A new gene ontology-based measure for the functional similarity of gene products / 中华医学杂志(英文版)

<p><b>BACKGROUND</b>Although biomedical ontologies have standardized the representation of gene products across species and databases, a method for determining the functional similarities of gene products has not yet been developed.</p><p><b>METHODS</b>We proposed a new semantic similarity measure based on Gene Ontology that considers the semantic influences from all of the ancestor terms in a graph. Our measure was compared with Resnik's measure in two applications, which were based on the association of the measure used with the gene co-expression and the protein-protein interactions.</p><p><b>RESULTS</b>The results showed a considerable association between the semantic similarity and the expression correlation and between the semantic similarity and the protein-protein interactions, and our measure performed the best overall.</p><p><b>CONCLUSION</b>These results revealed the potential value of our newly proposed semantic similarity measure in studying the functional relevance of gene products.</p>

Concurrent chemoradiotherapy versus radiotherapy alone for locoregionally advanced nasopharyngeal carcinoma: a meta-analysis / 中华耳鼻咽喉头颈外科杂志

<p><b>OBJECTIVE</b>To determine the value of concurrent chemoradiotherapy in patients with locoregionally advanced nasopharyngeal carcinoma from the mainland of China.</p><p><b>METHODS</b>Data were extracted from randomized trials comparing chemotherapy plus radiotherapy with radiotherapy alone in locally advanced nasopharyngeal carcinoma. Actuarial rates of survival and distant metastases were calculated. The followed electronic databases were searched the Chinese Biomedicine database, Pubmed, Medline, Embase and Cochrane library; Data were extracted by tow reviewers and Review manager 4.1 software was applied for statistical analysis.</p><p><b>RESULTS</b>Eighteen trials with 1993 patients were include according to the including criterion. The 3-year overall survival rate of the chemoradiotherapy group and the radiotherapy group were 68.47% and 56.38% respectively, and the 5-year overall survival rate of the two groups above were 51.91% and 41.09% respectively, while the distant metastases rate of the chemoradiotherapy group and the radiotherapy group were 26.19% and 38.71% respectively. The result demonstrated that chemoradiotherapy increased overall survival by 12% at 3 years, and 11% at 5 years after treatment. After chemoradiotherapy, the rate of distant metastasis was reduce by 12%.</p><p><b>CONCLUSIONS</b>In patients with locoregionally advanced nasopharyngeal carcinoma, chemoradiotherapy significantly improves overall survival at 3 years, and 5 years compared with radiotherapy alone.</p>