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Browsing Journal Articles by Subject "0104 Statistics"

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    Asthma inflammatory phenotypes on four continents: most asthma is non-eosinophilic
    (Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association, 2023-04) Pembrey L; Brooks C; Mpairwe H; Figueiredo CA; Oviedo AY; Chico M; Ali H; Nambuya I; Tumwesige P; Robertson S; Rutter CE; van Veldhoven K; Ring S; Barreto ML; Cooper PJ; Henderson J; Cruz AA; Douwes J; Pearce N; WASP Study Group
    BACKGROUND: Most studies assessing pathophysiological heterogeneity in asthma have been conducted in high-income countries (HICs), with little known about the prevalence and characteristics of different asthma inflammatory phenotypes in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs). This study assessed sputum inflammatory phenotypes in five centres, in Brazil, Ecuador, Uganda, New Zealand (NZ) and the United Kingdom (UK). METHODS: We conducted a cross-sectional study of 998 asthmatics and 356 non-asthmatics in 2016-20. All centres studied children and adolescents (age range 8-20 years), except the UK centre which involved 26-27 year-olds. Information was collected using questionnaires, clinical characterization, blood and induced sputum. RESULTS: Of 623 asthmatics with sputum results, 39% (243) were classified as eosinophilic or mixed granulocytic, i.e. eosinophilic asthma (EA). Adjusted for age and sex, with NZ as baseline, the UK showed similar odds of EA (odds ratio 1.04, 95% confidence interval 0.37-2.94) with lower odds in the LMICs: Brazil (0.73, 0.42-1.27), Ecuador (0.40, 0.24-0.66) and Uganda (0.62, 0.37-1.04). Despite the low prevalence of neutrophilic asthma in most centres, sputum neutrophilia was increased in asthmatics and non-asthmatics in Uganda. CONCLUSIONS: This is the first time that sputum induction has been used to compare asthma inflammatory phenotypes in HICs and LMICs. Most cases were non-eosinophilic, including in settings where corticosteroid use was low. A lower prevalence of EA was observed in the LMICs than in the HICs. This has major implications for asthma prevention and management, and suggests that novel prevention strategies and therapies specifically targeting non-eosinophilic asthma are required globally.
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    Rentrez: An R package for the NCBI eUtils API
    (The R Foundation for Statistical Computing, 2017-12) Winter DJ
    The USA National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is one of the world's most important sources of biological information. NCBI databases like PubMed and GenBank contain millions of records describing bibliographic, genetic, genomic, and medical data. Here I present rentrez, a package which provides an R interface to 50 NCBI databases. The package is well-documented, contains an extensive suite of unit tests and has an active user base. The programmatic interface to the NCBI provided by rentrez allows researchers to query databases and download or import particular records into R sessions for subsequent analysis. The complete nature of the package, its extensive test-suite and the fact the package implements the NCBI's usage policies all make rentrez a powerful aid to developers of new packages that perform more specific tasks.
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    Using data-driven and process mining techniques for identifying and characterizing problem gamblers in New Zealand
    (RTU Press, 2016-12) Suriadi S; Susnjak T; Ponder-Sutton A; Watters P; Schumacher CR