Clinical risk assessment of chronic kidney disease patients using genetic programming.

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is one of the serious health concerns in the twenty-first century. CKD impacts over 37 million Americans. By applying machine learning (ML) techniques to clinical data, CKD can be diagnosed early. This early detection of CKD can prevent numerous loss of life. In this work, clinical data set of 400 patients, available on the UCI repository, are taken. Unfortunately, this data set doesn't have an equal distribution of CKD and Non-CKD samples. This imbalanced nature of data highly influences the learning capabilities of classifiers. Genetic Programming (GP) is an ML technique based on the evolution of species. GP with standard fitness function, also impacted by this imbalanced nature of data. A new Euclidean distance-based fitness function in GP is proposed to handle this imbalanced nature of the data set. To compare the robustness of the proposed work, other classification techniques, K-nearest neighborhood (KNN), KNN with particle swarm optimization (PSO), and GP with the standard fitness function, is also applied. For ten-fold cross-validation, the KNN shows an accuracy of 83.54% with an AUC value of 0.69, the PSO-KNN shows an accuracy of 96.79% with an AUC value of 0.94, and the GP, with the newly proposed fitness function, supersedes KNN and PSO-KNN and shows the accuracy of 99.33% with an AUC value of 0.99.

Helping young women go red: Harnessing the power of personal and digital information to prevent heart disease.

OBJECTIVE: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death for American women, yet young women are rarely the target population of CVD prevention campaigns. This study investigated young women's exposure to CVD information. METHODS: We surveyed 331 females ages 15-24 years to determine 1) whether participants felt informed about heart disease or stroke, 2) their exposure to heart disease information sources over the past year, and 3) whether they had ever discussed CVD-related topics with healthcare providers. RESULTS: Over half of participants reported feeling not informed about heart disease (52%) or stroke (59%). Participants were more likely to report feeling informed if they were exposed to information from websites or social media, or if they had ever discussed family history of heart disease, personal risk for heart disease, or high blood pressure with their healthcare provider. CONCLUSIONS: Most young women did not feel informed about CVD. Exposure to specific information sources and discussions with healthcare providers may help improve this. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: Public health campaigns should promote cardiovascular health through websites and social media popular amongst young women. Healthcare providers should discuss CVD risk factor modification with young patients in order to promote cardiovascular health across the life course.

Mechanism of start site selection by RNA polymerase II: interplay between TFIIB and Ssl2/XPB helicase subunit of TFIIH.

TFIIB is essential for transcription initiation by RNA polymerase II. TFIIB also cross-links to terminator regions and is required for gene loops that juxtapose promoter-terminator elements in a transcription-dependent manner. The Saccharomyces cerevisiae sua7-1 mutation encodes an altered form of TFIIB (E62K) that is defective for both start site selection and gene looping. Here we report the isolation of an ssl2 mutant, encoding an altered form of TFIIH, as a suppressor of the cold-sensitive growth defect of the sua7-1 mutation. Ssl2 (Rad25) is orthologous to human XPB and is a member of the SF2 family of ATP-dependent DNA helicases. The ssl2 suppressor allele encodes an arginine replacement of the conserved histidine residue (H508R) located within the DEVH-containing helicase domain. In addition to suppressing the TFIIB E62K growth defect, Ssl2 H508R partially restores both normal start site selection and gene looping. Moreover, Ssl2, like TFIIB, associates with promoter and terminator regions, and the diminished association of TFIIB E62K with the PMA1 terminator is restored by the Ssl2 H508R suppressor. These results define a novel, functional interaction between TFIIB and Ssl2 that affects start site selection and gene looping.