Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Plasma Protein Signatures Of Adult Asthma, Gordon J. Smilnak, Yura Lee, Abhijnan Chattopadhyay, Annah B. Wyss, Julie D. White, Sinjini Sikdar, Jianping Jin, Andrew J. Grant, Alison A. Motsinger-Reif, Jian-Liang Li, Mikyeong Lee, Bing Yu, Stephanie J. London

Mathematics & Statistics Faculty Publications

Background: Adult asthma is complex and incompletely understood. Plasma proteomics is an evolving technique that can both generate biomarkers and provide insights into disease mechanisms. We aimed to identify plasma proteomic signatures of adult asthma.

Methods: Protein abundance in plasma was measured in individuals from the Agricultural Lung Health Study (ALHS) (761 asthma, 1095 non-case) and the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities study (470 asthma, 10,669 non-case) using the SOMAScan 5K array. Associations with asthma were estimated using covariate adjusted logistic regression and meta-analyzed using inverse-variance weighting. Additionally, in ALHS, we examined phenotypes based on both asthma and seroatopy (asthma with …

Biological Parameters And The Histological Response In Rectal Cancer Treated By Neoadjuvant Chemoradiotherapy: A Moroccan Cohort, A. Naim, N. Bouanani, F. Safini, S. Mounaime, Soumaya Rafii, L. Lachker, F. Guessous, M. Khaliss, N. Tawfiq, A. Badou

Health Sciences

Introduction: Multimodal management of rectal cancer, combining neoadjuvant Radio chemotherapy followed by total Mesorectal therapy (TME), has been shown to improve locoregional control. However, the histological response is variable independently of the initial tumor stage. Some recent data suggest the usefulness of the lymphocyte-monocyte ratio (LMR), neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), and platelet-lymphocyte ratio (PLR) in predicting the histological response to neoadjuvant therapy. This study aimed to investigate the correlation between the complete histological response (pCR) after neoadjuvant radio chemotherapy and biological parameters (LMR, NLR and PLR) in rectal cancer patients.

PATIENTS AND METHODS: This retrospective study was conducted in three Moroccan …

Personalized Medicine: The Use Of Biomarkers And Molecularly Targeted Therapies For Patient Care And Cancer Intervention, Wafa Asad, Emily Schmitt Lavin

Mako: NSU Undergraduate Student Journal

Personalized medicine and targeted therapy have been emerging fields of study for the remediation and inhibition of cancer. Personalized medicine in the treatment of cancer involves using genetic, immune, and proteomic profiling to provide therapeutic options as well as prognostic background for every patient and their tumor’s genetic mutations. Targeted therapies allow researchers and medical personnel alike to determine the appropriate treatment for a patient based on the molecular basis and mechanistic actions of a cancerous tumor. The overall significance of this study was to express how these treatments use biomarkers to pinpoint the location, and severity of the cancer, …

Current Status Of Magnetic Resonance On Saliva For Oral And Dental Health Early Diagnosis, Anastasia Katsavochristou, Dimitrios Koumoulis

Oral Health Practice Faculty Publications

Magnetic resonance spectroscopy of biomolecules has recently gained attention for clinical diagnosis. Its combination with saliva collection and analysis can promote early disease detection and monitoring, by identifying biomarkers of specific underlying pathology or disease as detected in saliva. With this novel, non-invasive technique, certain salivary biomarkers have been linked to dental and periodontal tissues pathology, as well as to specific head and neck cancer malignancies. At present, diagnostic biomarkers are still in need for further identification (e.g., diagnosis and monitoring of Sjögren’s syndrome), and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy has been found to be a promising technique to compliment the …

Distinct White Matter Changes Associated With Cerebrospinal Fluid Amyloid-Β1-42 And Hypertension, Omar M. Al-Janabi, Christopher A. Brown, Ahmed A. Bahrani, Erin L. Abner, Justin M. Barber, Brian T. Gold, Larry B. Goldstein, Richard R. Murphy, Peter T. Nelson, Nathan F. Johnson, Leslie M. Shaw, Charles D. Smith, John Q. Trojanowski, Donna M. Wilcock, Gregory A. Jicha

Sanders-Brown Center on Aging Faculty Publications

BACKGROUND: Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology and hypertension (HTN) are risk factors for development of white matter (WM) alterations and might be independently associated with these alterations in older adults.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the independent and synergistic effects of HTN and AD pathology on WM alterations.

METHODS: Clinical measures of cerebrovascular disease risk were collected from 62 participants in University of Kentucky Alzheimer's Disease Center studies who also had cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) sampling and MRI brain scans. CSF Aβ_1-42 levels were measured as a marker of AD, and fluid-attenuated inversion recovery imaging and diffusion tensor imaging were obtained to assess …

Identification Of Prognostic Cancer Biomarkers Through The Application Of Rna-Seq Technologies And Bioinformatics, Nathan Wong

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short single-stranded RNAs that function as the guide sequence of the post-transcriptional regulatory process known as the RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC), which targets mRNA sequences for degradation through complementary binding to the guide miRNA. Changes in miRNA expression have been reported as correlated with numerous biological processes, including embryonic development, cellular differentiation, and disease manifestation. In the latter case, dysregulation has been observed in response to infection by human papillomavirus (HPV), which has also been established as both oncogenic in cervical cancers and oropharyngeal cancers and favorable for overall patient survival after tumor formation. The identification of …

Developent Of A Phospholipid Encapsulation Process For Quantum Dots To Be Used In Biologic Applications, Logan Grimes

Master's Theses

The American Cancer Society predicts that 1,665,540 people will be diagnosed with cancer, and 585,720 people will die from cancer in 2014. One of the most common types of cancer in the United States is skin cancer. Melanoma alone is predicted to account for 10,000 of the cancer related deaths in 2014. As a highly mobile and aggressive form of cancer, melanoma is difficult to fight once it has metastasized through the body. Early detection in such varieties of cancer is critical in improving survival rates in afflicted patients. Present methods of detection rely on visual examination of suspicious regions …

Direct Quantitative Analysis Of Biomarkers Using Mass Spectrometry, Morgan N. Mcluckey, Zheng Ouyang

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Point-of-care (POC) diagnostics describes a step in the medical treatment process where drugs can be monitored in a patient’s body on-site and in a timely fashion. Mass spectrometry (MS) can provide a quick, efficient, and highly accurate method of analysis of patient biofluids and tissues. Developing methods to bring this diagnostic mechanism to hospitals and clinics has the potential to improve patient care through, for example, personalized medicine. Our goal was to develop a way to effectively introduce internal standard (IS), a necessary chemical for the analytical process, to low-volume biofluid samples. Additionally, the effective direct quantitation of biomarkers with …

Scanning In Situ Spectroscopy Pplatform For Imaging Surgical Breast Tissue Specimens, Venkataramanan Krishnaswamy, Ashley M. Laughney, Wendy A. Wells, Keith D. Paulsen, Brian W. Pogue

Dartmouth Scholarship

A non-contact localized spectroscopic imaging platform has been developed and optimized to scan 1 x 1 cm² square regions of surgically resected breast tissue specimens with ~150-micron resolution. A color corrected, image-space telecentric scanning design maintained a consistent sampling geometry and uniform spot size across the entire imaging field. Theoretical modeling in ZEMAX allowed estimation of the spot size, which is equal at both the center and extreme positions of the field with ~5% variation across the designed waveband, indicating excellent color correction. The spot sizes at the center and an extreme field position were also measured experimentally using the …

Combined Fluorescence And Reflectance Spectroscopy For In Vivo Quantification Of Cancer Biomarkers In Low- And High-Grade Glioma Surgery, Pablo A. ValdéS, Anthony Kim, Keith D. Paulsen, Frederic Leblond, Olga M. Conde, Brent T. Harris, David W. Roberts

Dartmouth Scholarship

Biomarkers are indicators of biological processes and hold promise for the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Gliomas represent a heterogeneous group of brain tumors with marked intra- and inter-tumor variability. The extent of surgical resection is a significant factor influencing post-surgical recurrence and prognosis. Here, we used fluorescence and reflectance spectral signatures for in vivo quantification of multiple biomarkers during glioma surgery, with fluorescence contrast provided by exogenously-induced protoporphyrin IX (PpIX) following administration of 5-aminolevulinic acid. We performed light-transport modeling to quantify multiple biomarkers indicative of tumor biological processes, including the local concentration of PpIX and associated photoproducts, total hemoglobin …

Improved Quantification Of Small Objects In Near-Infrared Diffuse Optical Tomography, Subhadra Srinivasan, Brian W. Pogue, Hamid Dehghani, Shudong Jiang, Xiaomei Song, Keith D. Paulsen

Dartmouth Scholarship

Diffuse optical tomography allows quantification of hemoglobin, oxygen saturation, and water in tissue, and the fidelity in this quantification is dependent on the accuracy of optical properties determined during image reconstruction. In this study, a three-step algorithm is proposed and validated that uses the standard Newton minimization with Levenberg-Marquardt regularization as the first step. The second step is a modification to the existing algorithm using a two-parameter regularization to allow lower damping in a region of interest as compared to background. This second stage allows the recovery of the actual size of an inclusion. A region-based reconstruction is the final …