[Effect of Interactions Among Obesity-Related Proteins on Breast Cancer Risk: A Preliminary Study].

Objective: To explore the potential interactions among obesity-related proteins in the pathogenic process of breast cancer (BC) in women. Methods: We conducted a case-control study, enrolling 279 primary breast cancer cases and 260 age-frequency-matched healthy women between April 2014 and May 2015. Based on the evidence of previous published literature on obesity-related proteins and BC risks, we selected proteins that received more attention and measured the plasma levels of these proteins by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). After stratification of the subjects according to their menopausal status, an analytic strategy combining multivariate logistic regression and generalized multifactor dimensionality reduction (GMDR) was used to explore the effect of the possible interactions of these proteins on BC risk. Results: There were marginal high-order interactions among insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), insulin-like growth factor binding protein 3 (IGFBP-3), C-reactive protein (CRP), resistin (RETN), soluble leptin receptor (sOB-R), and adiponectin (ADP) in premenopausal women (with the balanced accuracy for the testing set being 59.01%, cross-validation consistency being 10/10, and permutation test P=0.05). There were high-order interactions among leptin (LEP), sOB-R, ADP, CRP, IGFBP3 and visfatin (VF) in postmenopausal women (with the balanced accuracy for the testing set being 67.31%, cross-validation consistency being 10/10, and permutation test P=0.01). Along with an increase in the number of obesity-related proteins to which the subjects were exposed, the risk of developing breast cancer gradually increased in both pre- and postmenopausal women ( OR pre =2.18, 95% CI: 1.69-2.82; OR post =2.41, 95% CI: 1.75-3.32). Conclusions: This preliminary study suggested high-order interactions among obesity-related proteins on BC risk in both pre- and postmenopausal women. In future studies, close attention should be given to these potential interactions when these proteins are used jointly as predictors, as well as in developing a comprehensive risk scoring system for BC.

Study on the Salivary Microbial Alteration of Men With Head and Neck Cancer and Its Relationship With Symptoms in Southwest China.

This study explored the association between oral microbes and head and neck cancer (HNC) as well as symptoms related to patients with HNC before surgical treatment. Fifty-six patients with HNC and 64 matched healthy controls were recruited from West China hospital in Southwest China. The demographic, clinical, and symptom data were collected. Salivary samples were collected to determine the microbial characteristics using 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Patients with HNC presented increased Capnocytophaga abundances. The oral microbial markers as Capnocytophaga (area under the curve=0.81) achieved a high classification power between the HNC patients and healthy controls. Moreover, using Capnocytophaga in conjunction with symptom of voice/speech difficulty achieved an overall predicting accuracy of 92.5% comparing with using Capnocytophaga alone (79.2% accuracy) in distinguishing the HNC patients from healthy controls. Salivary microbial profiles and HNC symptoms may be potential biomarkers for HNC screening.