Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and Their Impact on Substance Misuse & Overall Health

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) encompass a wide variety of distressing events, including emotional, physical, or sexual abuse; witnessing maternal domestic violence; or living with a household member who has a substance use disorder, is mentally ill or suicidal, or is currently or was ever incarcerated during the first 18 years of a child’s life. According to most recent estimates, nearly half of Indiana’s youth have experienced at least one ACE in their life. ACEs are linked to many risk behaviors, including substance use, which can adversely affect health outcomes

Substance Abuse Trends in Indiana: A 10-Year Perspective

Substance use is a significant public health problem in the United States. Excessive use of alcohol and drugs has been linked to increased morbidity and mortality from cardiovascular conditions; injuries and motor vehicle crashes; sexually transmitted and blood-borne illnesses, including HIV/AIDS and hepatitis B and C, resulting from risky sexual behaviors and/or injection drug use; pregnancy complications and neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS); and drug overdoses [5, 6]

The Impact of Parental Incarceration on Children’s Health & Development

The incarceration boom in the United States has resulted in high rates of parents serving time. According to recent estimates, one in ten Hoosier children has a parent who is or has been in prison or jail. Though incarceration is often treated as a discrete event, it is important to note that the time period extends both prior to and beyond the incarcerated phase (pre- and post-incarceration). Evidence on the relationship between parental incarceration and various children’s outcomes is inconsistent across the literature and often disappears when controlling for demographic and family characteristics. However, whether the relationship between parental incarceration and children’s health and development is causal or simply correlational, this population is at high risk for adverse outcomes and should be the target of interventions

Cross-Platform Normalization of Microarray and Rna-Seq Data for Machine Learning Applications

Large, publicly available gene expression datasets are often analyzed with the aid of machine learning algorithms. Although RNA-seq is increasingly the technology of choice, a wealth of expression data already exist in the form of microarray data. If machine learning models built from legacy data can be applied to RNA-seq data, larger, more diverse training datasets can be created and validation can be performed on newly generated data. We developed Training Distribution Matching (TDM), which transforms RNA-seq data for use with models constructed from legacy platforms. We evaluated TDM, as well as quantile normalization, nonparanormal transformation, and a simple log 2 transformation, on both simulated and biological datasets of gene expression. Our evaluation included both supervised and unsupervised machine learning approaches. We found that TDM exhibited consistently strong performance across settings and that quantile normalization also performed well in many circumstances. We also provide a TDM package for the R programming language

A Novel Multi-Network Approach Reveals Tissue-Specific Cellular Modulators of Fibrosis in Systemic Sclerosis

Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is a multi-organ autoimmune disease characterized by skin fibrosis. Internal organ involvement is heterogeneous. It is unknown whether disease mechanisms are common across all involved affected tissues or if each manifestation has a distinct underlying pathology.We used consensus clustering to compare gene expression profiles of biopsies from four SSc-affected tissues (skin, lung, esophagus, and peripheral blood) from patients with SSc, and the related conditions pulmonary fibrosis (PF) and pulmonary arterial hypertension, and derived a consensus disease-associate signature across all tissues. We used this signature to query tissue-specific functional genomic networks. We performed novel network analyses to contrast the skin and lung microenvironments and to assess the functional role of the inflammatory and fibrotic genes in each organ. Lastly, we tested the expression of macrophage activation state-associated gene sets for enrichment in skin and lung using a Wilcoxon rank sum test

Leveraging Global Gene Expression Patterns to Predict Expression of Unmeasured Genes

BackgroundLarge collections of paraffin-embedded tissue represent a rich resource to test hypotheses based on gene expression patterns; however, measurement of genome-wide expression is cost-prohibitive on a large scale. Using the known expression correlation structure within a given disease type (in this case, high grade serous ovarian cancer; HGSC), we sought to identify reduced sets of directly measured (DM) genes which could accurately predict the expression of a maximized number of unmeasured genes

Dietary Supplements and Nutraceuticals Under Investigation for COVID-19 Prevention and Treatment

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused global disruption and a significant loss of life. Existing treatments that can be repurposed as prophylactic and therapeutic agents could reduce the pandemic's devastation. Emerging evidence of potential applications in other therapeutic contexts has led to the investigation of dietary supplements and nutraceuticals for COVID-19. Such products include vitamin C, vitamin D, omega 3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, probiotics, and zinc, all of which are currently under clinical investigation. In this review, we critically appraise the evidence surrounding dietary supplements and nutraceuticals for the prophylaxis and treatment of COVID-19. Overall, further study is required before evidence-based recommendations can be formulated, but nutritional status plays a significant role in patient outcomes, and these products could help alleviate deficiencies. For example, evidence indicates that vitamin D deficiency may be associated with greater incidence of infection and severity of COVID-19, suggesting that vitamin D supplementation may hold prophylactic or therapeutic value. A growing number of scientific organizations are now considering recommending vitamin D supplementation to those at high risk of COVID-19. Because research in vitamin D and other nutraceuticals and supplements is preliminary, here we evaluate the extent to which these nutraceutical and dietary supplements hold potential in the COVID-19 crisis