Publications by authors named "Brunak S"

Lifestyle factors (LSFs) are increasingly recognized as instrumental in both the development and control of diseases. Despite their importance, there is a lack of methods to extract relations between LSFs and diseases from the literature, a step necessary to consolidate the currently available knowledge into a structured form. As simple co-occurrence-based relation extraction (RE) approaches are unable to distinguish between the different types of LSF-disease relations, context-aware models such as transformers are required to extract and classify these relations into specific relation types.

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The initial evaluation of stenosis during coronary angiography is typically performed by visual assessment. Visual assessment has limited accuracy compared to fractional flow reserve and quantitative coronary angiography, which are more time-consuming and costly. Applying deep learning might yield a faster and more accurate stenosis assessment.

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Background: Pregnancy is a complex biological process and serious complications can arise when the delicate balance between the maternal and semi-allogeneic fetal immune systems is disrupted or challenged. Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), pre-eclampsia, preterm birth, and low birth weight pose serious threats to maternal and fetal health. Identification of early biomarkers through an in-depth understanding of molecular mechanisms is critical for early intervention.

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Patients experiencing adverse drug events (ADE) from polypharmaceutical regimens present a huge challenge to modern healthcare. While computational efforts may reduce the incidence of these ADEs, current strategies are typically non-generalizable for standard healthcare systems. To address this, we carried out a retrospective study aimed at developing a statistical approach to detect and quantify potential ADEs.

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Background: The contributions of genetic and environmental risk factors to hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) are both poorly understood.

Objective: To identify sequence variants that associate with HS and determine the contribution of environmental risk factors and inflammatory diseases to HS pathogenesis.

Methods: A genome-wide association meta-analysis of 4814 HS cases (Denmark: 1977; Iceland: 1266; Finland: 800; UK: 569; and US: 202) and 1.

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Iron homoeostasis is tightly regulated, with hepcidin and soluble transferrin receptor (sTfR) playing significant roles. However, the genetic determinants of these traits and the biomedical consequences of iron homoeostasis variation are unclear. In a meta-analysis of 12 cohorts involving 91,675 participants, we found 43 genomic loci associated with either hepcidin or sTfR concentration, of which 15 previously unreported.

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The application of artificial intelligence methods to electronic patient records paves the way for large-scale analysis of multimodal data. Such population-wide data describing deep phenotypes composed of thousands of features are now being leveraged to create data-driven algorithms, which in turn has led to improved methods for early cancer detection and screening. Remaining challenges include establishment of infrastructures for prospective testing of such methods, ways to assess biases given the data, and gathering of sufficiently large and diverse datasets that reflect disease heterogeneities across populations.

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  • Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is a major cause of heart failure, and this study analyzes genetic factors by examining 14,256 DCM cases and 36,203 participants from the UK Biobank for related traits.
  • Researchers discovered 80 genomic risk loci and pinpointed 62 potential effector genes tied to DCM, including some linked to rare variants.
  • The study uses advanced transcriptomics to explore how cellular functions contribute to DCM, showing that polygenic scores can help predict the disease in the general population and emphasize the importance of genetic testing and development of precise treatments.
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  • Researchers analyzed genetic data from nearly 130,000 cancer patients and over 730,000 healthy controls to identify variants linked to cancer risk across 22 cancer types.
  • Four high-risk genes were found: BIK (prostate cancer), ATG12 (colorectal cancer), TG (thyroid cancer), and CMTR2 (lung cancer and melanoma).
  • Additionally, two genes, AURKB (general cancer risk) and PPP1R15A (breast cancer), were associated with decreased cancer risk, indicating potential pathways for cancer prevention strategies.
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  • The CCR5 receptor is linked to susceptibility to Staphylococcus aureus leukotoxin ED, and researchers investigated the effects of the CCR5Δ32 deletion on S. aureus infection and nasal carriage in a large Danish blood donor study.
  • Analysis involved over 95,000 participants, examining various health outcomes and inflammatory markers through sophisticated statistical methods.
  • Findings indicated that CCR5Δ32 does not significantly affect the risk of S. aureus-related infections or nasal carriage, although it was associated with higher levels of certain chemokines in individuals with the deletion.
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Background: Signal transducer and activator of transcription 6 (STAT6) is central to type 2 (T2) inflammation, and common noncoding variants at the STAT6 locus associate with various T2 inflammatory traits, including diseases, and its pathway is widely targeted in asthma treatment.

Objective: We sought to test the association of a rare missense variant in STAT6, p.L406P, with T2 inflammatory traits, including the risk of asthma and allergic diseases, and to characterize its functional consequences in cell culture.

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Motivation: Despite lifestyle factors (LSFs) being increasingly acknowledged in shaping individual health trajectories, particularly in chronic diseases, they have still not been systematically described in the biomedical literature. This is in part because no named entity recognition (NER) system exists, which can comprehensively detect all types of LSFs in text. The task is challenging due to their inherent diversity, lack of a comprehensive LSF classification for dictionary-based NER, and lack of a corpus for deep learning-based NER.

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  • The study investigates the risk factors and comorbidities related to trigeminal neuralgia, a painful condition affecting facial nerves, highlighting its higher prevalence in women.
  • Utilizing data from 7.2 million individuals in Denmark from 1994 to 2018, researchers compared those with trigeminal neuralgia against 10,000 controls to find associated diseases, revealing 27 potential comorbidities linked with the condition.
  • It was found that treatment with carbamazepine or oxcarbazepine heightened the risk of ischemic stroke, indicating that healthcare providers should assess vascular risks in patients diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia.
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Objective: To determine the association between human leukocyte antigen (HLA) alleles and migraine, migraine subtypes, and sex-specific factors.

Background: It has long been hypothesized that inflammation contributes to migraine pathophysiology. This study examined the association between migraine and alleles in the HLA system, a key player in immune response and genetic diversity.

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  • Researchers are studying type 2 diabetes, which happens when there is too much sugar in the blood, to see how certain substances in the body, called metabolites, are connected to it.
  • They looked at 3,000 blood samples and analyzed 911 metabolites to find out how these substances relate to blood sugar levels.
  • They discovered several metabolites that are different in people with normal blood sugar, those with prediabetes, and those with type 2 diabetes, mainly focusing on specific amino acids and fats.
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  • The study aims to investigate the genetic factors associated with accessory atrioventricular pathways (APs) and related heart rhythm disorders using a genome-wide association study (GWAS).
  • It involved analyzing genetic data from over 1,200,000 control individuals and 2,310 individuals with APs from multiple countries and various health databases.
  • Key findings revealed three significant genetic variants linked to APs, particularly in specific genes (CCDC141 and SCN10A), with implications for understanding conditions like paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia (PSVT).
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Quantifying the contribution of genetics and environmental effects on disease initiation and progression, as well as the shared genetics of different diseases, is vital for the understanding of the disease etiology of multimorbidities. In this study, we leverage nationwide Danish registries to provide a granular atlas of the genetic origin of disease phenotypes for a cohort of all Danes 1978-2018 with partially known pedigree (n = 6.3 million).

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Disease trajectories, defined as sequential, directional disease associations, have become an intense research field driven by the availability of electronic population-wide healthcare data and sufficient computational power. Here, we provide an overview of disease trajectory studies with a focus on European work, including ontologies used as well as computational methodologies for the construction of disease trajectories. We also discuss different applications of disease trajectories from descriptive risk identification to disease progression, patient stratification, and personalized predictions using machine learning.

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Aims/hypothesis: Metabolic risk factors and plasma biomarkers for diabetes have previously been shown to change prior to a clinical diabetes diagnosis. However, these markers only cover a small subset of molecular biomarkers linked to the disease. In this study, we aimed to profile a more comprehensive set of molecular biomarkers and explore their temporal association with incident diabetes.

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  • Early pregnancy bleeding and postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) present significant risks to maternal health, with PPH being the leading cause of maternal death and early bleeding often linked to pregnancy loss.
  • A meta-analysis identified five genetic loci associated with PPH, highlighting candidate genes (HAND2, TBX3, RAP2C/FRMD7) that interact with progesterone receptors, suggesting a connection between PPH and progesterone signaling issues.
  • While bleeding in early pregnancy didn't show specific genetic signals, it was strongly correlated with other human traits, indicating it may be influenced by multiple genetic and possibly socio-economic factors not yet fully understood.
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Aims: Heterogeneity in the rate of β-cell loss in newly diagnosed type 1 diabetes patients is poorly understood and creates a barrier to designing and interpreting disease-modifying clinical trials. Integrative analyses of baseline multi-omics data obtained after the diagnosis of type 1 diabetes may provide mechanistic insight into the diverse rates of disease progression after type 1 diabetes diagnosis.

Methods: We collected samples in a pan-European consortium that enabled the concerted analysis of five different omics modalities in data from 97 newly diagnosed patients.

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Aims/hypothesis: The gut microbiome is implicated in the disease process leading to clinical type 1 diabetes, but less is known about potential changes in the gut microbiome after the diagnosis of type 1 diabetes and implications in glucose homeostasis. We aimed to analyse potential associations between the gut microbiome composition and clinical and laboratory data during a 2 year follow-up of people with newly diagnosed type 1 diabetes, recruited to the Innovative approaches to understanding and arresting type 1 diabetes (INNODIA) study. In addition, we analysed the microbiome composition in initially unaffected family members, who progressed to clinical type 1 diabetes during or after their follow-up for 4 years.

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