[Cognitive function analysis of chronic lead poisoning in adults].

Objective: To explore the changes of the auditory event-related potentials P300 and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) in the chronic mild lead poisoning in order to find out the impairment of cognitive function and intervene early. Methods: In February 2020, 50 patients with chronic mild lead poisoning in Wuhan Center for Prevention and Treatment of Occupational Diseases from June 2011 to June 2015 were selected as the case group, and 50 healthy people were selected as the control group. The changes of auditory event-related potential P300 and MOCA of the two groups were analyzed. Results: Compared with the control group, the latency of P300 of auditory event-related potential in the case group was prolonged and the amplitude was decreased (P<0.05) . Compared with the control group, the total score of MoCA in the case group was decreased, the mean score of language, abstract and delayed memory items decreased, and the differences were statistically significant (P<0.05) . Conclusion: The combination of auditory event-related potential P300 and MOCA is helpful to detect the early cognitive impairment in chronic lead poisoning population, and auditory event-related potential P300 is an objective and effective early detection method.

[Application of support vector machine in predicting in-hospital mortality risk of patients with acute kidney injury in ICU].

OBJECTIVE: To construct an in-hospital mortality prediction model for patients with acute kidney injury (AKI) in intensive care unit (ICU) by using support vector machine (SVM), and compare it with the simplified acute physiology score II (SAPS-II) which is commonly used in the ICU. METHODS: We used Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III (MIMIC-III) database as data source. The AKI patients in the MIMIC-III database were selected according to the 2012 Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) definition of AKI. We employed the same predictor variable set as used in SAPS-II to construct an SVM model. Meanwhile, we also developed a customized SAPS-II model using MIMIC-III database, and compared performances between the SVM model and the customized SAPS-II model. The performance of each model was evaluated via area under the receiver operation characteristic curve (AUROC), root mean squared error (RMSE), sensitivity, specificity, Youden's index and accuracy based on 5-fold cross-validation. The agreement of the results between the SVM model and the customized SAPS-II model was illustrated using Bland-Altman plots. RESULTS: A total number of 19 044 patients with AKI were included. The observed in-hospital mortality of the AKI patients was 13.58% in MIMIC-III. The results based on the 5-fold cross validation showed that the average AUROC of the SVM model and the customized SAPS-II model was 0.86 and 0.81, respectively (The difference between the two models was statistically significant with t=13.0, P<0.001). The average RMSE of the SVM model and the customized SAPS-II model was 0.29 and 0.31, respectively (The difference was statistically significant with t=-9.6, P<0.001). The SVM model also outperformed the customized SAPS-II model in terms of sensitivity and Youden's index with significant statistical differences (P=0.002 and <0.001, respectively).The Bland-Altman plot showed that the SVM model and the customized SAPS-II model had similar mortality prediction results when the mortality of a patient was certain, but the consistency between the mortality prediction results of the two models was poor when the mortality of a patient was with high uncertainty. CONCLUSION: Compared with the SAPS-II model, the SVM model has a better performance, especially when the mortality of a patient is with high uncertainty. The SVM model is more suitable for predicting the mortality of patients with AKI in ICU and early intervention in patients with AKI in ICU. The SVM model can effectively help ICU clinicians improve the quality of medical treatment, which has high clinical value.

Down-regulation of iASPP in human hepatocellular carcinoma cells inhibits cell proliferation and tumor growth.

The oncoprotein inhibitory member of the ASPP family (iASPP) is a key inhibitor of the p53 tumor suppressor and is upregulated in patients with acute leukemia and breast carcinoma. To investigate the effect of iASPP inhibition on the proliferation of hepatocellular carcinoma cells, a recombinant lentivirus vector expressing a small interfering RNA (siRNA) against iASPP gene expression was constructed and used to infect human hepatocellular carcinoma cells (HepG2 and Hep3B). The results showed that iASPP mRNA and protein levels were significantly down-regulated in both cells infected with the siRNA against iASPP. siRNA-mediated down-regulation of iASPP repressed tumor cell proliferation and colony formation in vitro and induced a growth delay of the tumor in vivo, suggesting that iASPP plays an important role in the proliferation of hepatocellular carcinoma cells. iASPP may be a valuable candidate target gene in hepatocellular carcinoma therapy.