Lung cancer in Chinese women: Evidence for an interaction between tobacco smoking and exposure to inhalants in the indoor environment

10.1289/ehp.0901587Environmental Health Perspectives11891257-126

Histopathology and biochemistry analysis of the interaction between sunitinib and paracetamol in mice

Background Sunitinib, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor to treat GIST and mRCC may interact with paracetamol as both undergo P450 mediated biotransformation and P-glycoprotein transport. This study evaluates the effects of sunitinib-paracetamol coadministration on liver and renal function biomarkers and liver, kidney, brain, heart and spleen histopathology. ICR male mice (n = 6 per group/dose) were administered saline (group-A) or paracetamol 500 mg/kg IP (group-B), or sunitinib at 25, 50, 80, 100, 140 mg/kg PO (group-C) or coadministered sunitinib at 25, 50, 80, 100, 140 mg/kg PO and paracetamol IP at fixed dose 500 mg/kg (group-D). Paracetamol was administered 15 min before sunitinib. Mice were sacrificed 4 h post sunitinib administration. Results Group-A serum ALT and AST levels were 14.29 ± 2.31 U/L and 160.37 ± 24.74 U/L respectively and increased to 249.6 ± 222.7 U/L and 377.1 ± 173.6 U/L respectively in group-B; group-C ALT and AST ranged 36.75-75.02 U/L and 204.4-290.3 U/L respectively. After paracetamol coadministration with low sunitinib doses (group-D), ALT and AST concentrations ranged 182.79-221.03 U/L and 259.7-264.4 U/L respectively, lower than group-B. Paracetamol coadministration with high sunitinib doses showed higher ALT and AST values (range 269.6-349.2 U/L and 430.2-540.3 U/L respectively), p 0.05). Mild cardiotoxicity occurred in groups B, C and D. Brain vascular congestion occurred at high doses of sunitinib administered alone or with paracetamol. Hepatic and renal biomarkers correlated with histopathology signs. Conclusions Paracetamol and sunitinib coadministration may lead to dose dependent outcomes exhibiting mild hepatoprotective effect or increased hepatotoxicity. Sunitinib at high doses show renal, cardiac and brain toxicity. Liver and renal function monitoring is recommended.FarmaciaMedicin

Predicting Factors that Affect East Asian Students’ Reading Proficiency in PISA

Teachers, schools, and parents contribute to equipping students with essential knowledge and skills during their education years. When students are approaching the end of their education, they are randomly selected to participate in Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) to assess their reading proficiency. Existing work on analyzing PISA achievement results concentrates solely on identifying factors related to Parent or in combination with Student. Limited work has been proposed on how factors related to Teacher and School affect the students’ reading proficiency in PISA. This study focuses on identifying the factors related to Teacher and/or School that affect East Asian students’ reading proficiency in PISA. The PISA achievement results from East Asian students are chosen as the domain study because they are consistently the top performers in PISA in the past decade. Decision Tree (DT), Naïve Bayes (NB), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Random Forest (RF) are compared. Hamming score is used as the evaluation metric. The results indicate that RF produces the best predictive models with highest Hamming score of 0.8427. Based on the findings, School-related factors such as the number of school’s disciplinary cases, size of the school, the availability of computers with Internet facilities, the quality and educational qualifications of teachers have higher impact on the PISA achievement results. The identified factors can be used as a reference in assessing the current school’s teaching, learning environment, and organizing extra activities as part of intervention programs to cultivate reading habits and enhance reading abilities among students

Developmental validation of Oxford Nanopore Technology MinION sequence data and the NGSpeciesID bioinformatic pipeline for forensic genetic species identification

Species identification of non-human biological evidence through DNA nucleotide sequencing is routinely used for forensic genetic analysis to support law enforcement. The gold standard for forensic genetics is conventional Sanger sequencing; however, this is gradually being replaced by high-throughput sequencing (HTS) approaches which can generate millions of individual reads in a single experiment. HTS sequencing, which now dominates molecular biology research, has already been demonstrated for use in a number of forensic genetic analysis applications, including species identification. However, the generation of HTS data to date requires expensive equipment and is cost-effective only when large numbers of samples are analysed simultaneously. The Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) MinION™ is an affordable and small footprint DNA sequencing device with the potential to quickly deliver reliable and cost effective data. However, there has been no formal validation of forensic species identification using high-throughput (deep read) sequence data from the MinION making it currently impractical for many wildlife forensic end-users. Here, we present a MinION deep read sequence data validation study for species identification. First, we tested whether the clustering-based bioinformatics pipeline NGSpeciesID can be used to generate an accurate consensus sequence for species identification. Second, we systematically evaluated the read variation distribution around the generated consensus sequences to understand what confidence we have in the accuracy of the resulting consensus sequence and to determine how to interpret individual sample results. Finally, we investigated the impact of differences between the MinION consensus and Sanger control sequences on correct species identification to understand the ability and accuracy of the MinION consensus sequence to differentiate the true species from the next most similar species. This validation study establishes that ONT MinION sequence data used in conjunction with the NGSpeciesID pipeline can produce consensus DNA sequences of sufficient accuracy for forensic genetic species identification

Study of early changes in intraocular pressure following phacoemulsification

: To evaluate early postoperative changes in intraocular pressure (IOP) following phacoemulsification and intraocular lens (IOL) implantation. Method: This retrospective and observational study included 100 patients with normal IOP underwent uneventful standard phacoemulsification procedure for senile cataracts at Sarawak General Hospital over a period of six months from July 2017 to December 2017. Patient's data were retrieved from Eye Clinic records. All patients were checked for IOP with Goldmann tonometry during pre-operative assessment and one month postoperatively. Patients with pre-existing IOP related ocular disease or intraocular surgery were excluded. Effects of age, gender, comorbidity of diabetes mellitus and hypertension, eye laterality, ocular axial length and pre-operative IOP on post-operative IOP reduction were analysed. Results: Phacoemulsification was found to reduce IOP by mean of 1.07 mmHg, which was statistically significant (P < 0.001). A larger IOP reduction was seen in cases with a higher pre-operative IOP (P 0.05). Conclusion: Phacoemulsification had a significant IOP-lowering effect in normal subjects, in particular in higher pre-operative IOP. There was no correlation between age, gender, comorbidity of diabetes mellitus or hypertension, eye laterality, and ocular axial length to IOP reduction following hacoemulsification

Factors affecting sexting behaviours among young adults in Malaysia

In recent years, the phenomenon of sexting has received tremendous attention by the researchers as several negative consequences were found attributed to sexting. However, such phenomenon is not well-understood in Malaysia context because so far only one local qualitative study was dedicated to understand this behaviour among a group of teenagers. Thus, the present study decided to further investigate on this topic by adopting quantitative, cross-sectional and correlational research design. Particularly, this study intended to examine sexting prevalence rate among Malaysian young adults; gender and relationship status differences in sexting behaviour; as well as the factors (self-esteem, sexual sensation seeking and perceived peer pressure) that would affect people to sext. Hence, a total of 396 Malaysian young adults (aged 18 to 38 years old, M = 24.21, SD = 3.15) were recruited by using purposive sampling method and online survey serves as a tool for data collection. Based on the findings of this study, 72.5% of the participants do engaged in sexting and no significant gender difference was found in sexting behaviour. As for relationship status, individuals in a relationship sext more than the singles, but no significant difference was found in married individuals. Moreover, findings also indicated that only sexual sensation seeking significantly predicts sexting behaviour, while self-esteem was not associated with sexting. Therefore, the findings in this study could enrich the literature of sexual media studies in Malaysia, and provide useful data for future researchers to investigate on this topic

Exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke and lung cancer by histological type: A pooled analysis of the International Lung Cancer Consortium (ILCCO)

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108359/1/ijc28835.pd

Rapid in situ identification of biological samples via DNA amplicon sequencing using miniaturized laboratory equipment

In many parts of the world, human-mediated environmental change is depleting biodiversity faster than it can be characterized, while invasive species cause agricultural damage, threaten human health and disrupt native habitats. Consequently, the application of effective approaches for rapid surveillance and identification of biological specimens is increasingly important to inform conservation and biosurveillance efforts. Taxonomic assignments have been greatly advanced using sequence-based applications, such as DNA barcoding, a diagnostic technique that utilizes PCR and DNA sequence analysis of standardized genetic regions. However, in many biodiversity hotspots, endeavors are often hindered by a lack of laboratory infrastructure, funding for biodiversity research and restrictions on the transport of biological samples. A promising development is the advent of low-cost, miniaturized scientific equipment. Such tools can be assembled into functional laboratories to carry out genetic analyses in situ, at local institutions, field stations or classrooms. Here, we outline the steps required to perform amplicon sequencing applications, from DNA isolation to nanopore sequencing and downstream data analysis, all of which can be conducted outside of a conventional laboratory environment using miniaturized scientific equipment, without reliance on Internet connectivity. Depending on sample type, the protocol (from DNA extraction to full bioinformatic analyses) can be completed within 10 h, and with appropriate quality controls can be used for diagnostic identification of samples independent of core genomic facilities that are required for alternative methods. </p