Search

Background: Children with allergic rhinitis (AR) have substantially more acute rhinosinusitis than children without AR. We evaluated whether intranasal corticosteroids (INCS), second-generation antihistamines (SGH), and/or intranasal antihistamines (INH) for AR affect acute rhinosinusitis in children with AR aged 2–18 years. Methods: By using the National Health Research Institutes Database 2005 of Taiwan, a cohort of patients with AR aged 2–18 years treated with AR medications between 2002 and 2018 was made, within which a nested case–control study was performed. Risk settings for acute rhinosinusitis cases matched controls for age, sex, and comorbidities. Current users of INCS, INH, and/or SGH were compared with remote and recent users of any AR medications and current users of INCS with and without SGH were compared with current users of SGH. Results: Current users of SGH and/or INCS had a higher risk of acute rhinosinusitis than remote users of AR drugs, and current users of SGH had a higher risk of acute rhinosinusitis than recent users; however, no difference in the risk of acute rhinosinusitis was found between current users of INCS and recent users of AR drugs. Current users of INCS with and without SGH had a lower risk of acute rhinosinusitis than current users of SGH alone. Conclusions: Treatment of INCS with and without SGH diminished the risk of acute rhinosinusitis compared with treatment using SGH alone. Adequate INCS treatment for patients with AR is important to reduce the incidence of acute rhinosinusitis.

Summary: Thrombocytopenia is the hallmark finding in dengue virus (DENV) infection. Prothymosin α (ProT) has both intracellular and extracellular functions involved in cell cycle progression, cell differentiation, gene regulation, oxidative stress response, and immunomodulation. In this study, we found that ProT levels were elevated in dengue patient sera as well as DENV-infected megakaryoblasts and their culture supernatants. ProT transgenic mice had reduced platelet counts with prolonged bleeding times. Upon treatment with DENV plus anti-CD41 antibody, they exhibited severe skin hemorrhage. Furthermore, overexpression of ProT suppressed megakaryocyte differentiation. Infection with DENV inhibited miR-126 expression, upregulated DNA (cytosine-5)-methyltransferase 1 (DNMT1), downregulated GATA-1, and increased ProT expression. Upregulation of ProT led to Nrf2 activation and reduced reactive oxygen species production, thereby suppressing megakaryopoiesis. We report the pathophysiological role of ProT in DENV infection and propose an involvement of the miR-126-DNMT1-GATA-1-ProT-Nrf2 signaling axis in DENV-induced thrombocytopenia.

The Taiwan Cancer Registry (TCR) is a nationwide population-based registry that collects the data of patients with newly diagnosed cancer from hospitals with ≥50 beds. TCR data are high quality in terms of completeness and timeliness. However, accuracy is also a crucial quality indicator. This study evaluated the accuracy rates of selected 55 major items in the long-form TCR data between 2014 and 2016 with 700 reported cases randomly selected from 25 long-form-reporting hospitals. We calculated the accuracy rates of the reported data by employing a reabstracted chart review. Among the 55 items, the accuracy rates of 38 (69%) were at least 95%, those of 10 (18%) were between 90% and 95%, those of 5 (9%) were between 85% and 90%, and the remaining 2 (4%) were between 80% and 85%. This demonstrates a high degree of accuracy in the TCR long-form data.

Background/Purpose: This study aims at investigating the epidemiological profile of chronic hepatitis C (CHC) regarding hepatitis C virus (HCV) genotype in Taiwan. Methods: A total of 29,087 CHC patients with advanced fibrosis who received direct-acting antivirals (DAAs) therapy under Taiwan's National Health Insurance (NHI) during 2017–2018 were recruited. The HCV genotype distribution and its association with patients' demographic factors including age, gender, and geographical areas were examined. Results: The most common genotypes were 1b (59.5%) and 2 (30.1%) with characteristics of older age (mean ± standard deviation (SD): 66.5 ± 10.7 years and 67.3 ± 10.9 years) and female gender predominant (57.1% and 59.4%), which were associated with iatrogenic infection decades ago. Most of patients with genotype 1a (5.9%) and 6 (3.7%) infection were relatively younger (59.2 ± 12.0 years and 60.0 ± 13.8 years) and male gender predominant (59.1% and 61.1%), except Liujia and Liuying districts in southern Taiwan. The youngest group (53.2 ± 11.8 years) and most male gender predominant (74.3%) was genotype 3 (0.37%). These genotypes with characteristics of being younger and male gender predominant were highly related to injection drug use in recent years. The number of genotype 4 patients were extremely rare (n = 25) and efficacy of genotype-4-specific-DAA was significantly poorer than non-genotype-4-specific DAA (P value = 0.0411). Conclusion: The significant differences in demographic characteristics among CHC patients with different HCV genotypes found in this study suggest HCV genotype was highly associated with transmission pattern and may be used as a reference for HCV control.

Background: Streptococcus agalactiae, or group B Streptococcus (GBS), remains to be one of the leading pathogens causing invasive infections in infants. Methods: The clinical GBS isolates from sterile sites of patients younger than 18 years old were collected from October 1998 to December 2014 in two hospitals in Taiwan. Medical records were retrospectively reviewed. Every isolate was serotyped with a multiplex PCR assay. Multilocus sequence typing (MLST) was performed in representative isolates of different serotypes. A total of 205 GBS isolates were collected from 181 patients with 182 infection episodes. Results: Serotype Ia was the most common in patients less than 72 h old, whereas III the most common in patients older than 72 h. In early-onset disease (0–6 days), Ia and III each caused 27.5% of the infection, followed by Ib (14.5%). In late-onset disease (7–89 days), serotype III predominated (75.3%), followed by Ia (10.1%) and Ib (6.8%). Thirty-one episodes (17%) were complicated with culture-confirmed meningitis. We compared serotype Ia and III patients, and found that serotype Ia patients were significantly younger (median age, 3 days), had more perinatal maternal fever and higher mortality. ST17 and ST19 were exclusively found in serotype III, while ST23 and ST24 comprised of 85% of serotype Ia. Conclusion: In Taiwan, serotypes Ia and III are the most common cause for early-onset and late-onset neonatal GBS infections, respectively. Some differences in the clinical features of invasive GBS infections caused by serotype Ia and III were observed. Keywords: Streptococcus agalactiae, GBS, Neonatal sepsis, serotype, MLST, GBS meningitis

Evidence is lacking regarding whether insomnia increases the risk of infectious disease. Accordingly, the present study examined the risk of pneumonia in patients with insomnia.This study was a population-based retrospective cohort study on a cohort of 8061 patients with insomnia and a control cohort of 16,112 patients (matched by age, sex, and year of diagnosis) from the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database for the 2000–2010 period.Overall incidence of pneumonia was 50.6 per 1000 person-years in the insomnia cohort, which was significantly higher than that in the control cohort (30.9 per 1000 person-years). Overall, the insomnia cohort exhibited a higher risk of pneumonia (HR = 2.43; CI, 2.24–2.62). By age group, the risk of pneumonia was significantly higher in the insomnia cohort for those aged ≤40 years (HR = 3.23, CI: 1.38–7.57), 41–65 years (HR = 2.62, CI: 2.07–3.32), and >65 years (CI: 2.21–2.61).Compared with the controls, the insomnia cohort exhibited a higher risk of pneumonia, particularly in young adults. Keywords: Insomnia, Pneumonia, Retrospective cohort study, Infectious disease

Research on the association between sleep duration and type 2 diabetes in an adult community population has been relatively scarce. The objective of this study was to analyze the association between sleep duration and the risk of diabetes in Taiwanese adults. Methods: Secondary data analysis was based on the database of Nutrition and Health Survey in Taiwan between 2005 and 2008. A stratified three-staged probability sampling method was used to create a cross-sectional research design and 1533 participants (733 men, 800 women, between 19 years and 64 years of age) were selected in this study. Logistic regression models were conducted to estimate the effect of sleep duration for type 2 diabetes patients. Results: The average sleep duration for all participants in this study was 7.2 ± 1.4 hours, with 35.1% of the participants having a sleep duration less than 7 hours. After controlling related confounders, such as age, sex, body mass index, abdominal circumference, total cholesterol levels, sleep disturbances, and hypertension, the risk of having diabetes for participants with ≤ 5 hours sleep was 2.04-fold (95% confidence interval, 1.05–3.95) higher than for participants with 7–8.9 hours of sleep. In particular, the risk of having diabetes for young adults (between 19 years and 44 years of age) with ≤5 hours of sleep was 5.24-fold (95% confidence interval, 1.17–23.47) higher than for young adults who reported 7–8.9 hours of sleep. Conclusion: Our results show that a short sleep duration was associated with a higher prevalence of diabetes and this correlation was particularly strong in young adults.