Heparin is a naturally produced, heterogeneous compound consisting of variably sulfated and acetylated repeating disaccharide units. The structural complexity of heparin complicates efforts to assess the purity of the compound, especially when differentiating between similar glycosaminoglycans. Recently, heparin sodium contaminated with oversulfated chondroitin sulfate A (OSCS) has been associa...

BACKGROUND Diagnosis of liver involvement due to schistosomiasis in asymptomatic patients from endemic areas previously diagnosed with chronic hepatitis B (HBV) or C (HCV) and periportal fibrosis is challenging. H-1 Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR)-based metabonomics strategy is a powerful tool for providing a profile of endogenous metabolites of low molecular weight in biofluids in a non-invas...

OBJECTIVE Chorioamnionitis is a leading cause of preterm birth worldwide, with higher incidence at lower gestational ages. An early and reliable diagnosis of histological chorioamnionitis (HCA) in preterm infants may be helpful in guiding postnatal management, especially the administration of prophylactic antibiotics to prevent early-onset sepsis. The main aim of this study was to investigate m...

The aim of this study was to investigate whether women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) had a unique metabolomic profile that was different from controls and to assess the feasibility of a definitive study. Twelve women with PCOS and 10 healthy women  as controls had measurements of demographic and anthropometric data, venepunctures and assays on plasma samples for metabolomic profiles usi...

This work aims to evaluate the potential of H Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy combined with multivariate statistics (metabonomics) for finding malignancy biomarkers in lung tissue and discriminating between different tumour histological types. Paired tissue samples from 32 patients with primary lung cancer were directly analysed by H High Resolution Magic Angle Spinning (HRMAS) NM...

Borna disease virus (BDV) persists in the central nervous systems of a wide variety of vertebrates and causes behavioral disorders. Previous studies have revealed that metabolic perturbations are associated with BDV infection. However, the pathophysiological effects of different viral strains remain largely unknown. Rat cortical neurons infected with human strain BDV Hu-H1, laboratory BDV Strai...

Background There is no consensus on how to define patients with symptoms of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). A diagnosis of asthma-COPD overlap (ACO) syndrome has been proposed, but its value is debated. This study (GSK Study 201703 [NCT02302417]) investigated the ability of statistical modeling approaches to define distinct disease groups in patients with obstructive lu...

BACKGROUND Metabonomics is a useful tool for studying mechanisms of drug treatment using systematic metabolite profiles. Ginsenosides Rg1 and Rb1, ophiopogonin D, and schizandrin are the main bioactive components of a traditional Chinese formula (Sheng-Mai San) widely used for the treatment of coronary heart disease. It remains unknown the effect of individual bioactive component and how the mu...

Random Forests were introduced by Breiman for feature (variable) selection and improved predictions for decision tree models. The resulting model is often superior to AdaBoost and bagging approaches. In this paper the random forests approach is extended for variable selection with other learning models, in this case Partial Least Squares (PLS) and Kernel Partial Least Squares (K-PLS) to estimat...

The utilisation of social media in the workplace has attracted much speculation in the business community in relation to its risks and benefits. However, intra-organisational dimensions affecting such ustilisation are yet to be holistically considered. Grounded in the scholarly literature, a survey questionnaire was operationalized and empirical data collected and analysed using PLS. The result...