METHODS: A double-blind randomized study was carried out with 140 colorectal cancer patients on chemotherapy. Subjects were separated into two groups to receive either placebo or MCP [30 billion colony-forming unit (CFUs) per sachet] at a dose of two sachets daily for 4 weeks, and omega-3 fatty acid at a dose of 2 g daily for 8 weeks. Outcomes measured were quality of life, side effects of chemotherapy and levels of inflammatory markers such as interleukin-6 (IL-6), tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) and C-reactive protein.
RESULTS: The supplementation with MCP and omega-3 fatty acid improved the overall quality of life and alleviated certain side effects of chemotherapy. The supplementation with MCP and omega-3 fatty acid also managed to reduce the level of IL-6 (P = 0.002). There was a significant rise in the placebo group's serum TNF-α (P = 0.048) and IL-6 (P = 0.004).
CONCLUSION: The combined supplementation with MCP and omega-3 fatty acid may improve quality of life, reduce certain inflammatory biomarkers and relieve certain side effects of chemotherapy in colorectal patients on chemotherapy.
MATERIALS AND METHODS: The clinical characteristics, presenting symptoms and survival of RCC patients (n=151) treated at UMMC from 2003-2012 were analysed. Symptoms evaluated were macrohaematuria, flank pain, palpable abdominal mass, fever, lethargy, loss of weight, anaemia, elevated ALP, hypoalbuminemia and thrombocytosis. Univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses were performed to determine the prognostic significance of these presenting symptoms. Kaplan Meier and log rank tests were employed for survival analysis.
RESULTS: The 2002 TNM staging was a prognostic factor (p<0.001) but Fuhrman grading was not significantly correlated with survival (p=0.088). At presentation, 76.8% of the patients were symptomatic. Generally, symptomatic tumours had a worse survival prognosis compared to asymptomatic cases (p=0.009; HR 4.74). All symptoms significantly affect disease specific survival except frank haematuria and loin pain on univariate Cox regression analysis. On multivariate analysis adjusted for stage, only clinically palpable abdominal mass remained statistically significant (p=0.027). The mean tumour size of palpable abdominal masses, 9.5±4.3cm, was larger than non palpable masses, 5.3±2.7cm (p<0.001).
CONCLUSIONS: This is the first report which includes survival information of RCC patients from Malaysia. Here the TNM stage and a palpable abdominal mass were independent predictors for survival. Further investigations using a multicentre cohort to analyse mortality and survival rates may aid in improving management of these patients.
Objective: The objective of this study was to use IHC to compare leptin and leptin receptor expressions in clear cell renal cell carcinomas (ccRCC) in non-obese and obese patients to determine the association between these proteins with the clinicopathological features and prognosis of ccRCC. Patients and Methods. The study involved 60 patients who underwent nephrectomy of which 34 were obese, as assessed using body mass index (BMI). Nephrectomy samples provided tissues of ccRCC and adjacent non-cancerous kidney. The intensity and localization of leptin and leptin receptor protein expressions were evaluated using IHC and correlated with clinicopathological features and clinical outcomes. Aperio ImageScope morphometry and digital pathology were applied to assess the IHC results. The chi-square test was used to determine if there was any significant association between the proteins and the clinicopathological features. The Kaplan-Meier test was used to determine the overall survival, disease-free survival, and recurrence-free survival. A value of p < 0.05 was considered significant.
Results: There was neither significant difference in the overall cellular and nuclear expressions of leptin and leptin receptor between non-cancerous kidney and ccRCC tissues nor in non-obese and obese individuals with ccRCC.
Conclusion: In this present study, it was revealed that leptin and leptin receptor were not associated with tumour characteristics and progression of ccRCC patients. Interestingly, nuclear expression of leptin was significantly associated with overall survival. However, the significance of these proteins as biomarkers in other RCC histotypes is still unclear.
METHODOLOGY: The PRISMA guidelines and MOOSE checklist were followed for this review. Publications in English from year 1990 to 2017 that included data on the timing and type of burn surgery and outcomes were included. Searches were done using Web of Science, Cochrane collaboration and Pubmed using keywords "Burn and surgery", "Burn and excision", "Burn and excision and grafting" and "burn and skin grafting". Trial quality was evaluated using the Newcastle-Ottawa scale. Outcomes compared for early and late excisions were length of stay (LOS), sepsis and mortality between LICs and HICs.
RESULTS: From 278 citations, we selected 41 for full text evaluation, and identified 16 eligible trials. LOS is shorter in early excision compared to late excision in both LICs and HICs. Mortality is lower in late excision compared to early excision in both LICs and HICs. Further subgroup analysis of elderly patients in HICs confirmed that mortality is lower in late excision and unchanged if the elderly are excluded. Early excision reduces sepsis in both LIC and HIC.
DISCUSSION: The variable definitions of age, timing of excision, variable nature of % TBSA comparison, mixed inclusion of inhalation injury, co-morbidities and unquantified access to resources make the data difficult to interpret and it is not possible to draw accurate conclusions on the role of early excision for burns in low-middle income countries. A prospective study is needed in order to answer this question.
DESIGN: An observational study.
PATIENTS: Sexually active men, ≥40 years, with no known urological problems, were recruited at the phlebotomy clinic at our centre.
MEASUREMENTS: A brief history along with latest fasting lipid profile and plasma glucose levels were obtained. An Aging Male Symptoms questionnaire was administered; waist circumference (WC) and serum testosterone concentration were measured.
STATSTICAL ANALYSIS: Analysis of testosterone concentration between Malay, Indian and Chinese men was performed. Statistical tests such as analysis of variance, χ2 test, univariate and multivariable regression were performed. Any p .05). In the multivariable analysis only Malay ethnicity, WC ≥ 90 cm and low high-density lipoprotein (HDL) were associated with lower testosterone concentration.
CONCLUSION: In this study, Malaysian men of Malay origin had lower testosterone concentration compared with Indian and Chinese men. WC and low HDL were also associated with lower testosterone concentrations.
METHODS: For experiments, the autopsy reports belonging to eight different causes of death were collected, preprocessed and converted into 43 master feature vectors using various schemes for feature extraction, representation, and reduction. The six different text classification techniques were applied on these 43 master feature vectors to construct a classification model that can predict the cause of death. Finally, classification model performance was evaluated using four performance measures i.e. overall accuracy, macro precision, macro-F-measure, and macro recall.
RESULTS: From experiments, it was found that that unigram features obtained the highest performance compared to bigram, trigram, and hybrid-gram features. Furthermore, in feature representation schemes, term frequency, and term frequency with inverse document frequency obtained similar and better results when compared with binary frequency, and normalized term frequency with inverse document frequency. Furthermore, the chi-square feature reduction approach outperformed Pearson correlation, and information gain approaches. Finally, in text classification algorithms, support vector machine classifier outperforms random forest, Naive Bayes, k-nearest neighbor, decision tree, and ensemble-voted classifier.
CONCLUSION: Our results and comparisons hold practical importance and serve as references for future works. Moreover, the comparison outputs will act as state-of-art techniques to compare future proposals with existing automated text classification techniques.