Front Endocrinol (Lausanne)
December 2021
Reliable protein markers for pre-diabetes in humans are not clinically available. In order to identify novel and reliable protein markers for pre-diabetes in humans, healthy volunteers and patients diagnosed with pre-diabetes and stroke were recruited for blood collection. Blood samples were collected from healthy and pre-diabetic subjects 12 h after fasting.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMotivation: Heatmap is a popular visualization technique in biology and related fields. In this study, we extend heatmaps within the framework of matrix visualization (MV) by incorporating a covariate adjustment process through the estimation of conditional correlations. MV can explore the embedded information structure of high-dimensional large-scale datasets effectively without dimension reduction.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudy Question: What are the potential endocrine characteristics related to risk and severity of metabolic disturbances in women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS)?
Summary Answer: Women with PCOS could be subtyped into four subgroups according to heterogeneous endocrine characteristics and the major predictive endocrine factors for metabolic aberrations among different subgroups were free androgen index (FAI) and luteinizing hormone (LH) levels.
What Is Known Already: Women diagnosed with PCOS present with highly heterogeneous phenotypes, including endocrine and metabolic aberrations. Different strategies have been proposed to predict the metabolic outcomes but whether the endocrine factors can solely predict the metabolic aberrations is still inconclusive.
Biclustering has emerged as an important approach to the analysis of large-scale datasets. A biclustering technique identifies a subset of rows that exhibit similar patterns on a subset of columns in a data matrix. Many biclustering methods have been proposed, and most, if not all, algorithms are developed to detect regions of "coherence" patterns.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Morus alba has long been used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat inflammatory diseases; however, the scientific basis for such usage and the mechanism of action are not well understood. This study investigated the action of M. alba on leukocyte migration, one key step in inflammation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Researches have been conducted for the identification of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) by generating and mining of cDNA expressed sequence tags (ESTs) for more than a decade. Although the availability of public databases make possible the comprehensive mining of DEGs among the ESTs from multiple tissue types, existing studies usually employed statistics suitable only for two categories. Multi-class test has been developed to enable the finding of tissue specific genes, but subsequent search for cancer genes involves separate two-category test only on the ESTs of the tissue of interest.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Several self-report instruments were developed to capture psychotic prodrome, and were claimed to have good predictive validity. The feasibility of screening is questionable considering the heterogeneity of the targeted populations and the negative ramifications of false positive identification. This study developed a questionnaire using data covering a wide range of clinical characteristics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground & Aims: Unusual hypervascularity is a hallmark of human hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Although microRNA-214 (miR-214) is upregulated in other human cancers, it is downregulated in HCC. We elucidated the biological and clinical significance of miR-214 downregulation in HCC.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Epidermal growth factor receptor-tyrosine kinase inhibitors are used as effective first-line and salvage therapy in the treatment of advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients in East Asia. The objective of this study was to compare the efficacy of gefitinib and erlotinib in Taiwanese patients with advanced NSCLC.
Methods: Clinical data of NSCLC patients treated with gefitinib or erlotinib from January 2004 to December 2008 were collected retrospectively.
Echinacea preparations were the top-selling herbal supplements or medicines in the past decade; however, there is still frequent misidentification or substitution of the Echinacea plant species in the commercial Echinacea products with not well chemically defined compositions in a specific preparation. In this report, a comparative metabolomics study, integrating supercritical fluid extraction, gas chromatography/mass spectrometry and data mining, demonstrates that the three most used medicinal Echinacea species, Echinacea purpurea, E. pallida, and E.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The hierarchical clustering tree (HCT) with a dendrogram 1 and the singular value decomposition (SVD) with a dimension-reduced representative map 2 are popular methods for two-way sorting the gene-by-array matrix map employed in gene expression profiling. While HCT dendrograms tend to optimize local coherent clustering patterns, SVD leading eigenvectors usually identify better global grouping and transitional structures.
Results: This study proposes a flipping mechanism for a conventional agglomerative HCT using a rank-two ellipse (R2E, an improved SVD algorithm for sorting purpose) seriation by Chen 3 as an external reference.
Background: Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a recent epidemic human disease, is caused by a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV). First reported in Asia, SARS quickly spread worldwide through international travelling. As of July 2003, the World Health Organization reported a total of 8,437 people afflicted with SARS with a 9.
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