Air Pollution and Emergency Department Visits for Suicide Attempts in Vancouver, Canada

Background Comorbidity of depression, heart disease, and migraine has been observed in clinical practice, while ambient air pollution has been identified among different risk factors for these health conditions. Suicide attempts and ideations as the result of depression may be linked to air pollution exposure. Therefore the effects of ambient air pollution on emergency department (ED) visits for suicide attempts were investigated. Methods Emergency visit data were collected in a hospital in Vancouver, Canada. The generalized linear mixed models technique was applied in the analysis of these data. A natural hierarchical structure of the data was used to define the clusters, with days nested in a 3-level structure (day of week, month, year). Poisson models were fitted to the clustered counts of ED visits with a single air pollutant, temperature and relative humidity. In addition, the case-crossover methodology was used with the same data for comparison. The analysis was performed by gender (all, males, females) and month (all: January-December, warm: April-September, cold: October-March). Results Both hierarchical and case-crossover methods confirmed positive and statistically significant associations among carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ), sulphur dioxide (SO 2 ), and particulate matter (PM 10 ) for all suicide attempts in the cold period. The largest increase was observed for males in the cold period for a 1-day lagged exposure to NO 2 , with an excess risk of 23.9% (95% CI: 7.8, 42.4) and odds ratio of 1.21 (95% CI: 1.03, 1.41). In warm months the associations were not statistically significant, and the highest positive value was obtained for ozone lagged by 1 day. Conclusion The results indicate a potential association between air pollution and emergency department visits for suicide attempts

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

The MicroArray Quality Control (MAQC)-II study of common practices for the development and validation of microarray-based predictive models

Gene expression data from microarrays are being applied to predict preclinical and clinical endpoints, but the reliability of these predictions has not been established. In the MAQC-II project, 36 independent teams analyzed six microarray data sets to generate predictive models for classifying a sample with respect to one of 13 endpoints indicative of lung or liver toxicity in rodents, or of breast cancer, multiple myeloma or neuroblastoma in humans. In total, >30,000 models were built using many combinations of analytical methods. The teams generated predictive models without knowing the biological meaning of some of the endpoints and, to mimic clinical reality, tested the models on data that had not been used for training. We found that model performance depended largely on the endpoint and team proficiency and that different approaches generated models of similar performance. The conclusions and recommendations from MAQC-II should be useful for regulatory agencies, study committees and independent investigators that evaluate methods for global gene expression analysis. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.0SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe