to under-detection and lower quality of variants, highlighting the need to consider epidemiological factors for future genomics studies.

PMID:35299252 | DOI:10.1093/jnci/djac054

PLoS One. 2022 Mar 17;17(3):e0265593. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0265593. eCollection 2022.

ABSTRACT

Physalia physalis, the bluebottle in Australia, are colonial siphonophores that live at the surface of the ocean, mainly in tropical and subtropical waters. P. physalis are sometimes present in large swarms, and with tentacles capable of intense stings, they can negatively impact public health and commercial fisheries. P. physalis, which does not swim, is advected by ocean currents and winds acting on its gas-filled sail. While previous studies have attempted to model the drift of P. physalis, little is known about its sources, distribution, and the timing of its arrival to shore. In this study, we present a dataset with four years of daily P. physalis beachings and stings reports at three locations off Sydney’s coast in Australia. We investigate the spatial and temporal variability of P. physalis presence (beachings and stings) in relation to different environmental parameters. This dataset shows a clear seasonal pattern where more P. physalis beachings occur in the Austral summer and less in winter. Cold ocean temperatures do not hinder the presence of P. physalis and the temperature seasonal cycle and that observed in P. physalis presence/absence time-series are out of phase by 3-4 months. We identify wind direction as the major driver of the temporal variability of P. physalis arrival to the shore, both at daily and seasonal time-scales. The differences observed between sites of the occurrence of beaching events is consistent with the geomorphology of the coastline which influences the frequency and direction of favorable wind conditions. We also show that rip currents, a physical mechanism occurring at the scale of the beach, can be a predictor of beaching events. This study is a first step towards understanding the dynamics of P. physalis transport and ultimately being able to predict its arrival to the coast and mitigating the number of people who experience painful stings and require medical help.

PMID:35299230 | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0265593

Aesthet Surg J. 2022 Mar 17:sjac059. doi: 10.1093/asj/sjac059. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Breast reduction is a generally well-tolerated procedure with high patient satisfaction and low risk of surgical site infection and other complications. While age, obesity and comorbidities have historically been used as surgical risk proxies, recent literature suggests ‘frailty’ measures, such as the modified 5-item frailty index (mFI-5), may be a superior predictor.

OBJECTIVES: To investigate if mFI-5 can predict the likelihood and magnitude of 30-day complications resulting from breast reductions.

METHODS: A retrospective review was performed using the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP) database of patients who underwent breast reduction without other concurrent procedures, from 2013 to 2019. mFI-5 scores were calculated for each patient, and complication data were gathered. Age, BMI, number of major comorbidities, ASA class, smoking status, diabetes, steroid use and mFI-5 score were compared as predictors of all-cause 30-day complications, 30-day surgical site complications of any kind, length of stay, and aggregate Clavien-Dindo complication severity score. Univariate logistic, linear regressions and multivariate logistic regression analyses were performed to evaluate predictive value. Statistical significance was set at p < 0.05.

RESULTS: A total of 14,160 patients were analyzed. The overall complication rate was 5.6%. The mFI-5 score significantly predicted overall 30-day complications, surgical site complications, complication severity, overnight stay and likelihood of readmission (all p < 0.0001).

CONCLUSIONS: The mFI-5 is a statistically significant predictor for adverse outcomes in breast reduction surgery. The mFI-5 is a simple and reliable tool that can be efficiently used to conduct a preoperative evaluation of patients requesting breast reductions.

PMID:35299241 | DOI:10.1093/asj/sjac059

Nanotechnology. 2022 Mar 17. doi: 10.1088/1361-6528/ac5ee3. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

We have synthesized CdS(1.3 nm)/CdSe(1.7 nm)/CdS(3.4 nm) spherical quantum wells (SQWs) with a diameter of 13nm and demonstrated the first photon-antibunching from their emission, labelling them as single-photon sources. Antibunching survives even at high excitation intensities, ruling-out strong emission from the bi-exciton. For the largest intensities, antibunching coupled to spectral measurements reveal the signature of a blue-shifted emission, associated to an irreversible photo-aging effect. A statistical analysis over 26 SQWs demonstrates a moderate correlation between the energy of the main and the blue-shifted emission. Intensity-timetraces recorded on 28 single SQWs show weak blinking, with a median time spent in the bright state of 89 %. Their emission decay reveals a complex dynamic with either three or four exponential components. We assigned three of them to the neutral and singly-charged excitons and the slowest to defect emission. While SQWs have been initially designed for laser-oriented applications, we demonstrate that they can serve as efficient single-photon sources.

PMID:35299164 | DOI:10.1088/1361-6528/ac5ee3

Phys Med Biol. 2022 Mar 17. doi: 10.1088/1361-6560/ac5ed8. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Accurate segmentation of glioma and its subregions plays an important role in radiotherapy treatment planning. Due to a very populated multiparameter magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) image, manual segmentation task can be very time-consuming, meticulous, and prone to subjective errors. Here, we propose a novel deep learning (DL) framework based on mutual enhancing networks (MENs) to automatically segment brain tumor subregions. Proposed framework is suitable for segmentation of brain tumor subregions owing to contribution of retina U-Net followed by implementation of mutual enhancing strategy between classification module and segmentation module. Retina U-Net is trained to accurately identify view-of-interest (VOIs) and feature maps of whole tumor (WT), which are then transferred to classification module and segmentation module. Subsequently, classification localization map (CLM) generated by classification module is integrated with segmentation module to bring forth mutual enhancing strategy. In this way, our proposed framework first focuses on WT through retina U-Net, and since WT consists subregions, mutual enhancing strategy then further aims to classify and segment subregions embedded within WT. We implemented and evaluated our proposed framework on brain tumor segmentation challenge (BraTS) 2020 dataset consisting of 369 cases. We performed 5-fold cross validation on 200 datasets and hold-out test on remaining 169 cases. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our network design, we compared our method against the networks without retina U-Net, mutual enhancing strategy, and a recently published Cascaded U-Net architecture. Results of all four methods were compared to the ground truth for segmentation and localization accuracies. Our method yielded significantly (P < 0.01) better values of dice-similarity-coefficient, center-of-mass-distance, and volume difference compared to all three competing methods across all tumor labels on both validation and hold-out dataset. Overall quantitative and statistical results of this work demonstrate ability of our method to both accurately and automatically segment brain tumor subregions.

PMID:35299156 | DOI:10.1088/1361-6560/ac5ed8

J Environ Manage. 2022 Mar 14;311:114852. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.114852. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Aotearoa New Zealand is highly vulnerable to extratropical cyclones because of its unique location in the midlatitude south pacific region. This study empirically investigates the impact of the extratropical cyclones on individual income, combining the data from Statistics New Zealand’s Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) and the weather-related insurance claims data from the Earthquake Commission. Our sample covers the administrative longitudinal panel data of all the IRD registered individual taxpayers between 2010 and 2019. We estimate a set of panel regressions with individual and time-fixed effects to assess the impact of extratropical cyclones on the affected individual’s annual income. We find that income from salaries and wages is negatively affected by the cyclones across various specifications. Extratropical cyclones also negatively affect the total individual income from wages and salaries, benefit and compensation, and sole tradership. However, we have limited success in identifying individual characteristics influencing the affected people’s income level in our study.

PMID:35299135 | DOI:10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.114852