Mild iodine deficiency and thyroid disorders in Hong Kong.

OBJECTIVES: To review evidence of iodine deficiency and clinical thyroid disorders in Hong Kong. DATA SOURCES: Publications on local dietary iodine intake, the iodine content of local food items, and clinical thyroid problems in the Hong Kong population. DATA EXTRACTION: Data was extracted and evaluated independently by the authors. DATA SYNTHESIS: Iodine is an essential nutrient. Iodine deficiency can lead to goitre, hypothyroidism, mental deficiency, and impaired growth. It is now appreciated that determination of goitre incidence in children alone may grossly underestimate the problem of iodine deficiency in a population. In total, the evidence indicates that iodine deficiency exists in Hong Kong, leading to clinical problems of transient neonatal hypothyroidism, goitrogenesis, and thyroid disorders in pregnant women and neonates, as well as thyroid dysfunction in the elderly. CONCLUSION: A supplementation programme aimed at a relatively uniform iodine intake is recommended to avoid deficient or excessive iodine intake in subpopulations.published_or_final_versio

Genotypic tropism testing by massively parallel sequencing: qualitative and quantitative analysis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Inferring viral tropism from genotype is a fast and inexpensive alternative to phenotypic testing. While being highly predictive when performed on clonal samples, sensitivity of predicting CXCR4-using (X4) variants drops substantially in clinical isolates. This is mainly attributed to minor variants not detected by standard bulk-sequencing. Massively parallel sequencing (MPS) detects single clones thereby being much more sensitive. Using this technology we wanted to improve genotypic prediction of coreceptor usage.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Plasma samples from 55 antiretroviral-treated patients tested for coreceptor usage with the Monogram Trofile Assay were sequenced with standard population-based approaches. Fourteen of these samples were selected for further analysis with MPS. Tropism was predicted from each sequence with geno2pheno_[coreceptor].</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Prediction based on bulk-sequencing yielded 59.1% sensitivity and 90.9% specificity compared to the trofile assay. With MPS, 7600 reads were generated on average per isolate. Minorities of sequences with high confidence in CXCR4-usage were found in all samples, irrespective of phenotype. When using the default false-positive-rate of geno2pheno_[coreceptor](10%), and defining a minority cutoff of 5%, the results were concordant in all but one isolate.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The combination of MPS and coreceptor usage prediction results in a fast and accurate alternative to phenotypic assays. The detection of X4-viruses in all isolates suggests that coreceptor usage as well as fitness of minorities is important for therapy outcome. The high sensitivity of this technology in combination with a quantitative description of the viral population may allow implementing meaningful cutoffs for predicting response to CCR5-antagonists in the presence of X4-minorities.</p

Middleborns disadvantaged? testing birth-order effects on fitness in pre-industrial finns

Parental investment is a limited resource for which offspring compete in order to increase their own survival and reproductive success. However, parents might be selected to influence the outcome of sibling competition through differential investment. While evidence for this is widespread in egg-laying species, whether or not this may also be the case in viviparous species is more difficult to determine. We use pre-industrial Finns as our model system and an equal investment model as our null hypothesis, which predicts that (all else being equal) middleborns should be disadvantaged through competition. We found no overall evidence to suggest that middleborns in a family are disadvantaged in terms of their survival, age at first reproduction or lifetime reproductive success. However, when considering birth-order only among same-sexed siblings, first-, middle-and lastborn sons significantly differed in the number of offspring they were able to rear to adulthood, although there was no similar effect among females. Middleborn sons appeared to produce significantly less offspring than first-or lastborn sons, but they did not significantly differ from lastborn sons in the number of offspring reared to adulthood. Our results thus show that taking sex differences into account is important when modelling birth-order effects. We found clear evidence of firstborn sons being advantaged over other sons in the family, and over firstborn daughters. Therefore, our results suggest that parents invest differentially in their offspring in order to both preferentially favour particular offspring or reduce offspring inequalities arising from sibling competition

Prospective study of patients with persistent symptoms of dengue in Brazil

Dengue is an arboviral infection clinically recognized as an acute and self-limited disease. Persistence of dengue symptoms is known, but it has been little studied. The aim of this study was to characterize persistent symptoms in 113 patients with dengue followed up clinically and by laboratory testing at a tertiary hospital. Symptoms that persisted for more than 14 days were observed in 61 (54.0%) patients, and six (6.2%) of them had symptoms for 6 months or more. The persistent symptoms identified were myalgia, weakness, hair loss, memory loss, reduced resistance to physical effort, headache, reasoning problems, arthralgia, sleepiness- and emotional lability. The progression to persistent symptoms was significantly associated with hospitalization, older age, more severe disease, the presence of bleeding and comorbidities upon univariate analysis. Upon multivariate analysis, the presence of persistent symptoms continued to be significantly associated only with increased age and dengue with warning signs. The platelet count during the acute phase of the disease was significantly lower in the group with persistent symptoms. In conclusion, the frequency of progression to persistent symptoms in dengue is relevant in patients seen at a tertiary hospital and the persistence of symptoms is more common in patients with dengue with warning signs

A sweetpotato gene index established by de novo assembly of pyrosequencing and Sanger sequences and mining for gene-based microsatellite markers

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Sweetpotato (<it>Ipomoea batatas </it>(L.) Lam.), a hexaploid outcrossing crop, is an important staple and food security crop in developing countries in Africa and Asia. The availability of genomic resources for sweetpotato is in striking contrast to its importance for human nutrition. Previously existing sequence data were restricted to around 22,000 expressed sequence tag (EST) sequences and ~ 1,500 GenBank sequences. We have used 454 pyrosequencing to augment the available gene sequence information to enhance functional genomics and marker design for this plant species.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Two quarter 454 pyrosequencing runs used two normalized cDNA collections from stems and leaves from drought-stressed sweetpotato clone <it>Tanzania </it>and yielded 524,209 reads, which were assembled together with 22,094 publically available expressed sequence tags into 31,685 sets of overlapping DNA segments and 34,733 unassembled sequences. Blastx comparisons with the UniRef100 database allowed annotation of 23,957 contigs and 15,342 singletons resulting in 24,657 putatively unique genes. Further, 27,119 sequences had no match to protein sequences of UniRef100database. On the basis of this gene index, we have identified 1,661 gene-based microsatellite sequences, of which 223 were selected for testing and 195 were successfully amplified in a test panel of 6 hexaploid (<it>I. batatas</it>) and 2 diploid (<it>I. trifida</it>) accessions.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The sweetpotato gene index is a useful source for functionally annotated sweetpotato gene sequences that contains three times more gene sequence information for sweetpotato than previous EST assemblies. A searchable version of the gene index, including a blastn function, is available at <url>http://www.cipotato.org/sweetpotato_gene_index</url>.</p

Economic Impact of Dengue Illness and the Cost-Effectiveness of Future Vaccination Programs in Singapore

Dengue illness is a tropical disease transmitted by mosquitoes that threatens more than one third of the worldwide population. Dengue has important economic consequences because of the burden to hospitals, work absenteeism and risk of death of symptomatic cases. Governments attempt to reduce the disease burden using costly mosquito control strategies such as habitat reduction and spraying insecticide. Despite such efforts, the number of cases remains high. Dengue vaccines are expected to be available in the near future and there is an urgent need to evaluate their cost-effectiveness, i.e. whether their cost will be justified by the reduction in disease burden they bring. For such an evaluation, we estimated the economic impacts of dengue in Singapore and the expected vaccine costs for different prices. In this way we estimated price thresholds for which vaccination is not cost-effective. This research provides useful estimates that will contribute to informed decisions regarding the adoption of dengue vaccination programs

Field template-based design and biological evaluation of new sphingosine kinase 1 inhibitors

Purpose: Sphingosine kinase 1 (SK1) is a protooncogenic enzyme expressed in many human tumours and is associated with chemoresistance and poor prognosis. It is a potent therapy target and its inhibition chemosensitises solid tumours. Despite recent advances in SK1 inhibitors synthesis and validation, their clinical safety and chemosensitising options are not well described. In this study, we have designed, synthesised and tested a new specific SK1 inhibitor with a low toxicity profile. Methods: Field template molecular modelling was used for compound design. Lead compounds were tested in cell and mouse cancer models. Results: Field template analysis of three known SK1 inhibitors, SKI-178, 12aa and SK1-I, was performed and compound screening identified six potential new SK1 inhibitors. SK1 activity assays in both cell-free and in vitro settings showed that two compounds were effective SK1 inhibitors. Compound SK-F has potently decreased cancer cell viability in vitro and sensitised mouse breast tumours to docetaxel (DTX) in vivo, without significant whole-body toxicity. Conclusion: Through field template screening, we have identified a new SK1 inhibitor, SK-F, which demonstrated antitumour activity in vitro and in vivo without overt toxicity when combined with DTX

Epidemiological risk factors for adult dengue in Singapore: an 8-year nested test negative case control study

10.1186/s12879-016-1662-4BMC Infectious Diseases16132