Expression of CIAPIN1 in human colorectal cancer and its correlation with prognosis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The cytokine-induced anti-apoptotic molecule (CIAPIN1) had been found to be a differentially-expressed gene involved in a variety of cancers, and it was also considered as a candidate tumour suppressor gene in gastric cancer, renal cancer and liver cancer. However, studies on the role of CIAPIN1 in colorectal cancer were still unavailable. The aim of this study was to determine the prognostic impact of CIAPIN1 in 273 colorectal cancer (CRC) samples and to investigate the CIAPIN1 expression in CRC cell lines after inducing differentiation.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Immunohistochemical analysis was performed to detect the expression of CIAPIN1 in CRC samples from 273 patients. The relationship between CIAPIN1 expression and patients' characteristics (gender, age, location of cancer, UICC stage, local recurrence and tumour grade factors) was evaluated. In addition, these patients were followed up for five consecutive years to investigate the relationship between CIAPIN1 expression and the prognosis of CRC. We induced the differentiation of the CRC cell lines HT29 and SW480, in order to detect the expression of CIAPIN1 in the process of CRC cells differentiation.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Results indicated that CIAPIN1 was mainly expressed in the cytoplasm and nucleus, and that its expression level in cancer samples was significantly lower than in normal tissues. The Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test showed a significant difference in the differential expression of CIAPIN1 in patients with different T and UICC stages, and tumour grade (<it>P </it>= 0.0393, 0.0297 and 0.0397, respectively). The Kaplan-Meier survival analysis demonstrated that the survival time of CRC patients with high expression of CIAPIN1 was longer than those with low expression during the 5-year follow up period (<it>P </it>= 0.0002). COX regression analysis indicated that low expression of CIAPIN1, cancer stage of > pT1, distant organ metastasis (pM₁), regional lymph node metastasis (> pN₁) and local recurrence (yes) were independent, poor prognostic factors of CRC (<it>P </it>= 0.012, <it>P </it>= 0.032, <it>P <</it>0.001, <it>P <</it>0.001, <it>P <</it>0.001 respectively). Both Western blotting and RT-PCR showed that CIAPIN1 expression was increased with the degree of differentiation of HT29 and SW480 cells.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>CIAPIN1 played an important role in the differentiation of CRC cells, and the differential expression of CIAPIN1 in CRC was closely related to prognosis.</p

Hybrid multicriteria fuzzy classification of network traffic patterns, anomalies, and protocols

© 2017, Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature. Traffic classification in computer networks has very significant roles in network operation, management, and security. Examples include controlling the flow of information, allocating resources effectively, provisioning quality of service, detecting intrusions, and blocking malicious and unauthorized access. This problem has attracted a growing attention over years and a number of techniques have been proposed ranging from traditional port-based and payload inspection of TCP/IP packets to supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised machine learning paradigms. With the increasing complexity of network environments and support for emerging mobility services and applications, more robust and accurate techniques need to be investigated. In this paper, we propose a new supervised hybrid machine-learning approach for ubiquitous traffic classification based on multicriteria fuzzy decision trees with attribute selection. Moreover, our approach can handle well the imbalanced datasets and zero-day applications (i.e., those without previously known traffic patterns). Evaluating the proposed methodology on several benchmark real-world traffic datasets of different nature demonstrated its capability to effectively discriminate a variety of traffic patterns, anomalies, and protocols for unencrypted and encrypted traffic flows. Comparing with other methods, the performance of the proposed methodology showed remarkably better classification accuracy

Consanguinity and reproductive health among Arabs

Consanguineous marriages have been practiced since the early existence of modern humans. Until now consanguinity is widely practiced in several global communities with variable rates depending on religion, culture, and geography. Arab populations have a long tradition of consanguinity due to socio-cultural factors. Many Arab countries display some of the highest rates of consanguineous marriages in the world, and specifically first cousin marriages which may reach 25-30% of all marriages. In some countries like Qatar, Yemen, and UAE, consanguinity rates are increasing in the current generation. Research among Arabs and worldwide has indicated that consanguinity could have an effect on some reproductive health parameters such as postnatal mortality and rates of congenital malformations. The association of consanguinity with other reproductive health parameters, such as fertility and fetal wastage, is controversial. The main impact of consanguinity, however, is an increase in the rate of homozygotes for autosomal recessive genetic disorders. Worldwide, known dominant disorders are more numerous than known recessive disorders. However, data on genetic disorders in Arab populations as extracted from the Catalogue of Transmission Genetics in Arabs (CTGA) database indicate a relative abundance of recessive disorders in the region that is clearly associated with the practice of consanguinity

The impact of surgical delay on resectability of colorectal cancer: An international prospective cohort study

AIM: The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has provided a unique opportunity to explore the impact of surgical delays on cancer resectability. This study aimed to compare resectability for colorectal cancer patients undergoing delayed versus non-delayed surgery. METHODS: This was an international prospective cohort study of consecutive colorectal cancer patients with a decision for curative surgery (January-April 2020). Surgical delay was defined as an operation taking place more than 4 weeks after treatment decision, in a patient who did not receive neoadjuvant therapy. A subgroup analysis explored the effects of delay in elective patients only. The impact of longer delays was explored in a sensitivity analysis. The primary outcome was complete resection, defined as curative resection with an R0 margin. RESULTS: Overall, 5453 patients from 304 hospitals in 47 countries were included, of whom 6.6% (358/5453) did not receive their planned operation. Of the 4304 operated patients without neoadjuvant therapy, 40.5% (1744/4304) were delayed beyond 4 weeks. Delayed patients were more likely to be older, men, more comorbid, have higher body mass index and have rectal cancer and early stage disease. Delayed patients had higher unadjusted rates of complete resection (93.7% vs. 91.9%, P = 0.032) and lower rates of emergency surgery (4.5% vs. 22.5%, P < 0.001). After adjustment, delay was not associated with a lower rate of complete resection (OR 1.18, 95% CI 0.90-1.55, P = 0.224), which was consistent in elective patients only (OR 0.94, 95% CI 0.69-1.27, P = 0.672). Longer delays were not associated with poorer outcomes. CONCLUSION: One in 15 colorectal cancer patients did not receive their planned operation during the first wave of COVID-19. Surgical delay did not appear to compromise resectability, raising the hypothesis that any reduction in long-term survival attributable to delays is likely to be due to micro-metastatic disease

Translating conjunctions in political journalistic argumentative texts from English into Arabic

Political Journalistic Argumentative Texts (PJATs) have always been challenging fortranslators of this type of texts when rendering them into Arabic. One major problemfacing translators of this genre is the translation of conjunctions which is oftenovershadowed by researchers. This study recovers the meanings and functions ofconjunctions and their role in maintaining cohesion and coherence in discourse. Due to thepolitical nature of this type of discourse and mistranslating the relations residing betweenadjacent sentences which mainly rely on conjunctions to signal to them, ideology, whenmistranslating conjunction, may come to surface causing more problems relating tomeaning interpretation, namely on the part of the receivers of translated texts.With this in mind, this study has been conducted with the aim of finding out the mostfrequently used conjunctions and whether they are adequately translated from English intoArabic, the most frequently problem-causing conjunctions, and identifying the relationshipbetween conjunctions, on the one hand, and cohesion and coherence, on the other. Tomake this happen, a corpus of 40 PJATs translated into Arabic in two major Jordaniannewspapers, Al-Rai and Ad-Dustour, has been studied with specific attention to theprocess of translating conjunctions in light of Halliday and Hasan's (1976) model ofconjunctions. Conjunctions were initially looked at as being translated or non-translated,and each of the headings was examined according to a three step scale: adequate, semiadequate,and inadequate.The findings of the study show that the overall number of conjunction relations (bothsyndetic and asyndetic] in the corpus was 1469 including additive, adversative, causal,temporal, zero conjunction, and paragraph beginnings conjunction relations. The findingshave shown that a significant number (52.82%) of these conjunction relations was eitherinadequately or semi-adequately translated into Arabic. The study has also revealed thatasyndetic conjunction in English represents one of the major problems in texts translatedinto Arabic featuring 44.38% of the total number of the conjunction relations; for thisparticular problematic area, this study argues that the Arabic conjunction (j) can be thebest equivalent to the English asyndetic conjunction.This relatively high percentage of mistranslations at the level of the relations residingbetween sentences forming a larger text will inevitably cast its influence on the quality ofthe translated text on three major levels: cohesion, coherence and ideology, with the aimof reflecting on these three influential levels in discourse, Critical Discourse Analysis wasadopted as a framework of analysis to show how the ideological background of thereceivers, namely the Target Language receivers, may interfere and lead them throughirrelevant and sometimes dark tunnels as a result of misunderstanding the semanticrelation existing between adjacent sentences in translated texts.To sum up, this study of PJATs represents a corner stone for translators, researchers andstudents of translation as it has shed light on the problem of translating conjunctions fromEnglish into Arabic, highlighted the problematic areas and proposed some guidelines todealing with the conjunctions and their close connection with cohesion and coherence indiscourse.KEY WORDS:Conjunction in English, Conjunction in Arabic, Cohesion, Coherence, Ideology, PoliticalDiscourse, Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, Argumentation, Journalese,and Translation

Short-term functional outcome in children with arthrogryposis multiplex congenita after multiple surgeries at an early age

Moutasem M Obeidat,1 Ziad Audat,1 Wadah Khriesat21Department of Orthopedic Surgery, 2Department of Pediatrics, Jordan University of Science and Technology &amp;ndash; King Abdullah University Hospital, Irbid, JordanPurpose: The purpose of this study is to report our short-term functional outcome for 14 children with arthrogryposis multiplex congenita (AMC) who underwent multiple surgical procedures at an early age.Methods: During the period 2002&amp;ndash;2010, 14 children (11 males and three females) with AMC underwent multiple surgical procedures to treat deformities of the lower and upper limbs. About 81 procedures were performed, at a rate of 5.9 procedures per child. The mean age at the last follow-up was 5.9 years. The average follow-up period was 3.6 years (range, 1.5&amp;ndash;6 years). The functional outcome assessment included walking ability and the activities of daily living for the upper limb function.Results: At the last follow-up visit, six (43%) children (four males, two females) with a mean age of 8.3 years (range, 4&amp;ndash;15) were independent walkers. Three children (males) with a mean age of 3.5 years (range, 2.5&amp;ndash;5) were able to walk, but with support. One child (male), 3 years old, was a household ambulator. Three children (two males, one female) with a mean age of 4.2 years (range, 2.5&amp;ndash;6) were nonfunctional ambulators. The last child (male) was nonambulatory at the age of 5 years. Activities of daily living were severely affected in the nonambulatory child. One child in the nonfunctional ambulators group had limitations in the activities of daily living; however, upper limb function was not affected in the remaining 12 children.Conclusion: We believe that aggressive surgical treatment using multiple operations at an early age can improve the short-term functional and clinical outcomes of children with AMC.Keywords: deformity, multiple surgeries, functional outcom

Preparation and Characterization of Highly Porous Direct Compression Carrier Particles with Improved Drug Loading During an Interactive Mixing Process

The aim of this study was to prepare highly porous carrier particles by emulsion solvent evaporation and compare the loading capacity of these beads with two traditional carriers, sugar beads, and microcrystalline cellulose granules during an interactive mixing process. The porous carrier particles were prepared by an emulsion solvent evaporation process using cellulose propionate as a binder, anhydrous dibasic calcium phosphate, and ion exchange resins as a fillers, and polyethylene glycol as a pore inducer. Micronized furosemide or griseofulvin powder was mixed with the same volume of each carrier in an interactive mixing process. The tableting properties, drug loading per unit volume of carrier, content uniformity of the mixtures, and dissolution of the drugs from the mixtures were measured. The results showed that highly porous microcapsules with desirable hardness equivalent to that of sugar beads and MCC granules were successfully prepared. On average the loading capacity of the new carrier was 310% that of sugar beads and 320% that of MCC granules during an interactive mixing process with very good content uniformity. The tableting properties of the microcapsules were equivalent to that of microcrystalline cellulose granules, and the dissolution of the drugs from interactive mixtures prepared with the new carrier was equivalent to that of drug suspensions. This showed that the prepared microcapsule carrier could be used to improve the loading capacity during an interactive mixing and to prepare tablets by direct compression

Design and optimization of gastro-retentive microballoons for enhanced bioavailability of cinnarizine

This study is focused on the design of gastro-retentive drug delivery system composed of hollow microspheres (microballoons) for the sustained delivery of cinnarizine (CIN). The microballoons (MBs) were prepared by the emulsion solvent diffusion method using cellulose acetate butyrate (CAB) as the hosting polymer and absolute ethanol (ETH) and dichloromethane (DCM) as solvents. A 33 full factorial experimental design was adopted to study the effect of different variables and to find an optimum formula with desired properties. Prepared microballoons showed high drug loading capacities and controlled release behaviour. The optimum formulation was chosen on the basis of achieving maximum values for both drug loading capacity and release efficiency as well as having suitable size. The optimized MB (MB-F21) was composed of 200 mg CIN and 400 mg CAB with a DCM/ETH ratio of 2:1. Scanning electron microscopy for the optimum formulation showed a spherical outline with internal porous structure. An in vivo study using human volunteers was performed by determination of CIN concentration in the plasma using the liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) method. Results proved the superiority of the designed formulation over the market product Stuval® tablets in bioavailability parameters comprising T max as well as area under the plasma CIN concentration-time curve (AUC0–24 h) and AUC0–∞ values. Also, the significantly greater value of mean residence time (MRT) in case of MB-F21 indicates its higher gastric residence time and proves the advantages of micro-multiparticulate dosage forms over conventional one

Susceptibility to chronic mucus hypersecretion, a genome wide association study

Background: Chronic mucus hypersecretion (CMH) is associated with an increased frequency of respiratory infections, excess lung function decline, and increased hospitalisation and mortality rates in the general population. It is associated with smoking, but it is unknown why only a minority of smokers develops CMH. A plausible explanation for this phenomenon is a predisposing genetic constitution. Therefore, we performed a genome wide association (GWA) study of CMH in Caucasian populations. Methods: GWA analysis was performed in the NELSON-study using the Illumina 610 array, followed by replication and metaanalysis in 11 additional cohorts. In total 2,704 subjects with, and 7,624 subjects without CMH were included, all current or former heavy smokers ($20 pack-years). Additional studies were performed to test the functional relevance of the most significant single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP). Results: A strong association with CMH, consistent across all cohorts, was observed with rs6577641 (p = 4.25x10⎺⁶, OR = 1.17), located in intron 9 of the special AT-rich sequence-binding protein 1 locus (SATB1) on chromosome 3. The risk allele (G) was associated with higher mRNA expression of SATB1 (4.3x10⎺⁹) in lung tissue. Presence of CMH was associated with increased SATB1 mRNA expression in bronchial biopsies from COPD patients. SATB1 expression was induced during differentiation of primary human bronchial epithelial cells in culture. Conclusions: Our findings, that SNP rs6577641 is associated with CMH in multiple cohorts and is a cis-eQTL for SATB1, together with our additional observation that SATB1 expression increases during epithelial differentiation provide suggestive evidence that SATB1 is a gene that affects CMH