Mobile Phone Use and Risk of Thyroid Gland Lesions Detected by Ultrasonography

Abstract In recent years, widespread use of mobile phones has led to a public debate about possible harmful effects on human health. A lot of researchers studied the possible effect of radiofrequency energy (RFE) emitted from cell phones on the human body. Up to our knowledge no one studied the effect of these waves on the thyroid gland by Ultrasonography (US). Our aim was to investigate the possible effects of EMR arising from cell phones on the thyroid gland using US. A prospective study was done on 180 participants, 110 females and 70 males, ranging in age from 15 to 65. A constructed questionnaire was distributed among them before performing US of the neck. Demographic data along with US findings were collected and statistically analyzed. A total of 46.7% of our participants had abnormal findings of the thyroid gland more in non smart phone users and more in females. The commonest abnormality was multinodular goiter (54%). Expanded researches are still needed to answer the question about the hazards of RFE on human health. All efforts should be made to encourage users of cellular phone to follow mobile device recommendations of manufacturers and avoid its possible hazards as possible

INTEGRATION BETWEEN MRI AND PHYSICAL THERAPY TO IMPROVE TREATMENT OF PATIENTS WITH SHOULDER PAIN

Background: Shoulder pain is the second most common musculoskeletal disorder treated by physical therapists. The cause for the shoulder pain is multifactorial. However, a specific diagnosis is crucial in the right management of shoulder dysfunction. Therefore, the aim of this study was to find out the efficacy of integrating the MRI for the accurate diagnosis and impact of this on rendering the effective physical therapy interventions in shoulder dysfunction patients. Methods: A retrospective study conducted on 14 patients who undergone an MRI with a 1.5 T unit MAGNETOM Symphony (Siemens), for their shoulder pain, where the diagnosis might be Muscle tears like, subscapularis, infraspinatus,supraspinatus and teres minor muscles; subacromial or subdeltoid bursitis and labral tears were included. All the subjects were then continued with usual physical therapy treatments for four weeks depending on their diagnosis which includes; advice, stretching, mobilization and strengthening exercises, manual therapy, massage, strapping, and electrotherapy . The outcome measures documented from the case sheet were; Visual Analogue Scale grade and passive range of motion of shoulder external / internal rotation and abduction. Results: Paired t test was used to compare the PROM between pre rehabilitation and post rehabilitation testing and the non parametric test, Mann Whitney U test was used for the comparison of VAS. All patients showed a significant improvement in VAS and PROM of abduction, internal and external rotation following physical therapy (P≤ 0.05). Conclusion: MRI is found to be a reliable method of diagnostic procedure for the shoulder pain and the integration of MRI and physical therapy to treat shoulder dysfunction leads to a better outcome

Gene expression study of breast cancer using Welch Satterthwaite t-test, Kaplan-Meier estimator plot and Huber loss robust regression model

Objective: Breast Cancer (BC) is one of the deadliest diseases in women, causing thousands of deaths annually despite the advent of high-throughput genomic platforms in the recent past. Microarray-based gene expression profiling with different statistical methods have been extensively used to understand the disease at the molecular level. We plan to apply Welch Satterthwaite t-test, Kaplan-Meier estimator plot and Huber Loss robust regression model on microarray data to improve the analysis and find biomarkers for future diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. Methods: We retrieved microarray data (GSE10810 dataset) of 31 breast tumor samples and 27 normal breast samples from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO, NCBI). Welch Satterthwaite t-test was applied to identify the most statistically significant genes, Huber loss robust regression model was applied to investigate the existing mathematical relations between tumor and control variables, and Kaplan-Meier Plotter was used to confirm their association with overall metastatic relapse-free survival of BC patients. Results: We identified 1837 differentially expressed genes, including 638 overexpressed (COL11A1, KIAA0101, S100P, GJB2, TOP2A, LINC01614, RRM2, INHBA, C15orf48 and CKS2) and 1199 under expressed (LEP, ADIPOQ, PLIN1, PCK1, PCOLCE2, ADH1B, LYVE1, FABP4, ABCA8, and CHRDL1) genes passing the threshold (fold change ± 2 and p value < 0.001). KM analysis revealed 12 out of 20 DEGs (log rank p value < 0.05) as potential prognostic and therapeutic biomarkers. Conclusion: Huber loss robust regression model was found to be one of the best performing algorithms for the mathematical relationship between the control and breast tumor samples with co-relation coefficient of 0.4398 and mean absolute error of 1.069 ± 0.020. In conclusion, with high mathematical confidence, we detected DEGs have high potential to be BC biomarkers using Welch t-test and Kaplan-Meier plot having minimum underlying assumptions