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Objective. Endothelial cell-specific molecule 1 (ESM1) has been implicated as an oncogene in several types of cancer. However, the potential role of ESM1 in esophageal carcinogenesis (ESCA)/esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is still unclear. Methods. The expression, function, and survival data of ESM1 were observed using a bioinformatics approach. Subsequently, the expression level of ESM1 in surgical esophageal tumors and adjacent normal tissues was detected by qRT–PCR and immunofluorescence. We further revealed protein expression by immunohistochemistry (IHC), which is related to the prognosis of patients with ESCC using survival analysis. In vitro, knockdown of ESM1 in KYSE150 and KYSE510 cell lines, colony formation assays, wound healing assays, and Transwell assays were performed. Results. ESM1 is significantly elevated in 12 of 20 types of human cancer. ESM1 is highly expressed in tumor tissue compared with adjacent normal tissue and was identified as a hub gene in ESCA. Clinical outcome endpoints of overall survival (OS), progression-free interval (PFI), and disease-specific survival (DSS) curves showed that patients whose ESM1 expression was high had a lower clinical survival rate. The ESM1 high-expression group has a certain correlation with clinical stage and grade. The IHC of ESM1 further demonstrated that the higher the expression was, the worse the N classification and pTNM stage in patients with ESCC, which had a distinctly poorer overall 5-year survival rate. Univariate analysis showed that age, N classification, pTNM stage, and ESM1 expression were all prognostic factors, although multivariate Cox regression analysis showed that only pTNM stage was an independent prognostic factor. In vitro, silencing ESM1 suppressed the proliferation, migration, and invasion of KYSE150 and KYSE510 cells. Conclusions. ESM1 is a hub gene in the initiation and progression of ESCA/ESCC that promotes the proliferation, migration, and invasion of esophageal cancer cells and may be a promising therapeutic target and prognostic indicator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective. Nasopharyngeal carcinoma is particularly prevalent in Guangdong and Guangxi (southern China); the economic burden of nasopharyngeal cancer patients is heavy in China. This study is aimed at retrospectively analyzing the basic features and economic burden of newly diagnosed nasopharyngeal carcinoma patients admitted to the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University and at providing a scientific basis for nasopharyngeal carcinoma prevention and control strategies. Methods. The data of 3,727 nasopharyngeal carcinoma inpatients diagnosed from January 2012 to December 2020 were extracted from the Guangxi Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Healthcare Big Data Management Information Platform. Basic demographic characteristics, duration of hospital stay, and hospitalization cost of nasopharyngeal carcinoma patients were collected and analyzed statistically. Results. The incidence period of nasopharyngeal carcinoma was primarily from 30 to 69 years of age, with the 40–49-year age group comprising the largest proportion of nasopharyngeal carcinoma patients, accounting for 34.18% of the patients with newly diagnosed nasopharyngeal carcinoma in the hospital. The male-to-female ratio was 2.87 : 1. There were 2,223 cases from rural areas, 2,153 from the Han ethnic group, and 1,460 from the Zhuang ethnic group, accounting for 59.65%, 55.77%, and 39.17% of the total number of cases, respectively. The average duration of hospitalization decreased whereas the average hospitalization cost increased annually. Multivariate analysis of hospitalization cost showed that the duration of hospital stay, rural/urban, and ethnicity was the main influencing factors: the longer the duration of hospital stay, the higher the hospitalization cost; patients from rural incurred lower costs than from urban; ethnic Zhuang patients incurred significantly lower costs than patients from other ethnicities. Conclusion. Early diagnosis and treatment should be actively carried out to reduce the incidence of nasopharyngeal carcinoma, especially for rural, ethnic Zhuang, and males in the 40–49-year age group patients. The future research on nasopharyngeal carcinoma will focus on exploring the pathogenesis of nasopharyngeal carcinoma, improving the screening system, and reducing the burden on patients, in order to further improve the survival rate and quality of life of patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The microarray cancer data obtained by DNA microarray technology play an important role for cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. However, predicting the different types of tumors is a challenging task since the sample size in microarray data is often small but the dimensionality is very high. Gene selection, which is an effective means, is aimed at mitigating the curse of dimensionality problem and can boost the classification accuracy of microarray data. However, many of previous gene selection methods focus on model design, but neglect the correlation between different genes. In this paper, we introduce a novel unsupervised gene selection method by taking the gene correlation into consideration, named gene correlation guided gene selection (G3CS). Specifically, we calculate the covariance of different gene dimension pairs and embed it into our unsupervised gene selection model to regularize the gene selection coefficient matrix. In such a manner, redundant genes can be effectively excluded. In addition, we utilize a matrix factorization term to exploit the cluster structure of original microarray data to assist the learning process. We design an iterative updating algorithm with convergence guarantee to solve the resultant optimization problem. Experimental results on six publicly available microarray datasets are conducted to validate the efficacy of our proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective. To establish and validate a nomogram to predict the overall survival (OS) and cancer-specific survival (CSS) in patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) receiving radiotherapy by integrating multiple independent prognostic factors. Materials and Methods. Data from 5663 patients with NPC who received definite radiotherapy between 2004 and 2018 were included and divided into training and validation cohorts. Univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses were performed to determine the independent prognostic factors of patients with NPC after radiotherapy. Thereafter, the predictive accuracy of the nomogram model was evaluated. Results. Age, race, marital status, pathological type, tumor size, T stage, N stage, M stage, American Joint Committee on Cancer stage, and chemotherapy were independent factors affecting the prognosis of patients with NPC receiving radiotherapy. Nomograms with a concordance index of 0.726 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.675–0.777) and 0.732 (95% CI: 0.680–0.785) were able to predict OS and CSS, respectively. The area under the curve showed excellent predictive performance. Additionally, the calibration curve indicated that the predicted survival rate was consistent with the actual survival rate, and the decision curve indicated its clinical value. The established risk stratification system was able to accurately stratify patients receiving radiotherapy for NPC into three risk subgroups with significant differences in prognosis (P < 0.05). Conclusions. The constructed nomogram had good prognostic performance and could be used as an effective tool to evaluate the prognosis of patients with NPC after radiotherapy. This nomogram could be further used to guide clinical decisions and personalized treatment plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human adipose-derived stem cells (ADSCs) have become a promising therapeutic approach against skin aging. Recent studies confirm that exosomes partially mediate the therapeutic effect of stem cells. This study successfully isolated exosomes from the ADSC culture medium and discovered that ADSC-derived exosomes (ADSC-Exos) could alleviate human dermal fibroblast (HDF) senescence and stimulate HDF migration. Moreover, ADSC-Exos increased the type I collagen expression level and reduced the reactive oxygen species (ROS) and senescence-associated β-galactosidase (SA-β-Gal) activity in HDFs. In addition, we demonstrated that ADSC-Exos significantly inhibited senescence-related protein expression levels of p53, p21, and p16. In conclusion, our results have revealed the antisenescence effects of ADSC-Exos on HDFs and ADSC-Exos may be a novel cell-free therapeutic tool for antiaging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]