Project description:Patient experience literature in early-stage breast cancer (eBC) is limited. This study used a mixed-methods approach to examine patient conversations from public online forums to identify and evaluate eBC-related themes. Among 60,000 eBC-related posts published September 2014-2019, text from a random subset of 15,000 posts was extracted and grouped into linguistically similar, mutually exclusive clusters using an advanced natural language processing (NLP) algorithm. Clusters were characterized using four quantitative metrics: betweenness centrality (linguistic similarity to other areas of the cluster network), sentiment (general attitude toward a topic), recency (average date of posts), and volume (total number of posts). This analysis represented 3906 unique users (67% and 33% obtained from cancer-specific and general health/nonhealth forums, respectively). Of the 27 clusters identified, most important were "discussing recurrence & progression," "understanding diagnosis & prognosis," and "understanding cancer, biomarkers, and treatments." Several major themes related to recurrence risk, diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment were identified. Additional emphasis on communicating the disease recurrence risk and shared decision-making could strengthen patient-clinician partnerships.

| S-EPMC8521423 | biostudies-literature

Metabolomics and cancer preventive behaviors in the BC Generations Project.

Project description:Metabolomics can detect metabolic shifts resulting from lifestyle behaviors and may provide insight on the relevance of changes to carcinogenesis. We used non-targeted nuclear magnetic resonance to examine associations between metabolic measures and cancer preventive behaviors in 1319 participants (50% male, mean age 54 years) from the BC Generations Project. Behaviors were dichotomized: BMI < 25 kg/m2, ≥ 5 servings of fruits or vegetables/day, ≤ 2 alcoholic drinks/day for men or 1 drink/day for women and ≥ 30 min of moderate or vigorous physical activity/day. Linear regression was used to estimate coefficients and 95% confidence intervals with a false discovery rate (FDR) of 0.10. Of the 218 metabolic measures, 173, 103, 71 and 6 were associated with BMI, fruits and vegetables, alcohol consumption and physical activity. Notable findings included negative associations between glycoprotein acetyls, an inflammation-related metabolite with lower BMI and greater fruit and vegetable consumption, a positive association between polyunsaturated fatty acids and fruit and vegetable consumption and positive associations between high-density lipoprotein subclasses with lower BMI. These findings provide insight into metabolic alterations in the context of cancer prevention and the diverse biological pathways they are involved in. In particular, behaviors related to BMI, fruit and vegetable and alcohol consumption had a large metabolic impact.

| S-EPMC8187402 | biostudies-literature

Chromatin Reprogramming of In Vitro Fertilized and Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer Bovine Embryos During Embryonic Genome Activation [WGS-bovine-EJG]

Project description:Reprogramming of the gamete into a developmentally competent embryo identity is a fundamental aspect of preimplantation development. One of the most important processes of this reprogramming is the transcriptional awakening during embryonic genome activation (EGA), which robustly occurs in fertilized embryos but is defective in most somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) embryos. However, little is known about the genome-wide underlying chromatin landscape during EGA in SCNT embryos and how it differs from a fertilized embryo. By profiling open chromatin genome-wide in both types of bovine embryos, we find that SCNT embryos fail to reprogram a subset of the EGA gene targets that are normally activated in fertilized embryos. Importantly, a small number of transcription factor (TF) motifs explain most chromatin regions that fail to open in SCNT embryos suggesting that over-expression of a limited number of TFs may provide more robust reprogramming. One such TF, the zygotically-expressed bovine gene DUXC which is a homologue of EGA factors DUX/DUX4 in mouse/human, is alone capable of activating ~84% of all EGA transcripts that fail to activate normally in SCNT embryos. Additionally, single-cell chromatin profiling revealed low intra-embryo heterogeneity but high inter-embryo heterogeneity in SCNT embryos and an uncoupling of cell division and open chromatin reprogramming during EGA. Surprisingly, our data also indicate that transcriptional defects may arise downstream of promoter chromatin opening in SCNT embryos, suggesting additional mechanistic insights into how and why transcription at EGA is dysregulated. We anticipate that our work will lead to altered SCNT protocols to increase the developmental competency of bovine SCNT embryos.

2025-06-01 | GSE236608 | GEO

Chromatin Reprogramming of In Vitro Fertilized and Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer Bovine Embryos During Embryonic Genome Activation [ATAC-Seq]

2025-06-01 | GSE236604 | GEO