BACKGROUND To investigate whether genetic risk variants for age-related macular degeneration (AMD) are associated with response to intravitreal anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in polypoidal choroidal vasculopathy (PCV) patients. METHODS This prospective cohort study included 95 treatment-naïve patients that underwent anti-VEGF treatment for PCV for 12 months. Patients were geno...

In this research, we propose a novel approach for a multinomial logit model selection procedure: specifically, we apply association rules analysis to identifying potential interactions for multinomial logit modeling. Interaction effects are very common in reality, but conventional multinomial logit model selection methods typically ignore them. This is especially true for higher-order interacti...

Regional-based association analysis instead of individual testing of each SNP was introduced in genome-wide association studies to increase the power of gene mapping, especially for rare genetic variants. For regional association tests, the kernel machine-based regression approach was recently proposed as a more powerful alternative to collapsing-based methods. However, the vast majority of exi...

Background The association of differing genotypes with disease-related phenotypic traits offers great potential to both help identify new therapeutic targets and support stratification of patients who would gain the greatest benefit from specific drug classes. Development of low-cost genotyping and sequencing has made collecting large-scale genotyping data routine in population and therapeutic ...

background & aim: low back pain is the most debilitating condition, and can lead to decreased physical function, compromised quality of life, and psychological distress. several studies have been conducted to recognize the risk factors of low back pain, but despite of strong relationship between obesity and low back pain, the underlying mechanisms are unclear. the aim of this study was to evalu...

There has been a growing interest in developing strategies for identifying single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that explain a linkage signal by joint modeling of linkage and association. We compare several existing methods and propose a new method called the homozygote sharing transmission-disequilibrium test (HSTDT) to detect linkage and association or to identify SNPs explaining the linkag...

conclusions knowledge, attitude and performance of the communication skills of health staff are improper and it would lead to not using the communication skills to establish perfect communication with patients, so it seems that it is necessary to make the training courses during the service for health staff about communication skills and observing on performing the acquired skills. patients and...

background and aims. childhood obesity has been associated with high refined sugar intake. the relationship between sucrose intake and development of dental caries has been established. the aim of this study was to determine the association between age-specific body mass index (bmi-for-age) and dental caries in children. materials and methods. in this cross-sectional study a total of 1003 child...