ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: The annual incidence of metabolic-associated fatty liver disease (MAFLD) in China has been increasing and is often overlooked owing to its insidious characteristics. Approximately 50% of the patients have a normal weight or are not obese. They are said to have lean-type MAFLD, and few studies of such patients are available. Because MAFLD is associated with abnormal lipid metabolism, lipid-targeted metabolomics was used in this study to provide experimental evidence for early diagnosis and pathogenesis. AIM: To investigate the serum fatty-acid metabolic characteristics in lean-type MAFLD patients using targeted serum metabolomic technology. METHODS: Between January and June 2022, serum samples were collected from MAFLD patients and healthy individuals who were treated at Shanghai Putuo District Central Hospital for serum metabolomics analysis. Principal component analysis and orthogonal partial least squares-discriminant analysis models were developed, and univariate analysis was used to screen for biomarkers of lean-type MAFLD and analyze metabolic pathways. UPLC-Q-Orbitrap/MS content determination was used to determine serum palmitic acid (PA), oleic acid (OA), linoleic acid (LA), and arachidonic acid (AA) levels in lean-type MAFLD patients. RESULTS: Urea nitrogen and uric acid levels were higher in lean-type MAFLD patients than in healthy individuals (P < 0.05). Alanine transaminase and cholinesterase levels were higher in lean-type MAFLD patients than in healthy individuals (P < 0.01). The expression of high-density lipoprotein and apolipoprotein A-1 were lower in lean-type MAFLD patients than in healthy individuals (P < 0.05) and the expression of triglycerides and fasting blood glucose were increased (P < 0.01). A total of 65 biomarkers that affected the synthesis and metabolism of fatty acids were found with P < 0.05 and variable importance in projection > 1". The levels of PA, OA, LA, and AA were significantly increased compared with healthy individuals. CONCLUSION: The metabolic profiles of lean-type MAFLD patients and healthy participants differed significantly, yielding 65 identified biomarkers. PA, OA, LA, and AA exhibited the most significant changes, offering valuable clinical guidance for prevention and treatment of lean-type MAFLD.
Subject(s)
Biomarkers , Fatty Acids , Metabolomics , Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease , Humans , Metabolomics/methods , Male , Female , Middle Aged , Fatty Acids/blood , Fatty Acids/metabolism , Biomarkers/blood , Adult , Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease/blood , Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease/diagnosis , China/epidemiology , Lipid Metabolism , Case-Control Studies , Thinness/blood , Thinness/diagnosisABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Rectal mucinous adenocarcinoma (MAC) is a rare pathological type of rectal cancer with unique pathological features and a poor prognosis. It is difficult to diagnose and treat early because of the lack of specific manifestations in some aspects of the disease. The common metastatic organs of rectal cancer are the liver and lung; however, rectal carcinoma with metastasis to subcutaneous soft tissue is a rare finding. CASE SUMMARY: In this report, the clinical data, diagnosis and treatment process, and postoperative pathological features of a patient with left waist subcutaneous soft tissue masses were retrospectively analyzed. The patient underwent surgical treatment after admission and recovered well after surgery. The final pathological diagnosis was rectal MAC with left waist subcutaneous soft tissue metastasis. CONCLUSION: Subcutaneous soft tissue metastasis of rectal MAC is rare, and it can suggest that the tumor is disseminated, and it can appear even earlier than the primary malignant tumor, which is occult and leads to a missed diagnosis and misdiagnosis clinically. When a subcutaneous soft tissue mass of unknown origin appears in a patient with rectal cancer, a malignant tumor should be considered.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Prediction of drug-drug interactions (DDIs) can reveal potential adverse pharmacological reactions between drugs in co-medication. Various methods have been proposed to address this issue. Most of them focus on the traditional link prediction between drugs, however, they ignore the cold-start scenario, which requires the prediction between known drugs having approved DDIs and new drugs having no DDI. Moreover, they're restricted to infer whether DDIs occur, but are not able to deduce diverse DDI types, which are important in clinics. RESULTS: In this paper, we propose a cold start prediction model for both single-type and multiple-type drug-drug interactions, referred to as CSMDDI. CSMDDI predict not only whether two drugs trigger pharmacological reactions but also what reaction types they induce in the cold start scenario. We implement several embedding methods in CSMDDI, including SVD, GAE, TransE, RESCAL and compare it with the state-of-the-art multi-type DDI prediction method DeepDDI and DDIMDL to verify the performance. The comparison shows that CSMDDI achieves a good performance of DDI prediction in the case of both the occurrence prediction and the multi-type reaction prediction in cold start scenario. CONCLUSIONS: Our approach is able to predict not only conventional binary DDIs but also what reaction types they induce in the cold start scenario. More importantly, it learns a mapping function who can bridge the drugs attributes to their network embeddings to predict DDIs. The main contribution of CSMDDI contains the development of a generalized framework to predict the single-type and multi-type of DDIs in the cold start scenario, as well as the implementations of several embedding models for both single-type and multi-type of DDIs. The dataset and source code can be accessed at https://github.com/itsosy/csmddi .
Subject(s)
Pharmaceutical Preparations , Software , Drug InteractionsABSTRACT
An ethanol-soluble pigment extract was separated from fermented Zijuan Pu-erh tea. The compositions of the ethanol soluble pigment extract were analyzed by high-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectroscopy (HPLC-MS/MS). The extract was prepared into a series of ethanol solutions and analyzed for free radical-scavenging activities (against two free radicals: 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) and (2,2,6,6-tetramethylpiperidin-1-yl)oxyl (TEMPO)) and in vitro anti-oxidative properties. Electron spin resonance spectroscopy showed that the peaks of DPPH and TEMPO decreased with increasing extract concentration, suggesting that the extract had excellent free radical-scavenging activities. In vitro cell culture suggested that, at 50-200 mg/L, the extract had no measurable effect on the viability of vascular endothelial cells (ECV340) but produced significant protective effects for cells that underwent oxidative injuries due to hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) treatment. Compared with the H2O2 treatment alone cells group, 200 mg/L of the extract increased the activity of superoxide dismutase (SOD) in cells by 397.3%, and decreased the concentration of malondialdehyde (MDA) and the activity of lactate acid dehydrogenase (LDH) by 47.8% and 69.6%, respectively. These results suggest that the extract has excellent free radical scavenging and anti-oxidative properties.