Multi-Omics and Its Clinical Application in Hepatocellular Carcinoma: Current Progress and Future Opportunities / 中国医学科学杂志(英文版)

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the sixth most common malignancy and the fourth leading cause of cancer related death worldwide. China covers over half of cases, leading HCC to be a vital threaten to public health. Despite advances in diagnosis and treatments, high recurrence rate remains a major obstacle in HCC management. Multi-omics currently facilitates surveillance, precise diagnosis, and personalized treatment decision making in clinical setting. Non-invasive radiomics utilizes preoperative radiological imaging to reflect subtle pixel-level pattern changes that correlate to specific clinical outcomes. Radiomics has been widely used in histopathological diagnosis prediction, treatment response evaluation, and prognosis prediction. High-throughput sequencing and gene expression profiling enabled genomics and proteomics to identify distinct transcriptomic subclasses and recurrent genetic alterations in HCC, which would reveal the complex multistep process of the pathophysiology. The accumulation of big medical data and the development of artificial intelligence techniques are providing new insights for our better understanding of the mechanism of HCC via multi-omics, and show potential to convert surgical/intervention treatment into an antitumorigenic one, which would greatly advance precision medicine in HCC management.

Epidemiological prospective studies on physical activities and the risk of colon cancer: a Meta-analysis / 中华流行病学杂志

Objective To explore the relationship between physical activity(PA) and the risk of colon cancer. Methods Cohort studies on physical activity and risk of colon cancer were identified by searching MEDLINE, EMBASE, Chinese Bio-medicine and Chinese Wanfang databases from January 1979 to December 2009. Results from the individual studies were synthetically combined in our study. Inverse variance weighting was used in fixed effects model and the random effects estimate was based on the DerSimonian-Laird method. Variance-weighted least squares method was used for trend test of summarized dose-response data. Results A total of 28 studies were included in our analysis. An inverse association between physical activities and the risk of colon cancer was observed with the relative risks (RR) as 0.75 [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.66-0.86] in males and 0.85(95%CI: 0.76-0.95)in females, respectively. However, the findings from those documents with high quality showed significant and borderline significant associations between PA and colon cancer in both males (RR=0.74, 95% CI: 0.61-0.90) and females (RR=0.99, 95% CI: 0.95-1.02). Meanwhile, the dose-response trend was not observed either in males (P=0.142) or in females (P=0.417). For men, the pooled RRs differed by subsites were 0.62(95%CI:0.45-0.85) and 0.74 (95%CI:0.56-0.99)for highest level PA, compared with lowest level PA in proximal colon and distal colon cancer,respectively. For women, the pooled RRs were 0.84 (95%CI: 0.69-1.01 ) in proximal colon and 0.75(95%CI: 0.53-1.05)in distal colon cancer, respectively. Conclusion These results added to the evidence for the protective effects in colon cancer among men and women.

A meta-analysis of cohort studies on the association between diabetes and the risk of primary liver cancer / 中华预防医学杂志

<p><b>OBJECTIVE</b>To investigate the association between diabetes and risks of primary liver cancer.</p><p><b>METHODS</b>A Meta-analysis was performed to estimate the pooled relative risk (RR) to evaluate the relationship between diabetes and the risk of primary liver cancer from cohort studies, which were identified by searching in Medline, Chinese CNKI and Wanfang databases from January 1989 to February 2010. A total of 28 publications were found according to this method. Adjusted RRs and their corresponding 95% confidence intervals (95%CI) were calculated by using the fixed-effect and random-effect model in our analysis. We also conducted a number of sub-groups analysis stratified by some important variables, such as source, gender, region and quality of study.</p><p><b>RESULTS</b>A total of 3800 cases of liver cancer and 3 672 248 study subjects from 14 prospective cohorts were included in our analysis. The pooled RR of primary liver cancer was 3.33 (95%CI: 1.82 - 6.10) for persons with diabetes when compared to subjects without diabetes. The results showed a significant association between diabetes and the risk of primary liver cancer based on these cohort studies. Subgroup analysis indicated that the pooled RRs for diabetes were 3.76 (95%CI: 1.69 - 8.38) in the population-based cohorts and 2.41 (1.34 - 4.32) in the hospital-based cohorts. In terms of the sex groups, the pooled RRs for diabetes were 2.32 (95%CI: 1.70 - 3.17) for males and 1.63 (95%CI: 1.08 - 2.47) for females, respectively.</p><p><b>CONCLUSION</b>As one of independent risk factors, diabetes was associated with an increased risk of primary liver cancer.</p>

Time trend analysis of incidence rate for nasopharyngeal carcinoma in urban Shanghai YANG / 中华流行病学杂志

Objective To explore the secular trend of incidence for nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) in urban Shanghai during 1973-2005. Methods The incidence data from the population-based cancer registries in Shanghai was used in our analysis. We calculated the crude incidence rates, age-adjusted incidence rates, trucated rates and cumulative rates of NPC. The annual percentage change (APC) was used as an estimate of the secular trend. Results Over 33 years, a total of 7889 incident NPC cases in urban Shanghai were registered for 5555 males and 2334 females, respectively. The incidence of NPC had remained stable in males during the period (APC=-0.250%, P= 0.340), but a decreasing trend was observed in females with an average reduction of -1.577% (P=0.000) per year. During the period of 1973-1976 to 2001-2005, the crude incidence rates changed from 4.56 to 6.18 and from 3.96 to 2.41 per 100 000 in males and females, and the age-adjusted rates from 4.12 to 3.96 and from 2.18 to 3.42 per 100 000 in males and females, respectively. Conclusion From 1973 to 2005, the incidence of NPC was stable in males while having a decline in females, indicating that further epidemioiogical study and prevention for NPC should be addressed.