Search results

PURPOSE: To investigate the patterns of healthcare use (HCU) at the last year of life in persons with osteoarthritis (OA).METHODS: Using linked registers, we identified persons aged≥ 65 years who died during 2003-2014 and were resided in the Skåne region during 5-year prior to death. Among these, we randomly matched decedents with a principal OA diagnosis prior to the last year of life (OA cohort,

AIM: Self-expanding metallic stents (SEMS) as bridge to surgery have been questioned due to the fear of perforation and tumour spread. This study aimed to compare SEMS and stoma as bridge to surgery in acute malignant large bowel obstruction in the Swedish population. METHOD: Medical records of patients identified via the Swedish Colorectal Cancer Register 2007-2009 were collected and scrutinized.

The emergence of fourth-generation synchrotrons is prompting the development of new systems for experimental control and data acquisition. However, as general control systems are designed to cover a wide set of instruments and techniques, they tend to become large and complicated, at the cost of experimental flexibility. Here we present Contrast, a simple Python framework for interacting with beam

Changes in mitochondrial DNA copy number (mtDNA-CN) and telomere length have, separately, been proposed as risk factors for various cancer types. However, those results are conflicting. Here, mtDNA-CN and relative telomere length were measured in 3225 middle-aged women included in a large population-based prospective cohort. The baseline mtDNA-CN in patients with prevalent breast cancer was signif

BACKGROUND: Alcohol is an established risk factor for several cancers, but modest alcohol-cancer associations may be missed due to measurement error in self-reported assessments. Biomarkers of habitual alcohol intake may provide novel insight into the relationship between alcohol and cancer risk.METHODS: Untargeted metabolomics was used to identify metabolites correlated with self-reported habitua

Purpose Despite data showing breathlessness to be more prevalent in older adults, we have little detail about the severity or multidimensional characteristics of breathlessness and other self-reported measures (such as quality of life and other cardiorespiratory-related symptoms) in this group at the population level. We also know little about the relationship between multidimensional breathlessne

Background In cohorts with voluntary participation, participants may not be representative of the underlying population, leading to distorted estimates. If the relevant sources of selective participation are observed, it is however possible to restore the representativeness by reweighting the sample to resemble the target population. So far, few studies in epidemiology have applied reweighting bas

BACKGROUND: Different adiposity traits may be causally related to hypertension in different ways. By using genetic variants as randomly allocated proxies for studying the effect of modifying adiposity traits, the Mendelian randomization approach can be used to investigate this. METHODS AND RESULTS: In this study, we used 4 different genetic risk scores (GRS; GRS-BMI 565, GRS-WHR 324, GRS-VAT 208,

BACKGROUND: Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are of great help when researchers try to understand the nature of causal relationships and the consequences of conditioning on different variables. One fundamental feature of causal relations that has not been incorporated into the standard DAG framework is interaction, i.e. when the effect of one variable (on a chosen scale) depends on the value that an

Large-scale human exome sequencing can identify rare protein-coding variants with a large impact on complex traits such as body adiposity. We sequenced the exomes of 645,626 individuals from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Mexico and estimated associations of rare coding variants with body mass index (BMI). We identified 16 genes with an exome-wide significant association with BMI, incl

C-terminal α-amidation is the final and essential step in the biosynthesis of several peptide hormones. Peptidylglycine α-amidating monooxygenase (PAM) is the only known enzyme to catalyse this reaction. PAM amidating activity (AMA) is known to be present in human circulation, but its physiological role and significance as a clinical biomarker remains unclear. We developed a PAM-specific amidation

Improvement of structural efficiency in various materials is critically important for sustainable society development and the efficient use of natural resources. Recently, a lot of attention in science and engineering has been attracted to heterogeneous-structure materials because of high structural efficiency. However, strategies for the efficient design of heterogenous structures are still in th

Acute ischemic stroke affects men and women differently. In particular, women are often reported to experience higher acute stroke severity than men. We derived a low-dimensional representation of anatomical stroke lesions and designed a Bayesian hierarchical modeling framework tailored to estimate possible sex differences in lesion patterns linked to acute stroke severity (National Institute of H

The mast cell granule metalloprotease CPA3 is proposed to have important tissue homeostatic functions. However, the basal CPA3 mRNA and protein expression among mast cell populations has remained poorly investigated. Using a novel histology-based methodology that yields quantitative data on mRNA and protein expression at a single-cell level, the present study maps CPA3 mRNA and protein throughout

Background and aims: Neurotensin (NT) is an intestinal peptide released after fat ingestion, which regulates appetite and facilitates lipid absorption. Elevated plasma levels of its stable precursor pro-neurotensin (pro-NT) are associated with type 2 diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular mortality in adult populations; no data on pro-NT and metabolic disease are available in children. Aim of the st

Exposure to air pollution is associated with adverse health effects in humans, with special concern for exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5). The physicochemical properties of aerosols impact the health effects. Considering that we spend approximately 90% of our time indoors, it is important to gain increased understanding of indoor aerosol concentrations and properties. The overall aim of

Importance: Reflex syncope is the major cause of transient loss of consciousness, which affects one-third of the population, but effective treatment for individuals with severe syncope is lacking. Better understanding of reflex syncope predisposition may offer new therapeutic solutions.Objectives: To determine the familial risk of syncope in first-, second-, and third-degree relatives of affected

Gaining a mechanistic understanding of the expansion and maturation program of natural killer (NK) cells will provide opportunities for harnessing their inflammation-inducing and oncolytic capacity for therapeutic purposes. Here, we demonstrated that ID2, a transcriptional regulatory protein constitutively expressed in NK cells, supports NK cell effector maturation by controlling the amplitude and