Genome-wide associations between alcohol consumption and blood DNA methylation: evidence from twin study.

Aim: Alcohol intake alters DNA methylation profiles and methylation might mediate the association between alcohol and disease, but limited number of positive CpG sites repeatedly replicated. Materials & methods: In total, 57 monozygotic (MZ) twin pairs discordant for alcohol drinking from the Chinese National Twin Registry and 158 MZ and dizygotic twin pairs in the Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging were evaluated. DNA methylation was detected using the Infinium HumanMethylation450 BeadChip. Results: Among candidate CpG sites, cg07326074 was significantly correlated with drinking after adjusting for covariates in MZ twins in both datasets but not in the entire sample or dizygotic twins. Conclusion: The hypermethylation of cg07326074, located in the tumor-promoting gene C16orf59, was associated with alcohol consumption.

Frailty and comorbidity in predicting community COVID-19 mortality in the UK Biobank: the effect of sampling

Frailty has been linked to increased risk of COVID-19 mortality, but evidence is mainly limited to hospitalized older individuals and analyses in community samples are scarce. This study aims to assess and compare the predictive abilities of different frailty measures - the frailty phenotype (FP), frailty index (FI), and Hospital Frailty Risk Score (HFRS), and comorbidity, measured using the Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI), on COVID-19 mortality in a UK community sample of adults aged 52-86 years. We analyzed (i) the full sample of 428,754 UK Biobank participants and (ii) a subsample of 2,287 COVID-19 positive UK Biobank participants with data on COVID-19 outcomes between March 1 and September 21, 2020. COVID-19 positivity was confirmed by PCR, hospital records and/or death registers. Logistic regression models adjusted for age, sex, smoking, ethnicity, and socioeconomic variables with areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUCs) were used in the modelling. Overall, 391 individuals died of COVID-19. In the full sample, all frailty measures and the CCI were associated with COVID-19 mortality but only the HFRS and CCI improved the predictive ability of a model including age and sex, yielding AUCs>0.80. However, when restricting analyses to the COVID-19 positive subsample, which had an over-representation of frail individuals, similar improvement in AUCs was not observed in which only the CCI was significantly associated with COVID-19 mortality. Our results suggest that HFRS and CCI can be used in COVID-19 mortality risk stratification at the population level, but they show limited added value in COVID-19 positive individuals.

Prognostic value of APACHE Ⅱ score in patients with severe acute organophosphorus poisoning / 重庆医学

Objective To explore the prognostic value of APACHE Ⅱscore in patients with Severe acute organophosphorus poi-soning .Methods 42 patients with Severe acute organophosphorus poisoning ,in which 34 cases survived ,8 cases dead ,were select-ed .The APACHE Ⅱscores of patients in first 24 h of admission were collected ,and receiver operating characteristic curves (ROC curve) were drawn .Results APACHE Ⅱ score of the 42 patients with Severe acute organophosphorus poisoning was 18 ~30 (20 .11 ± 6 .32) ,in which the survival group was(16 .10 ± 3 .12) ,the dead group was(28 .01 ± 4 .46) (P<0 .01) .With the increase of APACHE Ⅱ score ,the fatality rate gradually increased .The total area under the ROC curves of APACHE Ⅱ score for death judgment was 0 .922 ,APACHE Ⅱ score of 21 .2 was the best diagnostic point ,the sensitivity was 95% ,and specificity was 89% . Conclusion The APACHE Ⅱscore could predict severity of patients with Severe acute organophosphorus poisoning ,and APACHEⅡscore ≥21 .2 could be used as the prognosis for death of the patients .

STUDIES ON INDIRECT FLUORESCENT ANTIBODY TEST FOR DIAGNOSIS AND EPIDEMIOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION OF FILARIASIS / 中国寄生虫学与寄生虫病杂志

Indirect fluorescent antibody test (IFAT) using frozen sections of Brugia malayi adult worms as antigen was employed in the diagnosis and epidemiological investigation of human filariasis. Sera were collected from 704 cases with bancroftian or malayan microfilaremia. the positive rate was 92.8-99.1%. Of 150 healthy people from non-endemic areas, only one showed a positive reaction (false positive rate 0.7%) (Table 1). This technique proved to be highly sensitive and specific for the diagnosis of filariasis and the antigen is easy to prepare. It might be used in sero-epidemiological investigation for the assessment of filariasis control.