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BackgroundPrevious studies have suggested that Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii) infection might be associated with fatty liver disease. However, the relationship between non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and T. gondii infection has not been investigated in a large population. We aimed to study the relationship between those two diseases using a population-based dataset from the United States.

BACKGROUND: Individuals adhering to a gluten-free diet (GFD) have been scarcely researched within a Chinese population. This present study was conducted to assess the characteristics, food choices, shopping preferences, and emotions and attitudes of individuals following a GFD.METHODS: Individuals following a GFD were invited to complete an online questionnaire about their demography and geography

A usual practice in observational studies is the comparison of baseline characteristics of participants between study groups. The overall population can be grouped by clinical outcome or exposure status. A combined table reporting baseline characteristics is usually displayed, for the overall population and then separately for each group. The last column usually gives the P value for the compariso

While the conventional forest plot is useful to present results within subgroups of patients in clinical studies, it has been criticized for several reasons. First, small subgroups are visually overemphasized by long confidence interval lines, which is misleading. Second, the point estimates of large subgroups are difficult to discern because of the large box representing the precision of the esti

BACKGROUND & AIMS: To establish an effective prognostic nomogram for acute-on-chronic hepatitis B liver failure (ACHBLF).MATERIALS AND METHODS: The nomogram was based on clinical data of 203 ACHBLF patients who admitted to the First Affiliated Hospital of Fujian Medical University from 2009 to 2014. The area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve (AUC) and calibration curve were car

Risk scores play an important role in clinical medicine. With advances in information technology and availability of electronic healthcare record, scoring systems of less commonly seen diseases and population can be developed. The aim of the article is to provide a tutorial on how to develop and validate risk scores based on a virtual dataset by using R software. The dataset we generated including

Clinical research usually involves time-to-event survival analysis, in which the presence of a competing event is prevalent. It is acceptable to use the conventional Cox proportional hazard regression to model cause-specific hazard. However, this cause-specific hazard cannot directly translate to the cumulative incidence function, and the latter is usually clinically relevant. The subdistribution

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is the third leading cause of death worldwide according to the world health organization. It is a disease characterized by chronic inflammation and emphysema, and cigarette smoking is the main cause of COPD development. There are several forms of stress present in the lungs of COPD patients, such as smoking induced endoplasmic reticulum stress or hypoxi

Objectives To examine whether multimorbidity aggregates in families in Sweden.Design National explorative family study.Setting Swedish Multigeneration Register linked to the National Patient Register, 1997-2015. Multimorbidity was assessed with a modified counting method of 45 chronic non-communicable diseases according to ICD-10 (international classification of diseases, 10th revision) diagnoses.

Complex and multiphonic voice signals of vocal improvisors are analyzed within the framework of nonlinear dynamics. Evidence is given that nonlinear phenomena are extensively used by performers associated with contemporary music. Narrow-band spectrograms of complex vocalizations are used to visualize the appearance of nonlinear phenomena (spectral bifurcation diagrams). Possible production mechani

BACKGROUND: Bisphosphonates have profound effects on bone physiology, and could modify the process of metastasis. We undertook collaborative meta-analyses to clarify the risks and benefits of adjuvant bisphosphonate treatment in breast cancer.METHODS: We sought individual patient data from all unconfounded trials in early breast cancer that randomised between bisphosphonate and control. Primary ou

BackgroundThe optimal ways of using aromatase inhibitors or tamoxifen as endocrine treatment for early breast cancer remains uncertain.MethodsWe undertook meta-analyses of individual data on 31 920 postmenopausal women with oestrogen-receptor-positive early breast cancer in the randomised trials of 5 years of aromatase inhibitor versus 5 years of tamoxifen; of 5 years of aromatase inhibitor versus

BACKGROUND: Postmastectomy radiotherapy was shown in previous meta-analyses to reduce the risks of both recurrence and breast cancer mortality in all women with node-positive disease considered together. However, the benefit in women with only one to three positive lymph nodes is uncertain. We aimed to assess the effect of radiotherapy in these women after mastectomy and axillary dissection.METHOD