Study design: An observational cross-sectional study.
Methods: The participants were aged between 45 and 75 years who participated in a screening program at the Golden Horses Health Sanctuary in Klang Valley. Lipid profile and anthropometric measurements were collected from the subjects' medical records. Ultrasound machine and a structured self-administered questionnaire were used as instruments for recruiting data from the subjects. The subjects who consumed alcohol (>140 g/wk for men and >70 g/wk for females), had hepatitis B or C viruses, liver insults, and surgery, and taken lipid-lowering medications were excluded from the study.
Results: A total of 628 subjects were analyzed, and 235 (37.4%) subjects were diagnosed with definite NAFLD. They comprised 518 (82.5%) Chinese, 92 (14.6%) Malays, and 18 (2.9%) Indians. Peak prevalence of NAFLD was found in 53 to 60 years age group. The higher prevalence of NAFLD was among men (48.3%) than women (27.3%) and among Indians (61.1%) and Malays (51.1%) than among Chinese (34.2%). NAFLD has been found to be strongly correlated with male sex, high body mass index (≥23.0 kg/m2), hypertriglyceridemia, low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, diabetes mellitus, and hypertension.
Conclusion: NAFLD is quite common among adults in Malaysian urban population. The prevalence of NAFLD was inordinately high among the 53 to 60 years age group, male sex, Indians, and Malays (as compared with Chinese). Age >60 years, male sex, high body mass index (≥23.0 kg/m2), hypertriglyceridemia, and diabetes mellitus were proven to be risk predictors for NAFLD.
Materials and Methods: A farmer complained that Cobb 500 chickens, raised in the open house, were having bloody diarrhea, open mouth breathing, non-uniform growth, and ruffled feathers. The mortality was about 100 birds (from about 7000 birds) per day. The sick birds were isolated and subjected to physical examination, postmortem, and histopathological analyses. Gross lesions were observed and recorded. The lung samples have proceeded with histopathological evaluations. The lungs, kidneys, trachea, air sac, and heart samples were collected to isolate bacteria and fungi through a series of conventional cultural methods, followed by molecular confirmation of the IBV.
Results: Postmortem examination revealed air sacculitis, hemorrhagic tracheitis, pulmonary congestion, fibrin deposition in the liver and air sac, hemorrhagic enteritis, and renomegaly. The bacterial culture and biochemical tests revealed E. coli in the lungs, trachea, liver, intestine, and kidney samples. However, no fungus could be isolated from those samples. Histological evaluation of lung samples demonstrated infiltration of inflammatory cells in the pulmonary tissues. Apart from this, reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction confirmed the presence of avian coronavirus responsible for infectious bronchitis (IB).
Conclusion: The chickens were diagnosed with IB concurrent with E.coli. The chickens exhibited typical nephropathogenic strain of IBV infection, causing high mortality.
Methods: We enrolled and reviewed 122 biopsy-proven NAFLD patients. Advanced fibrosis was defined as fibrosis stages 3-4. Noninvasive assessments included aspartate aminotransferase/alanine aminotransferase (AST/ALT) ratio, AST-to-platelet ratio index (APRI), AST/ALT ratio, diabetes (BARD) score, fibrosis-4 (FIB-4) score, and NAFLD fibrosis score.
Results: FIB-4 score had the highest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) and negative predictive value (NPV) of 0.86 and 94.3%, respectively, for the diagnosis of advanced fibrosis. FIB-4 score