Tag: statistics

Skeletal Radiol. 2022 Sep 5. doi: 10.1007/s00256-022-04170-x. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: To compare the MRI findings between the localized- and diffuse-type tenosynovial giant cell tumors (TSGCTs) of digits with pathology correlation.

METHODS: Twenty-eight patients with newly diagnosed TSGCTs of digits (22 localized and 6 diffuse types) who underwent preoperative MRI and surgical excision were included from Jan. 2015 to September 2021. MRI findings regarding nodularity, margins, morphology of hypointensity with pathology correlation, and disease extent (bone erosion, articular involvement, muscle involvement, tendon destruction, and neurovascular encasement) were assessed.

RESULTS: Diffuse type was significantly larger (P = 0.006), more multinodular on both MRI and pathology (P = 0.038, both) with significant agreement, and infiltrative on both MRI and pathology (P < 0.001, both) with substantial agreement, and showed central granular on MRI and strong hemosiderin deposition on pathology (P = 0.022 and P = 0.021) with moderate agreement than localized type. Localized type showed significantly more frequent peripheral capsules on both MRI and pathology (P < 0.001, both) with moderate agreement than diffuse type. However, the septum on both MRI and pathology showed no statistically significant difference between the two groups (P = 0.529 and P = 0.372) without significant agreement. The disease extent was more severe in the diffuse type than the localized type regarding articular involvement (P < 0.001), muscle involvement (P < 0.001), and tendon destruction (P = 0.010). No statistically significant differences were found between the two groups regarding bone erosion (P = 0.196) or neurovascular bundle encasement (P = 0.165).

CONCLUSIONS: Diffuse-type TSGCTs of digits presented as locally aggressive lesions with larger, multinodular, infiltrative masses exhibiting stronger hemosiderin deposition and more severe disease extents of articular, muscle, and tendon involvement than the localized type.

PMID:36063189 | DOI:10.1007/s00256-022-04170-x

Eval Rev. 2022 Sep 5:193841X221118454. doi: 10.1177/0193841X221118454. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Methods for estimating causal impact aim to either remove or reduce bias. This study estimates the degree of bias reduction obtained from regression adjustment and propensity score methods when only a weak set of predictors are available. The study uses an experimental test of providing emergency financial assistance to participants in a job training program to estimate an experimental benchmark and compares it to nonexperimental estimates of the impact of receiving assistance. When estimating the impact of receiving assistance, those who received it constitute the treatment group. The study explores two different comparison groups: those who could have (because they were assigned to the experimental treatment group) but did not receive emergency assistance; and those who could not receive emergency assistance because they were randomly assigned to the experimental control group. It uses these groups to estimate impacts by applying three estimation strategies: unadjusted mean comparison, regression adjustment, and inverse propensity weighting. It then compares these estimates to the experimental benchmark using statistical tests recommended by the within-study comparison literature. The nonexperimental approaches to addressing selection bias suggest large positive impacts. These are statistically different from the experimental benchmark, which shows that receipt of emergency assistance does not improve educational progress. Further, over 90% of the bias from a simple comparison of means remains. Unless a stronger set of predictors are available, future evaluations of such interventions should be wary of relying on these methods for either unbiased estimation of impacts or bias reduction.

PMID:36063140 | DOI:10.1177/0193841X221118454

J Int Adv Otol. 2022 Sep;18(5):388-391. doi: 10.5152/iao.2022.21496.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: A comparative study of 1.5T and 3.0T magnetic resonance imaging inner ear gadolinium enhancement was carried out to further explore the practicality and universality of 1.5T magnetic resonance imaging in the diagnosis of inner ear labyrinthine hydrops positive imaging.

METHODS: This dual case-control study was conducted on 25 patients with Meniere’s disease (experimental group), diagnosed by People’s Hospital of Ordos Dongsheng District between April 2017 and April 2019 and 51 patients with Meniere’s disease (control group), diagnosed by People’s Hospital Affiliated to Fujian University of Traditional Chinese Medicine between March 2010 and February 2011 and published on Chinese Medical Journal in 2011. Both groups were injected with gadolinium diluent into bilateral tympanic chambers through the tympanic membrane, and 3 dimensional-Fluid Attenuated Inversion Recovery (FLAIR) magnetic resonance imaging scanning of the inner ear was performed 24 hours later. The results of the 2 groups were observed, calculated, and statistically processed.

RESULTS: The positive rate of membranous labyrinthine hydrops was 96% (24/25) in the experimental group and 96.1% (49/51) in the control group. The results are very close.

CONCLUSION: In clinical diagnoses of Meniere’s disease, 1.5T magnetic resonance imaging and 3.0T magnetic resonance imaging have the same value and significance.

PMID:36063094 | DOI:10.5152/iao.2022.21496

Disabil Rehabil. 2022 Sep 5:1-7. doi: 10.1080/09638288.2022.2117862. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

PURPOSE: It is important to understand how consumers (person with stroke/family member/carer) and health workers perceive stroke care services.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: Consumers and health workers from across New Zealand were surveyed on perceptions of stroke care, access barriers, and views on service centralisation. Quantitative data were summarised using descriptive statistics whilst thematic analysis was used for free-text answers.

RESULTS: Of 149 consumers and 79 health workers invited to complete a survey, 53 consumers (36.5%) and 41 health workers (51.8%) responded. Overall, 40/46 (87%) consumers rated stroke care as ‘good/excellent’ compared to 24/41 (58.6%) health workers. Approximately 72% of consumers preferred to transfer to a specialised hospital. We identified three major themes related to perceptions of stroke care: 1) ‘variability in care by stage of treatment’; 2) ‘impact of communication by health workers on care experience’; and 3) ‘inadequate post-acute services for younger patients’. Four access barrier themes were identified: 1) ‘geographic inequities’; 2) ‘knowing what is available’; 3) ‘knowledge about stroke and available services’; and 4) ‘healthcare system factors’.

CONCLUSIONS: Perceptions of stroke care differed between consumers and health workers, highlighting the importance of involving both in service co-design. Improving communication, post-hospital follow-up, and geographic equity are key areas for improvement.Implications for rehabilitationProvision of detailed information on stroke recovery and available services in the community is recommended.Improvements in the delivery of post-hospital stroke care are required to optimise stroke care, with options including routine phone follow up appointments and wider development of early supported discharge services.Stroke rehabilitation services should continue to be delivered ‘close to home’ to allow community integration.Telehealth is a likely enabler to allow specialist urban clinicians to support non-urban clinicians, as well as increasing the availability and access of community rehabilitation.

PMID:36063065 | DOI:10.1080/09638288.2022.2117862

Bioinformatics. 2022 Sep 5:btac603. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btac603. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

MOTIVATION: Current advances in omics technologies are paving the diagnosis of rare diseases proposing as a complementary assay to identify the responsible gene. The use of transcriptomic data to identify aberrant gene expression (AGE) have demonstrated to yield potential pathogenic events. However popular approaches for AGE identification are limited by the use of statistical tests that imply the choice of arbitrary cut-off for significance assessment and the availability of several replicates not always possible in clinical contexts.

RESULTS: Hence we developed ABEILLE (ABerrant Expression Identification empLoying machine LEarning from sequencing data) a variational autoencoder (VAE) based method for the identification of AGEs from the analysis of RNA-seq data without the need of replicates or a control group. ABEILLE combines the use of a VAE, able to model any data without specific assumptions on their distribution, and a decision tree to classify genes as AGE or non-AGE. An anomaly score is associated to each gene in order to stratify AGE by severity of aberration. We tested ABEILLE on semi-synthetic and an experimental dataset demonstrating the importance of the flexibility of the VAE configuration to identify potential pathogenic candidates.

AVAILABILITY: ABEILLE source code is freely available at : https://github.com/UCA-MSI/ABEILLE.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

PMID:36063052 | DOI:10.1093/bioinformatics/btac603

Bioinformatics. 2022 Sep 5:btac601. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btac601. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

MOTIVATION: RNA epigenetics is an emerging field to study the post-transcriptional gene regulation. The dynamics of RNA epigenetic modification have been reported to associate with many human diseases. Recently developed high-throughput technology named Methylated RNA Immunoprecipitation Sequencing (MeRIP-seq) enables the transcriptome-wide profiling of N6-methyladenosine (m6A) modification and comparison of RNA epigenetic modifications. There are a few computational methods for the comparison of mRNA modifications under different conditions but they all suffer from serious limitations.

RESULTS: In this work, we develop a novel statistical method to detect differentially methylated mRNA regions from MeRIP-seq data. We model the sequence count data by a hierarchical negative binomial model that accounts for various sources of variations, and derive parameter estimation and statistical testing procedures for flexible statistical inferences under general experimental designs. Extensive benchmark evaluations in simulation and real data analyses demonstrate that our method is more accurate, robust, and flexible compared to existing methods.

AVAILABILITY: Our method TRESS is implemented as an R/Bioconductor package and is available at https://bioconductor.org/packages/devel/TRESS.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

PMID:36063045 | DOI:10.1093/bioinformatics/btac601

Rheumatology (Oxford). 2022 Sep 5:keac470. doi: 10.1093/rheumatology/keac470. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: Parotid swelling (PSW) is a major predictor of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) in primary Sjögren’s syndrome (pSS). However, since detailed information on the time of onset and duration of PSW is scarce, this was investigated to verify whether it may lead to further improved prediction. NHL localisation was concomitantly studied to evaluate the role of the parotid gland microenvironment in pSS-related lymphomagenesis.

METHODS: A multicentre study was conducted among patients with pSS who developed B cell NHL during follow-up and matched controls that did not develop NHL. The study focused on the history of salivary gland and lachrymal gland swelling, evaluated in detail at different times and for different durations, and on the localisation of NHL at onset.

RESULTS: PSW was significantly more frequent among the cases: at the time of first referred pSS symptoms before diagnosis, at diagnosis, and from pSS diagnosis to NHL. The duration of PSW was evaluated starting from pSS diagnosis, and the NHL risk increased from PSW of 2-12 months to > 12 months. NHL was prevalently localised in the parotid glands of the cases.

CONCLUSION: A more precise clinical recording of PSW can improve lymphoma prediction in pSS. PSW as a very early symptom is a predictor, and a longer duration of PSW is associated with a higher risk of NHL. Since lymphoma usually localises in the parotid glands, and not in the other salivary or lachrymal glands, the parotid microenvironment appears to be involved in the whole history of pSS and related lymphomagenesis.

PMID:36063040 | DOI:10.1093/rheumatology/keac470

Eur J Cardiothorac Surg. 2022 Sep 5:ezac441. doi: 10.1093/ejcts/ezac441. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: We investigated whether prophylactic preoperative cerebrospinal fluid drainage was effective in preventing spinal cord ischaemia during thoracic endovascular aortic repair for degenerative descending thoracic aortic aneurysm, excluding dissecting aneurysms.

METHODS: We retrospectively reviewed medical records of the patients who underwent thoracic endovascular aortic repair with proximal landing zones 3 and 4 for between 2009 and 2020.

RESULTS: Eighty-nine patients with preemptive cerebrospinal fluid drainage (68 men; median [range] age, 76.0 [71.0-81.0] years) and 115 patients without cerebrospinal fluid drainage (89 men; median [range] age, 77.0 [74.0-81.5] years) were included in this study. Among them, 59 from each group were matched based on propensity scores to regulate for differences in backgrounds. The incidence rate of spinal cord ischaemia was similar: 8/89 (9.0%) in the cerebrospinal fluid drainage group and 6/115 (5.2%) in the non-cerebrospinal fluid drainage group (p = 0.403). Shaggy aorta (odds ratio, 5.13; p = 0.004) and iliac artery access (odds ratio, 5.04; p = 0.005) were identified as positive predictors of spinal cord ischaemia. Other clinically important confounders included Adamkiewicz artery coverage (odds ratio, 2.53; p = 0.108) and extensive stent graft coverage (>8 vertebrae) (odds ratio, 1.41; p = 0.541) were not statistically significant. Propensity scores matching yielded similar incidence of spinal cord ischaemia: 4/59 (6.8%) in the cerebrospinal fluid drainage group and 3/59 (5.1%) in the non-cerebrospinal fluid drainage group (p = 0.697).

CONCLUSIONS: Aggressive use of prophylactic cerebrospinal fluid drainage was not supportive in patients without complex risks of spinal cord ischaemia.

PMID:36063039 | DOI:10.1093/ejcts/ezac441

J Matern Fetal Neonatal Med. 2022 Dec;35(23):4580-4589. doi: 10.1080/14767058.2020.1856809. Epub 2020 Dec 1.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Aimed to investigate in an animal model the efficacy of humic acid by showing its antioxidant and anti-apoptotic effect comparing with the histopathological and neurological outcomes for the hypoxic-ischemic brain injury.

METHODS: 28 Wistar-Albino rats who were on the 7th postnatal day and weighting between 9 and 19 g randomly divided into four groups with developed HIE model under the gas anesthesia. 20 mg/kg and 10 mg/kg intraperitoneal HA were given to Group I and II respectively. Saline was given to Group III and the sham group was Group IV. The brain tissues were stained with cresyl-violet histochemistry for grading neuronal cell injury and caspase immunohistochemistry.

RESULTS: The neuronal cell injury was statistically lower in all neuroanatomical lands in HA treatment groups. The degree of ischemia was significantly smaller in HA groups. Caspase-3 immunoreactivity was decreased in the HA groups compared with the saline group. When the groups were compared, there were no serious neuronal injury in Group I.

CONCLUSIONS: This is the first study which investigates the role of HA in HIE model. HA reduces apoptosis and neuronal injury in cerebral tissue of the rats. This findings suggest that HA may be viable protective agent against HIE.

PMID:36062519 | DOI:10.1080/14767058.2020.1856809

Electromagn Biol Med. 2022 Sep 5:1-13. doi: 10.1080/15368378.2022.2117187. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

This study aims to determine whether exposure to non-ionizing radiofrequency fields could induce an adaptive response (AR) in adult mice and to reveal potential molecular mechanisms triggered by RF-induced AR. The study was performed on 24 adult male Swiss-Albino mice. The average mass of the mice was 37 g. Four groups of adult mice, each consisting of 6, were formed. The radiofrequency group (R) and the adaptive response group (RB) were exposed to 900 MHz of global system for mobile communications (GSM) signal at 0.339 W/kg (1 g average specific absorption rate) 4 h/day for 7 days, while the control group (C) and the bleomycin group (B) were not exposed. 20 minutes after the last radiofrequency field (RF) exposure, the mice in the B and RB groups were injected intraperitoneal (ip) bleomycin (BLM), 37.5 mg/kg. All the animals were sacrificed 30 minutes after the BLM injection. Oxidative damage and antioxidant mechanism were subsequently investigated in the blood samples. Changes in the expression of the genes involved in DNA repair were detected in the liver tissue. TUNEL method was used to determine the apoptosis developed by DNA fragmentation in the liver tissue. The RB group, which produced an adaptive response, was compared with the control group. According to the results, the increase of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in the RB group may have played an important role in triggering the adaptive response and producing the required minimum stress level. Furthermore, tumor suppressor 53(p53), oxo guanine DNA glycosylase (OGG-1) levels responsible for DNA repair mechanism genes expression were increased in conjunction with the increase in ROS. The change in the poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase 1 (PARP-1) and glutathione peroxidase 1 (GPx-1) gene expression were not statistically significant. The antioxidant enzyme levels of superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), and total antioxidant capacity (TAC) were decreased in the group with adaptive response. According to the data obtained from terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase dUTP nick end labeling (TUNEL) analysis, apoptosis was decreased in the RB group due to the decrease in cell death, which might have resulted from an increase in gene expression responsible for DNA repair mechanisms. The results of our study show that exposure to RF radiation may create a protective reaction against the bleomycin. The minimal oxidative stress due to the RF exposure leads to an adaptive response in the genes that play a role in the DNA repair mechanism and enzymes, enabling the survival of the cell.

PMID:36062506 | DOI:10.1080/15368378.2022.2117187