Background and Purpose: Real-world laboratory monitoring of dabigatran activity is challenging. The purpose of the present study was to demonstrate the feasibility and accuracy of finger prick sampling with dried blood spot (fpDBS) cards in measuring the dabigatran concentration. Material and Methods: Patients >20 years of age with atrial fibrillation and receiving dabigatran therapy for more than 7 days were included in the study. Peak and trough dabigatran concentrations were collected by simu...
Diabetic neuropathy (DN) is one of the chronic complications of diabetes which can cause severe harm to patients. In order to determine the key genes and pathways related to the pathogenesis of DN, we downloaded the microarray data set GSE27382 from Gene Expression Synthesis (GEO) and adopted bioinformatics methods for comprehensive analysis, including functional enrichment, construction of PPI networks, central genes screening, TFs-target interaction analysis and evaluation of immune infiltrati...
Background Chemotherapy is suspected to be a risk factor for stroke in patients with cancer, athough the results from large-scale studies are controversial. Few strategies are available for reducing the stroke-related risks. Methods We analyzed stroke incidence rates in Taiwan's Longitudinal Health Insurance Database 2000 (LHID2000) for patients aged ≥20 years with newly-diagnosed cancer between Jan 1, 2000 and Dec 31, 2006, who did or did not receive chemotherapy. Moreover, we compared stroke i...
Background: Immunosuppressive medication (IM) nonadherence is associated with poor transplant outcomes. Therefore, it is of great importance to identify predictive factors with IM nonadherence. We aimed to improve the predicted capacity of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) by adding Health Belief Model’s variables (HBM) in renal transplant patients (RTPs). Methods: This cross-sectional study distributed questionnaires to patients who had undergone renal transplant and follow-up regularly in t...
Asiatic acid (AA) has been shown to induce apoptotic death in a range of cancers, but the mechanisms whereby it can inhibit tongue cancer growth have yet to be clarified. Herein, we explored the effects of AA on tongue cancer cells and found that it induced their apoptotic death in vitro and in vivo, while additionally impairing xenograft tumor growth in vivo. From a mechanistic perspective, AA treatment was associated with increases in levels of calcium and the calcium-dependent protease calpai...
According to classical pharmacophore fusion strategy, a series of 6-arylureido-4-anilinoquinazoline derivatives (Compounds 7a-t) were designed, synthesized, and biologically evaluated by standard CCK-8 method, induction apoptosis assay, and enzyme inhibition test. Among the title compounds, Compound 7a, 7c, 7d, 7f, 7i, 7o, 7p, 7q exhibited promising antiproliferative bioactivities, especially Compound 7i with excellent antitumor activities against A549, HT-29 and MCF-7 cell lines (IC50 = 2.25, 1...