Search

Background The epidemiology of Functional abdominal bloating (FAB) and its impact on health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in Chinese people remains unclear. Methods Randomised, stratified, multi-stage sampling methodology was used to select a representative sample of the general population from five cities in China (n = 16,078). All respondents completed the modified Rome II questionnaire; 20% were asked to complete the 36-item Short Form (SF-36). The associated factors of FAB were analyzed. The effects of FAB on HRQoL were estimated with gender stratification using propensity score techniques in 20% subsample. Results Overall, 643 individuals (4.00%) had FAB and it was more prevalent in males than in females (4.87% vs. 3.04%, P

It has been reported that dense intratumoral infiltration of Foxp3 (+)Tregs (Tregs) was an independent factor for poor prognosis of breast cancer (BC) patients. However, the cytokines activating the Treg infiltration are not known. This study was undertaken to evaluate the role of CCL22 and TGF-β1 in this cascade and their prognostic significance for BC patients. 417 cases of invasive breast cancer were selected from the prior study cohort and the expressions of CCL22 and TGF-β1 were assessed by immunohistochemistry. It was identified that tumor secretion of CCL22 was positively correlated with the intratumoral Treg infiltration (P

Noise exposure at low levels or low doses can damage hair cell afferent ribbon synapses without causing permanent threshold shifts. In contrast to reports in the mouse cochleae, initial damage to ribbon synapses in the cochleae of guinea pigs is largely repairable. In the present study, we further investigated the repair process in ribbon synapses in guinea pigs after similar noise exposure. In the control samples, a small portion of afferent synapses lacked synaptic ribbons, suggesting the co-existence of conventional no-ribbon and ribbon synapses. The loss and recovery of hair cell ribbons and post-synaptic densities (PSDs) occurred in parallel, but the recovery was not complete, resulting in a permanent loss of less than 10% synapses. During the repair process, ribbons were temporally separated from the PSDs. A plastic interaction between ribbons and postsynaptic terminals may be involved in the reestablishment of synaptic contact between ribbons and PSDs, as shown by location changes in both structures. Synapse repair was associated with a breakdown in temporal processing, as reflected by poorer responses in the compound action potential (CAP) of auditory nerves to time-stress signals. Thus, deterioration in temporal processing originated from the cochlea. This deterioration developed with the recovery in hearing threshold and ribbon synapse counts, suggesting that the repaired synapses had deficits in temporal processing.

Background Taxanes have been extensively used as adjuvant chemotherapy for the treatment of early or operable breast cancer, particularly in high risk, node-negative breast cancer. Previous studies, however, have reported inconsistent findings regarding their clinical efficacy and safety. We investigated disease-free survival (DFS), overall survival (OS), and drug-related toxicities of taxanes by a systematic review and meta-analysis. Methodology and Principal Findings We systematically searched PubMed, EMBASE, the Cochrane Center Register of Controlled Trials, proceedings of major meetings, and reference lists of articles for studies conducted between January 1980 and April 2011. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) comparing chemotherapy with and without taxanes in the treatment of patients with early-stage or operable breast cancer were eligible for inclusion in our analysis. The primary endpoint was DFS. Nineteen RCTs including 30698 patients were identified, including 8426 recurrence events and 3803 deaths. Taxanes administration yielded a 17% reduction of hazard ratio (HR) for DFS (HR = 0.83, 95% CI 0.79–0.88, p

Background Knowledge of drug safety in the pediatric population of China is limited. This study was designed to evaluate ADRs in children reported to the spontaneous reporting system (SRS) of Shanghai in 2009. Methodology and Principal Findings Crude ADR reports submitted to Shanghai SRS in 2009 for individuals aged from birth to 17 years (including 17 years) were included. Data were analyzed with respect to age, gender, category of ADR (System Organ Class [SOC]), the severity of reports and type of reporter. Results A male overrepresentation was observed regarding the total number of reports. The most frequently reported group of drugs were vaccines (42.15%). Skin rash and fever were the commonest symptoms reported in the total pediatric dataset. The proportion of children that suffered from a serious ADR was 2.16% and that for drug related deaths was 0.34%. And we found that the multiple drug exposure experienced a high proportion of serious ADRs compared with the single drug use (χ2 = 15.99, P

Background The epidemiology of functional diarrhea and its impacts on Chinese remain unclear, and there are no data on the comparative epidemiology of functional diarrhea and diarrhea-predominant irritable bowel syndrome (IBS-D). This study was to explore the epidemiology of functional diarrhea and its impacts, and to identify its distinction from IBS-D. Methods and Findings A cross-sectional survey was conducted in 16078 respondents, who were interviewed under a randomized stratified multi-stage sampling design in five cities of China. All respondents completed the modified Rome II questionnaire, and the 36-item Short Form health survey (SF-36) was used for assessing health-related quality of life in 20% of the sample. Overall, 248 respondents (1.54%) had functional diarrhea and 277 (1.72%) had IBS-D. Functional diarrhea was positively associated with increasing age and body mass index (trend test P

Background The detection of signals of adverse drug events (ADEs) has increased because of the use of data mining algorithms in spontaneous reporting systems (SRSs). However, different data mining algorithms have different traits and conditions for application. The objective of our study was to explore the application of association rule (AR) mining in ADE signal detection and to compare its performance with that of other algorithms. Methodology/Principal Findings Monte Carlo simulation was applied to generate drug-ADE reports randomly according to the characteristics of SRS datasets. Thousand simulated datasets were mined by AR and other algorithms. On average, 108,337 reports were generated by the Monte Carlo simulation. Based on the predefined criterion that 10% of the drug-ADE combinations were true signals, with RR equaling to 10, 4.9, 1.5, and 1.2, AR detected, on average, 284 suspected associations with a minimum support of 3 and a minimum lift of 1.2. The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve of the AR was 0.788, which was equivalent to that shown for other algorithms. Additionally, AR was applied to reports submitted to the Shanghai SRS in 2009. Five hundred seventy combinations were detected using AR from 24,297 SRS reports, and they were compared with recognized ADEs identified by clinical experts and various other sources. Conclusions/Significance AR appears to be an effective method for ADE signal detection, both in simulated and real SRS datasets. The limitations of this method exposed in our study, i.e., a non-uniform thresholds setting and redundant rules, require further research.