Prevalence of hyponatremia in acute medical admissions in tropical Asia Pacific Australia

OBJECTIVE@#To determine prevalence of hyponatremia in acute medical admissions in Northern Australasia.@*METHODS@#We studied 469 consecutive acute medical admissions to a hospital in Australia's Far North Queensland during the colder months of June and July 2012. Prevalence of hyponatremia and its relationship with gender, age, diagnosis and prognosis in acute medical admissions were investigated.@*RESULTS@#On admission, hyponatremia (plasma sodium <136 mmol/L) was present in 39.4% of patients, with mild (130-135 mmol/L), moderate (126-129 mmol/L) and severe (<126 mmol/L) hyponatremia being present in 25.2%, 10.7% and 3.6% respectively. Overall, adding together admission hyponatremia with that developing during admission, 45.2% of patients were affected with 11.5% moderate hyponatremia cases and 4.1% severe ones. Hypokalemia and hyperkalemia were present in 17.0% and 18.1%, respectively. Overall, 275/469 patients (58.6%) presented with an electrolyte abnormality. There were significant correlations of hyponatremia with age but not with gender and in-hospital mortality. Prevalence of hyponatremia was high across all diagnostic categories.@*CONCLUSIONS@#The prevalence of hyponatremia appears to be high in the tropical North Australian population, being the highest prevalence reported amongst acute hospital admissions. The previously reported correlations with age and mortality do appear to hold good for this population with a high prevalence of electrolyte disorders. Further prospective analysis on a larger population in the area is needed to confirm our findings.

Disease-specific induced pluripotent stem cells: a platform for human disease modeling and drug discovery

The generation of disease-specific induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines from patients with incurable diseases is a promising approach for studying disease mechanisms and drug screening. Such innovation enables to obtain autologous cell sources in regenerative medicine. Herein, we report the generation and characterization of iPSCs from fibroblasts of patients with sporadic or familial diseases, including Parkinson's disease (PD), Alzheimer's disease (AD), juvenile-onset, type I diabetes mellitus (JDM), and Duchenne type muscular dystrophy (DMD), as well as from normal human fibroblasts (WT). As an example to modeling disease using disease-specific iPSCs, we also discuss the previously established childhood cerebral adrenoleukodystrophy (CCALD)- and adrenomyeloneuropathy (AMN)-iPSCs by our group. Through DNA fingerprinting analysis, the origins of generated disease-specific iPSC lines were identified. Each iPSC line exhibited an intense alkaline phosphatase activity, expression of pluripotent markers, and the potential to differentiate into all three embryonic germ layers: the ectoderm, endoderm, and mesoderm. Expression of endogenous pluripotent markers and downregulation of retrovirus-delivered transgenes [OCT4 (POU5F1), SOX2, KLF4, and c-MYC] were observed in the generated iPSCs. Collectively, our results demonstrated that disease-specific iPSC lines characteristically resembled hESC lines. Furthermore, we were able to differentiate PD-iPSCs, one of the disease-specific-iPSC lines we generated, into dopaminergic (DA) neurons, the cell type mostly affected by PD. These PD-specific DA neurons along with other examples of cell models derived from disease-specific iPSCs would provide a powerful platform for examining the pathophysiology of relevant diseases at the cellular and molecular levels and for developing new drugs and therapeutic regimens.

Distribution of hepatitis B virus genotypes in Korea / 대한간학회지

BACKGROUND/AIMS: Considering the incidence of prevailing hepatitis B virus (HBV) genotypes in neighboring nations, the predominance of genotype C in Korea is exceptional and needs to be confirmed by nationwide investigation. METHODS: A total of 510 HBsAg (+) or HBeAg (+) serum samples was collected from subjects in several cities and harbors throughout the Korean peninsula for genotype (A-G)-specific multiplex PCR analysis. Another 40 serum samples from chronic HBV carriers from Iksan city were selected for sequencing of the entire HBV genome. Phylogenetic analysis was performed with 22 whole genomic sequences of Korean HBV strains enrolled in GenBank. RESULTS: An amplicon was found in 377 specimens and genotype C occupied 98.1% (370 cases); none of the other genotypes were found. A mixed pattern of genotypes B and C was seen in seven specimens (1.9%), of which five were tested using PCR targeting the X fragment; no genotype B bands were found. With the exception of 1 case, which was subgenotype A2, whole sequences of Korean HBV strains (n=62) belonged to subgenotype C2. CONCLUSIONS: The prevailing HBV genotype in Korea is C2; the other genotypes occur only rarely. Future studies should include confirmation of the detection of genotypes other than C.

Corrections: Distribution of hepatitis B virus genotypes in Korea / 대한간학회지

No abstract available.

Data Mining for High Dimensional Data in Drug Discovery and Development

Data mining differs primarily from traditional data analysis on an important dimension, namely the scale of the data. That is the reason why not only statistical but also computer science principles are needed to extract information from large data sets. In this paper we briefly review data mining, its characteristics, typical data mining algorithms, and potential and ongoing applications of data mining at biopharmaceutical industries. The distinguishing characteristics of data mining lie in its understandability, scalability, its problem driven nature, and its analysis of retrospective or observational data in contrast to experimentally designed data. At a high level one can identify three types of problems for which data mining is useful: description, prediction and search. Brief review of data mining algorithms include decision trees and rules, nonlinear classification methods, memory-based methods, model-based clustering, and graphical dependency models. Application areas covered are discovery compound libraries, clinical trial and disease management data, genomics and proteomics, structural databases for candidate drug compounds, and other applications of pharmaceutical relevance.

study of the effects of occupation, age, length of service, sex, marital status, type of job and method of payment on the number of spells and days of absence taken by an employee in a health authority

The 3,018 persons who were in continuous employment in a Health Authority from April 1974 to March 1976 formed the population for the study of independent variables, metric and non-metric, on the two dependent variables, number of spells and days of absence. The independent metric variables were age and length of service and the non-metric ones were sex, marital status, type of job [full or part-time], method of payment [weekly or monthly]. Because analysis of covariance could not determine whether interactions between metric and non-metric variables or between two metric variables had a significant effect, additional information was obtained from a multiple regression analysis with dummy variables. In this study, the effect of age on both the indicators of sickness absence [number of spells and days of absence] is not strong. Other variables rarely reached the 5% significance level, suggesting that any such effect is either very slight or may be due to random variations