National and Regional Rates of Chronic Diseases and All-Cause Mortality in Saudi Arabia-Analysis of the 2018 Household Health Survey Data.

The disease burden and mortality were estimated in Saudi Arabia between 2010 and 2017 but were unknown in 2018. This study aims to assess the 2018 national and regional rates of chronic diseases and all-cause mortality among the total and Saudi populations. In this descriptive cross-sectional study, we obtained data from 24,012 households from the 2018 household health survey. We included doctor-diagnosed chronic conditions such as diabetes mellitus (DM), hypertension (HTN), cardiovascular diseases (CAD), and cancer (CN). A secondary analysis was performed by the total and Saudi populations. Both citizens and residents comprised the total population. Makkah and Al-Medina had greater rates among the total population; however, Al-Baha and Ha'il had high rates of chronic diseases and related mortality in the Saudi population. Age-adjusted mortality rates were 286 per 100,000 population-year. The age-adjusted mortality rate among those aged 65 and above was 3428 per 100,000 population in the same age group. Men had a rate of 1779 per 100,000 men, which was higher than the rate of 1649 for women. In 2018, most citizens in Ha'il had DM, most Al-Baha had HTN and CAD, and most Al-Qassim had CN. People aged 65 and older had the highest death rate.

Metabolic syndrome is associated with an increased risk of falls in the elderly.

Numerous studies have investigated the causes of falls in the elderly. However, there is little information about metabolic syndrome (MS) as a risk factor for falls in older adults. No evaluations have given a qualitative overview of studies examining the relationship between MS and falls in the elderly. We did a literature search in electronic databases to look for studies that assessed a link between MS and falls among people over the age of 55 years. We found three studies of high quality. These included 2774 people with an average age of 72 years. Even after controlling for other risk factors, two studies found that MS was significantly associated with an older adult's 1.3-2.5-fold increased risk of falling. We found that MS and its independent components were strongly linked with falls among the elderly, even after correcting for numerous variables.

Reticulocyte Hemoglobin-Equivalent Potentially Detects, Diagnoses and Discriminates between Stages of Iron Deficiency with High Sensitivity and Specificity.

Background: Iron deficiency anemia (IDA) is a global health problem affecting the quality of life of more than 2 billion individuals. The current practice guidelines diagnose and monitor IDA via conventional hematological and iron biomarkers, which take several months before they are corrected under an iron-treatment plan. Reticulocyte hemoglobin equivalent (Ret-He) is used as a marker in most new hematology analyzers to assess iron incorporation into erythrocyte hemoglobin directly. This study aims to examine the efficacy of Ret-He as a marker for iron deficiency (ID) and IDA and investigate whether Ret-He is sensitive to iron therapy. Methods: Two blood samples were drawn from 182 participants for CBC and iron profile measurements. Follow-up samples were drawn from participants with a confirmed diagnosis of ID and/or IDA. Results: Ret-He levels were lower in the ID and IDA groups compared to the control (p < 0.0001), and lower in the IDA group compared to the ID group (p < 0.0001). Ret-He was correlated with ferritin at ID level (<30.0 mg/mL; r = 0.39) and severe IDA (<13.0 ng/mL; p-value < 0.01, r = 0.57). Cut-off values of <28.25 pg for ID and <21.55 pg for IDA showed a higher specificity and sensitivity (ID; AUC: 0.99, sensitivity: 92.73%, specificity: 97.87%) and (IDA; AUC: 0.94, sensitivity: 90.63%, specificity: 92.31%). Finally, Ret-He successfully reflected the iron therapy (p < 0.001) when compared to hemoglobin (Hb) (p = 0.1). Conclusions: Ret-He is a potential marker for detecting and diagnosing different stages of ID with high validity and is very sensitive in reflecting the iron incorporation in a short time.

Flexural Strength, Elastic Modulus and Remineralizing Abilities of Bioactive Resin-Based Dental Sealants.

OBJECTIVE: To assess the remineralizing abilities and compare the flexural strength and elastic modulus of different bioactive pit and fissure sealants. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Human enamel samples were randomly and blindly sealed with one of the following bioactive materials: BioCoat (Bc), ACTIVA KIDS (Av) and BeautiSealant (Bu). Seal-it (Si) was used as a non-bioactive sealant beside a control blank (B) group with no sealant. The sealed samples were subjected to a pH-cycling model (7 days of demineralization-remineralization cycles). The enamel surface hardness change (SHC), scanning electron microscopy-energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDX) and polarized light microscopy were used to assess the remineralizing abilities of the studied sealants. Flexural strength and elastic modulus were also assessed following the ISO 4049 protocols. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to analyze the results. RESULTS: Bc sealant showed the highest FS and EM (p < 0.05). The contact with Bc and Bu sealants showed significantly lower %SHL (p < 0.05) in comparison to the other. These findings were supported by the results of SEM-EDX and polarized imaging by showing higher percentages of calcium and phosphate ions with the former sealants and thinner demineralized enamel bands. CONCLUSION: In this study, Bc showed the highest flexural strength. Bc and Bu sealants outperformed the other studied sealants in terms of their remineralization abilities.

Hemoglobin Disorders Among Anemic Patients: a Cross-Sectional Study from Jeddah City, Western Saudi Arabia.

BACKGROUND: Hemoglobinopathies and thalassemia are defined as a group of inherited blood disorders characterized by a variable degree of anemia with a wide spectrum of clinical symptoms. They are commonly found in the Mediterranean area, sub-Sahara Africa, Middle East, Central India, and Southeast Asia with an estimation of 400,000 babies born annually with serious hemoglobinopathies. Of those, 90% of the births occur in underdevel-oped or developing countries. This study was undertaken to investigate the prevalence of hemoglobin disorders among anemic patients who visited a tertiary care setting represented by King Abdulaziz University Hospital. METHODS: This is a cross sectional study which investigated blood samples from 668 anemic patients for possible causes of anemia. This investigation involved the use of complete blood count, hemoglobin separation using capillary electrophoresis, and measurement of nutritional elements commonly investigated for anemia. RESULTS: We found that the frequency of different types of hemoglobinopathies and thalassemia among the subjects were as follow; normal (HbAA) 439 (65.7%); Sickle Cell Trait (HbAS) 65 (9.7%); Sickle Cell Anemia (HbSS) 63 (9.4%); ß-thalassemia trait 48 (7.2%); Hb S/ß 27 (4.0%); HbH 7 (1.0%); HbE 6 (0.9%); beta-thalassemia major 6 (0.9%); Hb E/beta-thalassemia 4 (0.6%); HbC 1 (0.1%); HbD 1 (0.1%) and HbSC 1 (0.1%). CONCLUSIONS: The findings of this study emphasize the necessity of increasing public health education, neonatal and adult screening programs, as well as nutritional guidance and plans to start the eradication of this burden.

Gracob: a novel graph-based constant-column biclustering method for mining growth phenotype data.

MOTIVATION: Growth phenotype profiling of genome-wide gene-deletion strains over stress conditions can offer a clear picture that the essentiality of genes depends on environmental conditions. Systematically identifying groups of genes from such high-throughput data that share similar patterns of conditional essentiality and dispensability under various environmental conditions can elucidate how genetic interactions of the growth phenotype are regulated in response to the environment. RESULTS: We first demonstrate that detecting such 'co-fit' gene groups can be cast as a less well-studied problem in biclustering, i.e. constant-column biclustering. Despite significant advances in biclustering techniques, very few were designed for mining in growth phenotype data. Here, we propose Gracob, a novel, efficient graph-based method that casts and solves the constant-column biclustering problem as a maximal clique finding problem in a multipartite graph. We compared Gracob with a large collection of widely used biclustering methods that cover different types of algorithms designed to detect different types of biclusters. Gracob showed superior performance on finding co-fit genes over all the existing methods on both a variety of synthetic data sets with a wide range of settings, and three real growth phenotype datasets for E. coli, proteobacteria and yeast. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Our program is freely available for download at http://sfb.kaust.edu.sa/Pages/Software.aspx. CONTACT: xin.gao@kaust.edu.sa. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Hologenome analysis of two marine sponges with different microbiomes.

BACKGROUND: Sponges (Porifera) harbor distinct microbial consortia within their mesohyl interior. We herein analysed the hologenomes of Stylissa carteri and Xestospongia testudinaria, which notably differ in their microbiome content. RESULTS: Our analysis revealed that S. carteri has an expanded repertoire of immunological domains, specifically Scavenger Receptor Cysteine-Rich (SRCR)-like domains, compared to X. testudinaria. On the microbial side, metatranscriptome analyses revealed an overrepresentation of potential symbiosis-related domains in X. testudinaria. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings provide genomic insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying host-symbiont coevolution and may serve as a roadmap for future hologenome analyses.