Network-based genetic profiling reveals cellular pathway differences between follicular thyroid carcinoma and follicular thyroid adenoma

Molecular mechanisms underlying the pathogenesis and progression of malignant thyroid cancers, such as follicular thyroid carcinomas (FTCs), and how these differ from benign thyroid lesions, are poorly understood. In this study, we employed network-based integrative analyses of FTC and benign follicular thyroid adenoma (FTA) lesion transcriptomes to identify key genes and pathways that differ between them. We first analysed a microarray gene expression dataset (Gene Expression Omnibus GSE82208, n = 52) obtained from FTC and FTA tissues to identify differentially expressed genes (DEGs). Pathway analyses of these DEGs were then performed using Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) resources to identify potentially important pathways, and protein-protein interactions (PPIs) were examined to identify pathway hub genes. Our data analysis identified 598 DEGs, 133 genes with higher and 465 genes with lower expression in FTCs. We identified four significant pathways (one carbon pool by folate, p53 signalling, progesterone-mediated oocyte maturation signalling, and cell cycle pathways) connected to DEGs with high FTC expression; eight pathways were connected to DEGs with lower relative FTC expression. Ten GO groups were significantly connected with FTC-high expression DEGs and 80 with low-FTC expression DEGs. PPI analysis then identified 12 potential hub genes based on degree and betweenness centrality; namely, TOP2A, JUN, EGFR, CDK1, FOS, CDKN3, EZH2, TYMS, PBK, CDH1, UBE2C, and CCNB2. Moreover, transcription factors (TFs) were identified that may underlie gene expression differences observed between FTC and FTA, including FOXC1, GATA2, YY1, FOXL1, E2F1, NFIC, SRF, TFAP2A, HINFP, and CREB1. We also identified microRNA (miRNAs) that may also affect transcript levels of DEGs; these included hsa-mir-335-5p, -26b-5p, -124-3p, -16-5p, -192-5p, -1-3p, -17-5p, -92a-3p, -215-5p, and -20a-5p. Thus, our study identified DEGs, molecular pathways, TFs, and miRNAs that reflect molecular mechanisms that differ between FTC and benign FTA. Given the general similarities of these lesions and common tissue origin, some of these differences may reflect malignant progression potential, and include useful candidate biomarkers for FTC and identifying factors important for FTC pathogenesis

Chief financial officer demographic characteristics and fraudulent financial reporting in China

We investigate whether management's cognitions, values and perceptions are associated with fraud for 18 863 firm-years for Chinese listed firms from 2000 to 2014. Demographic characteristics of the chief financial officer (CFO) are used as proxies for management's cognitions, values and perceptions. We find that fraudulent financial reporting is higher when CFOs are younger, male, and have lower education backgrounds. An analysis of inflated earnings, fictitious assets, material omissions and other material misstatements provide similar results, with the exception that CFOs with higher education levels are associated with more inflated earnings

Mapping geographical inequalities in access to drinking water and sanitation facilities in low-income and middle-income countries, 2000-17

Background Universal access to safe drinking water and sanitation facilities is an essential human right, recognised in the Sustainable Development Goals as crucial for preventing disease and improving human wellbeing. Comprehensive, high-resolution estimates are important to inform progress towards achieving this goal. We aimed to produce high-resolution geospatial estimates of access to drinking water and sanitation facilities. Methods We used a Bayesian geostatistical model and data from 600 sources across more than 88 low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) to estimate access to drinking water and sanitation facilities on continuous continent-wide surfaces from 2000 to 2017, and aggregated results to policy-relevant administrative units. We estimated mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subcategories of facilities for drinking water (piped water on or off premises, other improved facilities, unimproved, and surface water) and sanitation facilities (septic or sewer sanitation, other improved, unimproved, and open defecation) with use of ordinal regression. We also estimated the number of diarrhoeal deaths in children younger than 5 years attributed to unsafe facilities and estimated deaths that were averted by increased access to safe facilities in 2017, and analysed geographical inequality in access within LMICs. Findings Across LMICs, access to both piped water and improved water overall increased between 2000 and 2017, with progress varying spatially. For piped water, the safest water facility type, access increased from 40.0% (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 39.4-40.7) to 50.3% (50.0-50.5), but was lowest in sub-Saharan Africa, where access to piped water was mostly concentrated in urban centres. Access to both sewer or septic sanitation and improved sanitation overall also increased across all LMICs during the study period. For sewer or septic sanitation, access was 46.3% (95% UI 46.1-46.5) in 2017, compared with 28.7% (28.5-29.0) in 2000. Although some units improved access to the safest drinking water or sanitation facilities since 2000, a large absolute number of people continued to not have access in several units with high access to such facilities (>80%) in 2017. More than 253 000 people did not have access to sewer or septic sanitation facilities in the city of Harare, Zimbabwe, despite 88.6% (95% UI 87.2-89.7) access overall. Many units were able to transition from the least safe facilities in 2000 to safe facilities by 2017; for units in which populations primarily practised open defecation in 2000, 686 (95% UI 664-711) of the 1830 (1797-1863) units transitioned to the use of improved sanitation. Geographical disparities in access to improved water across units decreased in 76.1% (95% UI 71.6-80.7) of countries from 2000 to 2017, and in 53.9% (50.6-59.6) of countries for access to improved sanitation, but remained evident subnationally in most countries in 2017. Interpretation Our estimates, combined with geospatial trends in diarrhoeal burden, identify where efforts to increase access to safe drinking water and sanitation facilities are most needed. By highlighting areas with successful approaches or in need of targeted interventions, our estimates can enable precision public health to effectively progress towards universal access to safe water and sanitation. Copyright (C) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.Peer reviewe

Eye Disorders in Bangladesh: A Hospital-based Descriptive Study

The incidence and treatment of common eye disorders in Bangladesh are poorly understood. This study aims to provide a comprehensive overview of this clinical challenge to better enable the design of appropriate healthcare strategies.  The incidence and treatment of common eye disorders in Bangladesh are poorly understood. This study aims to provide a comprehensive overview of this clinical challenge to better enable the design of appropriate healthcare strategies.  Different types of eye disorder data were collected from patients aged 1 to 96 years admitted for eye surgery from March 2016 to October 2016 (N = 2390) at the Bangladesh Eye Hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Patient age distribution and types of treatment received were analysed, and incidence rates calculated.  Patients (58% male) underwent a total of 43 different types of eye surgeries. Among the surgeries reported 32.8% were Avastin intravitreal injections, 25.5% were Phaco with IOL, 14.6% were retinal laser therapies, 7.5% were YAG Laser and 6.5% were VR surgery. It is notable that a higher number of people suffered in ocular, cataract and retinal disorder respectively among all the eye disorders. With increasing patient age, the number of eye disorder treatments increased and it reached to peak number in the age group 56-60 years, although numbers varied greatly across age groups.</jats:p

Levels and health risk assessment of heavy metals in dried fish consumed in Bangladesh

As a cheap source of high-quality protein, healthy fats and essential nutrients, dried fish is a common item in the daily diet of the Bangladesh populace. In this study, ten types of widely consumed dried fish (H. neherius, T. lepturu, P.chinensis, P. affinis, A. mola, P. microdon, I. megaloptera, C. dussumieri, L. calcarifer, and G. chapra) were analyzed for Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Cu, Zn, Se, Rb, Hg, Pb, Ni and As by using an Energy Dispersive X-ray Fluorescence (EDXRF) technique. The concentration of the studied metals was found in the order Fe > Zn > Hg > Cu > Se > Cr > Mn > Co > Rb > Pb, while As and Ni were below the limit of detection. All fish species showed moderate to high pollution, where the species H. Neherius and P. Chinensis are the most and least polluted ones, respectively. The probable source of contamination is the leaching from the drying pans into the fish samples, atmospheric deposition, anthropogenic contamination, etc. of the water body where these fish were harvested. The calculated hazard index for the general population was below the maximum limiting value (i.e., < 1) except for Hg to children. The carcinogenic risk showed values lower than the acceptable limit for cancer risks (10–6 to 10–4). Periodic monitoring of trace metals in the aquatic organisms along with fish is recommended to avoid any unexpected health hazards caused by the toxic heavy metals via fish consumption.Full Tex

An extractive text summarization technique for Bengali document(s) using K-means clustering algorithm

Text summarization, a field of data mining, is very important for developing various real-life applications. Many techniques have been developed for summarizing English text(s). But, a few attempts have been made for Bengali text because of its some multifaceted structure. This paper presents a method for text summarization which extracts important sentences from a single or multiple Bengali documents. The input document(s) should be pre-processed by tokenization, stemming operation etc. Then, word score is calculated by Term-Frequency/Inverse Document Frequency (TF/IDF) and sentence score is determined by summing up its constituent words' scores with its position. Cue and skeleton words have also been considered to calculate the sentence score. For single or multiple documents, K-means clustering algorithm has been applied to produce the final summary. The experimental result shows satisfactory outputs in comparison to the existing approaches possessing linear run time complexity

Genetic Links Between Common Lung Diseases and Lung Cancer Progression: Bioinformatics and Machine Learning Insights

Lung cancer (LC) is one of the most frequently diagnosed cancers and remains the leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, representing a significant global health challenge. While numerous common lung diseases (CLDs) are implicated in LC development, the underlying causes of LC originating from CLDs remain inadequately elucidated. A thorough exploration of LC's progression from CLDs is essential; our approach integrated bioinformatics and machine learning, utilizing data from GEO and TCGA databases. We began by identifying differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in LC and CLDs, and our gene-disease network revealed for the first time shared DEGs (LC shares significant genes with TB (36), asthma (10), pneumonia (17), COPD (18), and Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) (78)), providing insights into potential connections of LC with CLDs. This analysis not only broadened our understanding of their associations but also identified significant pathways and hub proteins (SPTBN1, KCNA4, SCN7A, KCNQ3, GRIA1, and SDC1) through a protein-protein interaction network (PPI). Furthermore, RNA-seq and clinical data were obtained from the cBioPortal portal for shared DEGs of LC and CLDs, assessing their impact on LC patient survival. Integrated mRNA-Seq and clinical data were analyzed via univariate and multivariate Cox Proportional Hazard models to elucidate the influence of significant genes on survival. Furthermore, we developed and deployed a predictive model leveraging the identified hub genes, which demonstrated high accuracy in predicting LC progression. The identified biomarkers and pathways hold promise for further translational research and potential therapeutic targets, advancing understanding of LC development from CLDs. Additionally, co-expression networks among common genes were explored using the Weighted Gene Co-expression Network Analysis (WGCNA). Finally, the hub genes were validated using the Human Protein Atlas (HPA) database and evaluated through various classification algorithms to ascertain their predictive power and diagnostic potential. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2025-09-02-021 Full Text: PD