Utility of the Dependence Scale in dementia: validity, meaningfulness, and health economic considerations.

Background: The concept of dependence has been proposed as a unified representation of disease severity to quantify and stage disease progression in a manner more informative to patients, caregivers, and healthcare providers.

Methods: This paper provides a review of the Dependence Scale (DS) as a quantitative measure of Alzheimer's disease severity, its properties as an outcome measure, a metric of disease progression, and a correlate of medical costs.

Results: The literature supports the notion that the DS is related to, but distinct from, key severity measures, including cognition, function, and behavior, and captures the full spectrum of patient needs.

Metabolomic Modularity Analysis (MMA) to Quantify Human Liver Perfusion Dynamics.

Large-scale -omics data are now ubiquitously utilized to capture and interpret global responses to perturbations in biological systems, such as the impact of disease states on cells, tissues, and whole organs. Metabolomics data, in particular, are difficult to interpret for providing physiological insight because predefined biochemical pathways used for analysis are inherently biased and fail to capture more complex network interactions that span multiple canonical pathways. In this study, we introduce a nov-el approach coined Metabolomic Modularity Analysis (MMA) as a graph-based algorithm to systematically identify metabolic modules of reactions enriched with metabolites flagged to be statistically significant.