Free diving-inspired breathing techniques for COPD patients:A pilot study

Objectives: Pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) is a key factor in enhancing self-management and exercise capacity in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The content and length of PR varies between countries and authorities responsible for rehabilitation. After completion of rehabilitation, it is often difficult for patients to stay motivated and perform regular exercise. Methods: In this pilot study, nine patients with moderate to severe COPD completed a 6-week training programme consisting of free diving-inspired breathing techniques, designed to be incorporated into daily activities. Results: Participants significantly increased the distance walked in 6 min by 48 m (p < 0.05) and a significant reduction was seen on the COPD self-efficacy scale (p < 0.05). Furthermore, adherence to the programme sessions was very high at 96.3% and no adverse events occurred. Discussion: This pilot study tested the feasibility of introducing breathing techniques used by COPD patients to enhance their walking capacity. The techniques were well tolerated and participant’s adherence to the weekly group sessions was high

Long chain n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids and vascular function in patients with chronic kidney disease and healthy subjects:a cross-sectional and comparative study

BACKGROUND: Patients with chronic kidney disease have a markedly increased cardiovascular mortality compared with the general population. Long chain n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids have been suggested to possess cardioprotective properties. This cross-sectional and comparative study evaluated correlations between hemodynamic measurements, resistance artery function and fish consumption to the content of long chain n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids in adipose tissue, a long-term marker of seafood intake. METHODS: Seventeen patients with chronic kidney disease stage 5 + 5d and 27 healthy kidney donors were evaluated with hemodynamic measurements before surgery; from these subjects, 11 patients and 11 healthy subjects had vasodilator properties of subcutaneous resistance arteries examined. The measurements were correlated to adipose tissue n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids. Information on fish intake was obtained from a dietary questionnaire and compared with adipose tissue n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids. RESULTS: Fish intake and the content of n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids in adipose tissue did not differ between patients and controls. n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid levels in adipose tissue were positively correlated to systemic vascular resistance index; (r = 0.44; p = 0.07 and r = 0.62; p < 0.05, chronic kidney disease and healthy subjects respectively) and negatively correlated to cardiac output index (r = −0.69; p < 0.01 and r = −0.50; p < 0.05, chronic kidney disease and healthy subjects respectively). No correlation was observed between n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid levels in adipose tissue and vasodilator properties in resistance arteries. n-3 PUFA content in adipose tissue increased with increasing self-reported fish intake. CONCLUSIONS: The correlations found, suggest a role for n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids in hemodynamic properties. However, this is apparently not due to changes in intrinsic properties of the resistance arteries as no correlation was found to n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids

Natural killer cell activity as a biomarker for the diagnosis of lung cancer in high-risk patients

OBJECTIVE: Natural killer (NK) cells play an essential role in the immune response against cancer. However, immune escape mechanisms may cause inferior NK cell activity (NKA) in patients with cancer. This prospective study examined the relationship between NKA and lung cancer in a high-risk cohort. METHODS: In a cohort study, 250 participants referred by their general practitioner for suspicion of lung cancer were included. Before clinical investigation, blood was collected into NK Vue tubes, and the level of interferon gamma after 24 hours served as a surrogate marker for NKA. RESULTS: Among 250 patients, 79 were diagnosed with lung cancer. No difference in NKA was found between patients with lung cancer and control participants in which lung cancer was ruled out (median 226 pg/mL vs. 450 pg/mL). However, there was a significant difference in NKA between patients with late-stage lung cancer and controls (median 161 pg/mL vs. 450 pg/mL). A linear regression model showed that NKA was not influenced by age, sex or smoking status. CONCLUSIONS: The significantly lower NKA in patients with late-stage lung cancer warrants further investigation combining NKA with other biomarkers and examining the potential role of NKA as a marker of disseminated disease

A synthetic data set to benchmark anti-money laundering methods

Bank transactions are highly confidential. As a result, there are no real public data sets that can be used to investigate and compare anti-money laundering (AML) methods in banks. This severely limits research on important AML problems such as efficiency, effectiveness, class imbalance, concept drift, and interpretability. To address the issue, we present SynthAML: a synthetic data set to benchmark statistical and machine learning methods for AML. The data set builds on real data from Spar Nord, a systemically important Danish bank, and contains 20,000 AML alerts and over 16 million transactions. Experimental results indicate that performance on SynthAML can be transferred to the real world. As use cases, we present and discuss open problems in the AML literature

Dynamic Rearrangement of Cell States Detected by Systematic Screening of Sequential Anticancer Treatments

Signaling networks are nonlinear and complex, involving a large ensemble of dynamic interaction states that fluctuate in space and time. However, therapeutic strategies, such as combination chemotherapy, rarely consider the timing of drug perturbations. If we are to advance drug discovery for complex diseases, it will be essential to develop methods capable of identifying dynamic cellular responses to clinically relevant perturbations. Here, we present a Bayesian dose-response framework and the screening of an oncological drug matrix, comprising 10,000 drug combinations in melanoma and pancreatic cancer cell lines, from which we predict sequentially effective drug combinations. Approximately 23% of the tested combinations showed high-confidence sequential effects (either synergistic or antagonistic), demonstrating that cellular perturbations of many drug combinations have temporal aspects, which are currently both underutilized and poorly understood

Proteomic analysis of breast tumors confirms the mRNA intrinsic molecular subtypes using different classifiers: a large-scale analysis of fresh frozen tissue samples

Background: Breast cancer is a complex and heterogeneous disease that is usually characterized by histological parameters such as tumor size, cellular arrangements/rearrangments, necrosis, nuclear grade and the mitotic index, leading to a set of around twenty subtypes. Together with clinical markers such as hormone receptor status, this classification has considerable prognostic value but there is a large variation in patient response to therapy. Gene expression profiling has provided molecular profiles characteristic of distinct subtypes of breast cancer that reflect the divergent cellular origins and degree of progression.Methods: Here we present a large-scale proteomic and transcriptomic profiling study of 477 sporadic and hereditary breast cancer tumors with matching mRNA expression analysis. Unsupervised hierarchal clustering was performed and selected proteins from large-scale tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) analysis were transferred into a highly multiplexed targeted selected reaction monitoring assay to classify tumors using a hierarchal cluster and support vector machine with leave one out cross-validation.Results: The subgroups formed upon unsupervised clustering agree very well with groups found at transcriptional level; however, the classifiers (genes or their respective protein products) differ almost entirely between the two datasets. In-depth analysis shows clear differences in pathways unique to each type, which may lie behind their different clinical outcomes. Targeted mass spectrometry analysis and supervised clustering correlate very well with subgroups determined by RNA classification and show convincing agreement with clinical parameters.Conclusions: This work demonstrates the merits of protein expression profiling for breast cancer stratification. These findings have important implications for the use of genomics and expression analysis for the prediction of protein expression, such as receptor status and drug target expression. The highly multiplexed MS assay is easily implemented in standard clinical chemistry practice, allowing rapid and cheap characterization of tumor tissue suitable for directing the choice of treatment