Purpose: Asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are complex and heterogeneous inflammatory diseases. We sought to investigate distinct disease profiles based on clinical, cellular and molecular data from patients with mild-to-moderate obstructive pulmonary diseases.
Patients and Methods: Patients with mild-to-moderate allergic asthma (n=30) and COPD (n=30) were prospectively recruited. Clinical characteristics and induced sputum were collected. In total, 35 mediators were assessed in induced sputum. Logistic regression analysis was conducted to identify the optimal factors that were able to discriminate between asthma and COPD. Further, the data were explored using hierarchical clustering in order to discover and compare clusters of combined samples of asthma and COPD patients. Clinical parameters, cellular composition, and sputum mediators of asthma and COPD were assessed between and within obtained clusters.
Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) presents with emotional and somatic symptoms and sometimes subjective cognitive complaints (SCCs). This study developed a collaborative method to integrate SCC assessment for evaluating late-life MDD.
Methods: Residents aged > 50 years in the Community Medicine Research Center of Keelung Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taiwan during 2017– 2018 were prospectively recruited in this study. The participants were asked to report their depressive tendency and SCCs using the Taiwanese Depression Questionnaire (TDQ) and the AD8, respectively, and were administered psychiatric evaluation through the Mini–International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI). The participants were divided into elderly (age≥ 65 years) and older adult (age 50– 65) groups. The MDD predictive powers were assessed using logistic regression and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analyses.