Disease prediction review

OBJECTIVE: Intestinal ultrasound (IUS) is an emerging modality for assessing disease activity, extent, and treatment response in ulcerative colitis. This study aimed to evaluate the potential of IUS in predicting severe flares, the need for rescue therapy (corticosteroid failure), and colectomy in patients with ulcerative colitis. METHODS: We conducted a retrospective review of medical records, collecting clinical and IUS data. The Milan Ultrasound Criteria (MUC) score was used to assess ulcerative colitis severity...

Hepatocellular carcinoma is one of the most common cancers worldwide. Despite progress in treatment, recurrence after radical treatment is common, and the prognosis remains poor for patients with advanced disease. Therefore, there is a need to identify prognostic and predictive factors for the response to therapy or more intensive surveillance or treatment. Because the tumor microenvironment plays a crucial role in the development of cancer and metastasis, it is a crucial need to understand processes that are involved in carcinogenesis...

Islet autoantibodies predict type 1 diabetes (T1D) but can be transient in murine and human T1D and are not thought to be directly pathogenic. Rather, these autoantibodies signal B cell activity as antigen-presenting cells (APCs) that present islet autoantigen to diabetogenic T cells to promote T1D pathogenesis. Disrupting B cell APC function prevents T1D in mouse models and has shown promise in clinical trials. Autoantigen-specific B cells thus hold potential as sophisticated T1D biomarkers and therapeutic targets...

Acute pancreatitis (AP) is a sudden-onset inflammatory disease of the pancreas. The severity of AP is classified into mild, moderate, and severe categories based on the presence and persistence of organ failure. Severe acute pancreatitis (SAP) can be associated with significant morbidity and mortality. It requires early recognition for appropriate timely management. Prognostic scores for predicting SAP incorporating many clinical, laboratory, and radiological parameters have been developed in the past. However, all of these prognostic scores have low positive predictive value for SAP and some of these scores require >24 h for assessment...

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a debilitating and prevalent mental disorder with a high disease burden. Despite a wide array of different treatment options, many patients do not respond to initial treatment attempts. Selection of the most appropriate treatment remains a significant clinical challenge in psychiatry, highlighting the need for the development of biomarkers with predictive utility. Recently, the epigenetic modification DNA methylation (DNAm) has emerged to be of great interest as a potential predictor of MDD treatment outcomes...

INTRODUCTION: Low cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) increases the risk of cardiovascular disease by up to 8-fold, and is one of the strongest predictors of mortality. Some studies demonstrate impaired CRF in people living with type 1 and type 2 diabetes compared to those without diabetes, while others demonstrate no diabetes-associated impairment in CRF. PURPOSE: We aimed to determine whether diabetes can influence CRF, and if so, identify clinical associations underlying diabetes-associated exercise impairments...

STUDY DESIGN: This was a retrospective study. PURPOSE: This study aimed to assess the value of the Spinal Infection Treatment Evaluation (SITE) score, Brighton Spondylodiscitis Score (BSDS), and Pola classification to predict the need for surgical intervention in patients with spondylodiscitis. OVERVIEW OF LITERATURE: Spondylodiscitis is a rare disease, and the prediction of its outcome is crucial in the decision-making process. METHODS: All case records were assessed to extract information on the American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA), Visual Analog Scale (VAS), and Japanese Orthopedic Association Back Pain Evaluation Questionnaire (JOABPEQ) scores before and after surgery...

Scientific progress heavily relies on rigorous research, adherence to scientific standards, and transparent reporting. Animal models play a crucial role in advancing biomedical research, especially in the field of gene therapy. Animal models are vital tools in preclinical research, allowing scientists to predict outcomes and understand complex biological processes. The selection of appropriate animal models is critical, considering factors such as physiological and pathophysiological similarities, availability, and ethical considerations...

BACKGROUND: To determine the prevalence, clinical characteristics, and independent predictors of uveitic macular edema (UME) in patients with intermediate, posterior and panuveitis. METHODS: We retrospectively reviewed the records of patients with intermediate, posterior, and panuveitis who underwent macular assessment using optical coherence tomography between January 2015 and February 2020. The prevalence of UME and clinical characteristics of the patients were described...

Circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) consists of DNA fragments released from cancer cells into the blood circulation with quick clearance. Analysis of ctDNA can enable real-time assessment of the presence of cancer cells and their genomic characteristics. Therefore, ctDNA is expected to be one of the most useful biomarkers for cancer. In recent years, several ultra-sensitive assays for ctDNA analysis have been developed, and many clinical trials are using these assays to investigate the efficacy of ctDNA-based therapeutic strategies...

Thromboembolic diseases including arterial and venous thrombosis are common causes of morbidity and mortality globally. Thrombosis frequently recurs and can also complicate many inflammatory conditions through the process of 'thrombo-inflammation,' as evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Current candidate biomarkers for thrombosis prediction, such as D-dimer, have poor predictive efficacy. This limits our capacity to tailor anticoagulation duration individually and may expose lower risk individuals to undue bleeding risk...

OBJECTIVE: To determine the incidence of mortality and its predictors among pulmonary TB (PTB) survivors treated at a rural Ugandan tertiary hospital. METHODS: We conducted a retrospective chart review of data between 2013 and 2023. We included all people that met the WHO's definition of tuberculosis cure and traced them or their next of kin to determine vital status (alive/deceased). We estimated the cumulative incidence of mortality per 1,000 population, crude all-cause mortality rate per 1,000 person-years, and median years of potential life lost (YPLL) for deceased individuals...

The success of genome-wide association studies (GWASs) in uncovering genetic variants associated with complex eye diseases has paved the way for the development of risk prediction approaches based on disease genetics. Derived from GWAS data, polygenic risk scores (PRSs) have been emerging as a promising indicator of an individual's genetic liability to disease. In this review, we recap the current progress of PRS development and utility across a range of common eye diseases. While illustrating the prediction accuracy of PRSs and their valuable role in risk stratification for certain eye diseases, we also address PRSs' uncertain implementation in clinical settings at this stage, particularly in circumstances where limited treatment options are available...

Targeting the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) pathway represents a potentially novel approach to treat basal cell carcinoma (BCC), but activation of this pathway has not been well described in human BCCs. The purpose of this study was to assess whether mTOR pathway activation occurs in BCCs (both sporadic and syndromic) and report a case of a patient with Gorlin syndrome (GS) whose clinically suspicious BCCs responded to mTOR inhibition through topical sirolimus treatment. After Stanford Institutional Review Board Approval, archived BCCs from patients with GS (n = 25), sporadic BCCs (n = 35), and control tissues were subjected to immunohistochemical analysis for the activation of mTOR pathway, and immunohistochemical staining intensity was evaluated by a dermatopathologist...

PURPOSE: We performed this systematic review and meta-analysis to explore the impact of preoperative sarcopenia on postoperative complication risks after head and neck cancer (HNC) surgery. METHODS: We identified eligible studies by searching Ovid-MEDLINE, Ovid-Embase, EBM Reviews-Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Web of Science Core Collection, and Scopus. This systematic review was performed in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidance...

Craniosynostosis refers to the premature fusion of one or more of the fibrous cranial sutures connecting the bones of the skull. Machine learning (ML) is an emerging technology and its application to craniosynostosis detection and management is underexplored. This systematic review aims to evaluate the application of ML techniques in the diagnosis, severity assessment, and predictive modeling of craniosynostosis. A comprehensive search was conducted on the PubMed and Google Scholar databases using predefined keywords related to craniosynostosis and ML...

Gaucher disease (GD) is an autosomal recessively inherited lysosomal storage disorder caused by biallelic pathological variants in the GBA1 gene. Patients present along a broad clinical spectrum, and phenotypes are often difficult to predict based on genotype alone. The variant R463C (p.Arg502Cys) exemplifies this challenge. To better characterize its different clinical presentations, we examined the records of 25 current and historical patients evaluated at the National Institutes of Health. Nine patients were classified as GD1, 14 were classified as GD3, and two had an ambiguous diagnosis between GD1 and GD3...

Current predictors of clinical outcomes after pulmonary thromboendarterectomy (PTE) in patients with chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH) are largely limited to preoperative clinical characteristics. N-terminal-pro-brain natriuretic peptide (NT-pro-BNP), a biomarker of right ventricular dysfunction, has not yet been well described as one such predictor. From 2017 to 2021, 816 patients with CTEPH referred to the University of California, San Diego for PTE were reviewed for differences in NT-pro-BNP to predict preoperative characteristics and postoperative outcomes up to 30 days post-PTE...

Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) can cure malignant and nonmalignant hematological disorders. From 1983 to 2022, Taiwan performed more than 10,000 HSCT transplants. The Taiwan Blood and Marrow Transplantation Registry collects clinical information to gather everyone's experience and promote the advances of HSCT in Taiwan to gather everyone's experience and promote advances of HSCT in Taiwan. Compared with matched sibling donors, transplants from matched unrelated donors exhibited a trend of superior survival...

RATIONALE & OBJECTIVE: Long pentraxin-3 (PTX-3) serves as a biomarker for prognosticating adverse clinical outcomes in individuals with chronic kidney disease (CKD). The objective of the current meta-analysis was to evaluate the prognostic efficacy of PTX-3 in patients with CKD. In addition, we compared the prognostic effectiveness of PTX-3 and the short pentraxin C-reactive protein (CRP) in the identical cohort of patients with CKD. STUDY DESIGN: A systematic review and meta-analysis...