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Fulltext Malaysian adolescents' exposure to secondhand smoke in the car of their parents/guardians: A nationwide cross-sectional school-based study

Lim KH, Lim HL, Ghazali SM, Kee CC, Teh CH, Gill BS, et al.

Tob Induc Dis, 2020;18:53.
PMID: 32565765 DOI: 10.18332/tid/122586

INTRODUCTION: We investigated the prevalence of children's exposure to secondhand smoke (SHS) in the car of their parents/guardians and the associated factors.
METHODS: A self-administered validated questionnaire was used to obtain data from the nationally representative samples of school-going adolescents aged 11-19 years in Malaysia. Prevalence rates were computed and chi-squared tests and multiple logistic regression were conducted.
RESULTS: Of the participants, 23.3% reported exposure to SHS at least once in the car of their parents/guardians during the last 7 days before the survey. The prevalence and likelihood of SHS exposure were significantly higher in Malays, descendants of natives of Sabah and Sarawak, schools in rural areas, females, and current smokers. However, age group and knowledge on the harmful effects of SHS were not significant after adjusting for confounding effects.
CONCLUSIONS: A substantial proportion of school-going adolescents were exposed to secondhand smoke in the car of their parents/guardians. This highlights the need for effective tobacco control measures to include health promotion and smoke-free car regulations to be introduced to prevent severe health hazards and to reduce smoking initiation among non-smoking adolescents.
Fulltext Tobacco use and other aspects related to smoking among school-going adolescents aged 13-15 years in Malaysia: Analysis of three cross-sectional nationally representative surveys in 2003, 2009 and 2016

Lim KH, Ghazali SM, Lim HL, Kee CC, Cheah YK, Singh BSGP, et al.

Tob Induc Dis, 2020;18:80.
PMID: 33013276 DOI: 10.18332/tid/127231

INTRODUCTION: Periodic surveys on tobacco use patterns and other aspects of tobacco use among school-going adolescents in Malaysia provide information on the effectiveness of anti-smoking measures implemented. However, such information is limited in Malaysia. We investigated the prevalence of smoking and other related aspects among middle-secondary school students in Malaysia from the years 2003-2016 to fill this gap.
METHODS: We analyzed data from the Global Youth Tobacco Survey (GYTS) 2003, GYTS 2009, and the Tobacco and Electronic Cigarette Survey among Malaysia Adolescents (TECMA) 2016. The surveys employed multistage sampling to select representative samples of adolescents attending secondary school in Malaysia. Data were collected using a pre-validated self-administered anonymous questionnaire adopted from the GYTS.
RESULTS: Between 2003 and 2016, major changes occurred in which there were reductions in the prevalence of ever smoking, current smoking, and susceptibility to smoking. Reductions were also observed in exposure to SHS in public places and in the home. The proportion of school-going adolescents who support a ban on smoking in public places increased between 2013 to 2016, and there was a significant reduction in the proportion of respondents that were offered 'free' cigarettes by tobacco company representatives. However, there was no difference in the proportion of adolescents who initiated smoking before the age of 10 years and current smokers seeking advice to quit smoking across the time period.
CONCLUSIONS: Our study indicates that the smoking policies and measures have been effective in reducing smoking prevalence, secondhand smoke exposure, and access to cigarettes, among school-going adolescents in Malaysia. However, measures to reduce smoking initiation and increase smoking cessation need to be strengthened to reduce the burden of smoking-related diseases in Malaysia in the long-term.
Radioprotective activity of Polyalthia longifolia standardized extract against X-ray radiation injury in mice

Jothy SL, Saito T, Kanwar JR, Chen Y, Aziz A, Yin-Hui L, et al.

Phys Med, 2016 Jan;32(1):150-61.
PMID: 26526749 DOI: 10.1016/j.ejmp.2015.10.090

The radioprotective effect of Polyalthia longifolia was studied in mice. P. longifolia treatment showed improvement in mice survival compared to 100% mortality in the irradiated mice. Significant increases in hemoglobin concentration, and red blood cell, white blood cell and platelet counts were observed in the animals pretreated with leaf extract. Pre-irradiation administration of P. longifolia leaf extract also increased the CFU counts of the spleen colony and increased the relative spleen size. A dose-dependent decrease in lipid peroxidation levels was observed in the animals pretreated with P. longifolia. However, although the animals pretreated with P. longifolia exhibited a significant increase in superoxide dismutase and catalase activity, the values remained below normal in both liver and the intestine. Pre-irradiation administration of P. longifolia also resulted in the regeneration of the mucosal crypts and villi of the intestine. Moreover, pretreatment with P. longifolia leaf extract also showed restoration of the normal liver cell structure and a significant reduction in the elevated levels of ALT, AST and bilirubin. These results suggested the radioprotective ability of P. longifolia leaf extract, which is significant for future investigation for human applications in developing efficient, economically viable, non-toxic natural and clinically acceptable novel radioprotectors.
Fulltext Relation Extraction in Biomedical Texts Based on Multi-Head Attention Model With Syntactic Dependency Feature: Modeling Study

Li Y, Hui L, Zou L, Li H, Xu L, Wang X, et al.

JMIR Med Inform, 2022 Oct 20;10(10):e41136.
PMID: 36264604 DOI: 10.2196/41136

BACKGROUND: With the rapid expansion of biomedical literature, biomedical information extraction has attracted increasing attention from researchers. In particular, relation extraction between 2 entities is a long-term research topic.
OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to perform 2 multiclass relation extraction tasks of Biomedical Natural Language Processing Workshop 2019 Open Shared Tasks: relation extraction of Bacteria-Biotope (BB-rel) task and binary relation extraction of plant seed development (SeeDev-binary) task. In essence, these 2 tasks are aimed at extracting the relation between annotated entity pairs from biomedical texts, which is a challenging problem.
METHODS: Traditional research methods adopted feature- or kernel-based methods and achieved good performance. For these tasks, we propose a deep learning model based on a combination of several distributed features, such as domain-specific word embedding, part-of-speech embedding, entity-type embedding, distance embedding, and position embedding. The multi-head attention mechanism is used to extract the global semantic features of an entire sentence. Meanwhile, we introduced a dependency-type feature and the shortest dependency path connecting 2 candidate entities in the syntactic dependency graph to enrich the feature representation.
RESULTS: Experiments show that our proposed model has excellent performance in biomedical relation extraction, achieving F1 scores of 65.56% and 38.04% on the test sets of the BB-rel and SeeDev-binary tasks. Especially in the SeeDev-binary task, the F1 score of our model is superior to that of other existing models and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
CONCLUSIONS: We demonstrated that the multi-head attention mechanism can learn relevant syntactic and semantic features in different representation subspaces and different positions to extract comprehensive feature representation. Moreover, syntactic dependency features can improve the performance of the model by learning dependency relation between the entities in biomedical texts.
Fulltext The CYP2C19(∗)1/(∗)2 Genotype Does Not Adequately Predict Clopidogrel Response in Healthy Malaysian Volunteers

Nasyuhana Sani Y, Sheau Chin L, Luen Hui L, Mohd Redhuan Shah Edwin NE, Teck Hwa G, Serebruany VL, et al.

Cardiol Res Pract, 2013;2013:128795.
PMID: 23431496 DOI: 10.1155/2013/128795

Background. The CYP2C19∗2 allele may be associated with a reduced antiplatelet effect for clopidogrel. Here, we assessed whether CYP2C19∗2 alleles correlate with clopidogrel responsiveness following the administration of clopidogrel in healthy Malaysian volunteers. Methods. Ninety volunteers were genotyped for CYP2C19∗2 and CYP2C19∗3 alleles. Forty-five of 90 volunteers were included in the clopidogrel response studies and triaged into three genotypes, namely, CYP2C19∗1/∗1 (n = 17), CYP2C19∗1/∗2 (n = 21), and CYP2C19∗2/∗2 (n = 7). All subjects received 300 mg of clopidogrel, and platelet reactivity was assessed after a four-hour loading utilizing the VerifyNow-P2Y12 assay. Platelet activity was reported using P2Y12 reaction units (PRUs), and nonresponder status was prespecified at PRU ≥ 230. Results. Following clopidogrel intake, CYP2C19∗2/∗2 carriers had a significantly higher mean PRU compared to the CYP2C19∗1/∗2 and CYP2C19∗1/∗1 (291.0 ± 62.1 versus 232.5 ± 81.4 versus 147.4 ± 87.2 PRU, P < 0.001) carriers. Almost half of the participants (46.7%) were found to be nonresponders (3 were CYP2C19∗1/∗1, 11 were CYP2C19∗1/∗2, and 7 were CYP2C19∗2/∗2). Conclusion. In healthy Malaysian volunteers, CYP2C19∗2 allele was associated with a decrease in platelet responsiveness to clopidogrel. However, clopidogrel nonresponders can be found not only in the carriers of CYP2C19∗2/∗2, but also in the carriers of CYP2C19∗1/∗2 and CYP2C19∗1/∗1. The present paper demonstrated that genotype information does not correlate with clopidogrel response, and genotyping may represent a less robust approach compared to platelet activity testing in guiding clopidogrel therapy.
[Molecular regulatory mechanisms of hypoxia-inducible factor and interventional effect of Chinese herbal medicine]

Bu-Hui L, Mei-Zi W, Wei S, Yi-Gang W, Wei WU, Qi-Jun F, et al.

Zhongguo Zhong Yao Za Zhi, 2020 Oct;45(20):4805-4811.
PMID: 33350250 DOI: 10.19540/j.cnki.cjcmm.20200630.602

Hypoxia-inducible factors(HIFs)are the key transcription factors that sense and regulate cellular oxygen concentration in vivo. HIF-1 is composed of 2 subunits,α and β,in which,the molecular regulatory mechanism of HIF-1α involves the main processes of its degradation and activation. The degradation of HIF-1α is regulated by oxygen-dependent pathways,including "von hippel-lindau protein(pVHL)-dependent pathway" and "pVHL-independent pathway". The activation of HIF-1α is regulated by oxygen-independent pathways,including mammalian target of rapamycin(mTOR)/eukaryotic initiation factor 4 E-binding protein 1(4 EBP1)/HIF-1α pathway,phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase(PI3 K)/proteirrserinc-threonine kinases(Akt)/HIF-1α pathway and silent information regulator1(Sirt1)/HIF-1α pathway. In recent years,based on the molecular regulatory mechanism of HIFs,Roxadustat,a new drug for the treatment of renal anemia has been developed. Besides, some macromolecular substances with similar pharmacological effect to HIFs have been found in the extracts from Chinese herbal medicine(CHM),such as emodin,notoginseng triterpenes,honokiol and clematichinenoside. These natural macromolecular substances play the regulatory roles in inflammatory response,epigenetic modification and auto-phagy. It is worth noting that,for common hypoxic-related diseases including diabetic kidney disease,HIFs-mediated "pyroptosis" may be a new target of CHMs for clearing dampness and heat and its representative classical prescriptions(Ermiao Pills)in treating inflammatory injury in cells and tissues.