Nasheen Naidoo

Background The occupational health of university staff bears great social and economic value for which health utility is an indivisible aspect. Utility is also the primary data for the cost-utility analysis of occupational health programs. Health utility and occupational diseases have not been reported for the university staff in China. In the ligh...

Background: Early diagnosis and confirmation of HIV infection in newborns is crucial for expedited initiation of antiretroviral therapy. Confirmatory testing must be done for all children with a reactive HIV PCR result. There is no comprehensive data on confirmatory testing and HIV PCR test request rejections at National Health Laboratory Service l...

Background: Hepatitis C virus (HCV) genotype 1 is the most prevalent HCV infection in China. Sofosbuvir-based direct antiviral agent (DAA) regimens are the current mainstays of treatment. Sofosbuvir/velpatasvir (SOF/VEL) and sofosbuvir/ledipasvir (SOF/LDV) regimens became reimbursable in China in 2020. Thus, this study aimed to identify the optimal...

Backgrounds: The health of university staff is a major occupational health concern worldwide. Studies have reported low health-related quality of life (HRQOL), low job satisfaction and poor mental health in this occupational group. However, none of previous studies have measured health utility and compared it to a national norm. Therefore, this stu...

Background: Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is an important health threat in China to which direct acting antivirals (DAAs) are very effective. In 2019, another novel DAA glecaprevir/pibrentasvir (GLE/ PIB) was officially approved. Knowledge of its cost-effectiveness would be informative for clinical decision making but has not been evaluated. Th...

Background: Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) is the most common non-AIDS-defining cancer in HIV-positive patients. Studies on South African (SA) populations have described the prevalence as 7 - 17% of all lymphomas, 8 - 27% of head and neck lymphomas, 9% of lymph node biopsies and 4% of HIV-related malignancies. Objectives: To describe the incidence of HL...

Hodgkin's lymphoma (HL) constitutes a clonal expansion of what appears to be malignant B cells. Viruses are involved in its pathogenesis, such as the Epstein–Barr virus (EBV) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Since these viral infections have been shown to play key roles in the pathogenesis of HL, countries with a prevalence of HIV and EBV re...

Background Like several Southeast Asian countries, Singapore has a complex eating-out environment and a rising eating-out prevalence. However the determinants and drivers of eating-out in urban Asian environments are poorly understood. Methods We examined the socio-demographic characteristics of persons who frequently ate away from home in local e...

Background: Studies of electrophoresis testing (serum protein electrophoresis (SPE), urine protein electrophoresis (UPE), immunofixation electrophoresis (IFE)) in a South African (SA) pathology laboratory setting are limited. Objectives: To evaluate the prevalence, testing pattern and yield of electrophoresis tests performed over a 5-year period...

Aim: To identify the optimal strategy for gastric cancer (GC) prevention by evaluating the cost-effectiveness of esophagogastroduodenoscopy (EGD)-based preventive strategies. Methods: We conducted a model-based cost-effectiveness analysis. Adopting a healthcare payer's perspective, Markov models simulated the clinical experience of the target po...

Introduction: Iron deficiency is associated with significant morbidity and mortality, can present with or without haematological changes and is a major cause of microcytic anaemia. In South Africa and Africa in general, there is a paucity of studies on the iron status of healthy adult non pregnant females and males >18years of age. The aim of the...

Background: Indexes to quantify adherence to recommended dietary patterns have been developed for Western populations, but it is unclear whether these indexes can predict acute myocardial infarction (AMI) in Asian populations. Objectives: We aimed to investigate the association between the Alternative Healthy Eating Index (AHEI)-2010 and risk of...

Background: In western populations, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP), and to a lesser degree serum creatinine and haemoglobin A1c, predict risk of coronary heart disease (CHD). However, data on Asian populations that are increasingly affected by CHD are sparse and it is not clear whether these biomarkers can be used to improve CHD risk...

Introduction: Adherence to the Alternative Healthy Eating Index-2010 (AHEI-2010) has been associated with lower risk of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) in Western populations. It remains unclear if this association is present in Asian populations. Little is known about potential biological mediators of the association between the AHEI-2010 and AM...

The study investigated the relationship of general (body mass index [BMI]) and central (waist circumference [WC]; waist-hip ratio [WHipR]; waist-height ratio [WHeightR]) adiposity with all-cause and cardiovascular disease (CVD)-related mortality in an Asian population with diabetes. A total of 13,278 participants with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM...

As countries develop economically and increasing numbers of women enter the workforce, children are partly being cared for by someone other than their mother. Little is known about the impact of this shift in child-care provider on children’s nutrition. This study presents findings from a case study of Singapore, a small country that has experience...

The relation between carbohydrate intake and risk of ischemic heart disease (IHD) has not been fully explored in Asian populations known to have high-carbohydrate diets. We assessed whether intakes of total carbohydrates, different types of carbohydrates, and their food sources were associated with IHD mortality in a Chinese population. We prospect...

Gastric cancer (GC) surveillance based on oesophagogastroduodenoscopy (OGD) appears to be a promising strategy for GC prevention. By evaluating the cost-effectiveness of endoscopic surveillance in Singaporean Chinese, this study aimed to inform the implementation of such a program in a population with a low to intermediate GC risk. USING A REFERENC...

To (1) identify social and rehabilitation predictors of nursing home placement, (2) investigate the association between effectiveness and efficiency in rehabilitation and nursing home placement of patients admitted for inpatient rehabilitation from 1996 to 2005 by disease in Singapore. National data were retrospectively extracted from medical recor...

According to the World Health Organization's 2008 GLOBOCAN report, 64% of global cancer deaths -- and 56% of cancer cases -- were registered in countries in Africa, Asia, or Latin America. So while cancer is unquestionably a global burden, its reach in the developing world points to the need for specialized study on cancer in these countries. Canc...

Background Endoscopic surveillance has been proven effective in prolonging the survival of gastric cancer (GC) patients. However, there is limited evidence on the cost efficiency of delivering this intervention, especially on a national level in spite of cost efficiency being a major determinant of the actual cost-effectiveness of a cancer preventi...

The study reports on the results of an empirical investigation of the education and recruitment processes used in HIV vaccine trials conducted in South Africa. Interviews were conducted with 21 key informants involved in HIV vaccine research in South Africa and three focus groups of community advisory board members. Data analysis identified seven m...

Objective: To determine the trends in length of stay (LOS), rehabilitation functional outcome, and discharge destination of patients admitted for inpatient rehabilitation from 1996 to 2005 and stratified by disease in Singapore. Design: Retrospective national data were extracted from medical records of community-based inpatient rehabilitation ad...

Purpose of review: This review summarizes the results on flavonoid intakes and the development of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Recent findings: Recent advances in food composition databases have allowed the evaluation of a more comprehensive range of flavonoids in epidemiological studies. In addition, the number of randomized tri...

Background Quality of life (QoL) assessment has become an important aspect of the clinical management of gastric cancer (GC), which poses a greater health threat in Chinese populations around the world. Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Gastric Module (FACT-Ga), a questionnaire developed specifically to measure QoL of patients with GC, has ne...

BACKGROUND: Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed malignancy in men in Sweden and Geneva, and the third most common in men in Singapore. This population-based study describes trends in the incidence and mortality rates of prostate cancer in Singapore, Sweden and Geneva (Switzerland) from 1973 to 2006 and explores possible explanations for...

Journal of Human Genetics, official journal of the Japan Society of Human Genetics, publishes original articles and reviews on all aspects of human genetics, including medical genetics and genomics

The study of de novo point mutations (new germline mutations arising from the gametes of the parents) remained largely static until the arrival of next-generation sequencing technologies, which made both whole-exome sequencing (WES) and whole-genome sequencing (WGS) feasible in practical terms. Single nucleotide polymorphism genotyping arrays have...

Vitamin E and coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) have antioxidant effects that may benefit cardiovascular health. Meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials have not shown a protective effect of supplementation with the vitamin E isomer α-tocopherol on the risk of acute myocardial infarction (AMI), but data on other isomers and CoQ10 are limited. Our objectiv...

The advent of next-generation sequencing technologies has revolutionized the study of genetic variation in the human genome. Whole-genome sequencing currently represents the most comprehensive strategy for variant detection genome-wide but is costly for large sample sizes, and variants detected in noncoding regions remain largely uninterpretable. B...

The potential applications of next-generation sequencing technologies in diagnostic laboratories have become increasingly evident despite the various technical challenges that still need to be overcome to potentiate its widespread adoption in a clinical setting. Whole-genome sequencing is now both technically feasible and 'cost effective' using nex...

Endothelial dysfunction plays an important role in development and progression of atherosclerosis and may also contribute to the pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes. This review summarizes recent findings on the effects of vitamin D, antioxidant vitamins, polyphenols, polyphenol-rich foods, dietary component combinations and healthy diets on endothelia...

Recent developments in high-throughput sequence capture methods and next-generation sequencing technologies have now made exome sequencing a viable approach to elucidate the genetic basis of Mendelian disorders with hitherto unknown etiology. In addition, exome sequencing is increasingly being employed as a diagnostic tool for specific genetic dise...

The genomes of outbred populations were first shown in 2006 to contain regions of homozygosity (ROHs) of several megabases. Further studies have also investigated the characteristics of ROHs in healthy individuals in various populations but there are no studies on Singapore populations to date. This study aims to identify and investigate the charac...

Substantial progress has been made in human genetics and genomics research over the past ten years since the publication of the draft sequence of the human genome in 2001. Findings emanating directly from the Human Genome Project, together with those from follow-on studies, have had an enormous impact on our understanding of the architecture and fu...

The advances in next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies have had a significant impact on epigenomic research. The arrival of NGS technologies has enabled a more powerful sequencing based method--that is, ChIP-Seq--to interrogate whole genome histone modifications, improving on the conventional microarray based method (ChIP-chip). Similarly, t...

Copy number variations can be identified using newer genotyping arrays with higher single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) density and copy number probes accompanied by newer algorithms. McCarroll et al. (2008) applied these to the HapMap II samples and identified 1316 copy number polymorphisms (CNPs). In our study, we applied the same approach to 8...

Additional Tables. Table S1: This table contains information on participant characteristics across categories of tea intake. Table S2: This table contains information on the associations between total tea consumption and metabolic markers.

Higher coffee consumption has been associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes in cohort studies, but the physiological pathways through which coffee affects glucose metabolism are not fully understood. The aim of this study was to evaluate the associations between habitual coffee and tea consumption and glucose metabolism in a multi-ethnic Asi...

The abundance of copy number variants (CNVs) and regions of homozygosity (ROHs) have been well documented in previous studies. In addition, their roles in complex diseases and traits have since been increasingly appreciated. However, only a limited amount of CNV and ROH data is currently available for the Swedish population. We conducted a populati...

BACKGROUND: To measure the content of cholesterol-raising diterpenes in coffee sold at the retailer level in Singapore, Indonesia and India and to determine the relationship of coffee consumption with lipid levels in a population-based study in Singapore. METHODS: Survey and cross-sectional study in local coffee shops in Singapore, Indonesia and I...

A new era of copy number variants (CNVs) discovery began when two separate studies, published concurrently in 2004, identified several hundred deletions and duplications in the human genome. Over the past several years, most of the CNV data were generated by microarrays. These methods have several shortcomings, such as the inability to detect copy‐...

Over the past several years, more focus has been placed on dissecting the genetic basis of complex diseases and traits through genome-wide association studies. In contrast, Mendelian disorders have received little attention mainly due to the lack of newer and more powerful methods to study these disorders. Linkage studies have previously been the m...

Regions of homozygosity (ROHs) are more abundant in the human genome than previously thought. These regions are without heterozygosity, i.e. all the genetic variations within the regions have two identical alleles. At present there are no standardized criteria for defining the ROHs resulting in the different studies using their own criteria in the...

The genome‐wide association approach has become a reality as a result of significant advances in genomic resources such as the International HapMap Project, the high‐throughput genotyping technologies, the collection of large number of cases and controls and the development of powerful statistical analysis tools. The strength of this approach is it...

The recent advances in high‐throughput sequencing technologies have enabled several whole cancer genomes to be sequenced. In addition, a number of large‐scale targeted resequencing studies have also been performed previously using Sanger sequencing methods. These studies have identified numerous somatic mutations in cancer genomes and provided new...

In the light of the growing involvement of community advisory boards (CABs) in health research, this study presents empirical findings of the functions and operations of CABs in HIV/AIDS vaccine trials in South Africa. The individual and focus group interviews with CAB members, principal investigators, research staff, community educators, recruiter...

In the more than 100 genome wide association studies (GWAS) conducted in the past 5 years, more than 250 genetic loci contributing to more than 40 common diseases and traits have been identified. Whilst many genes have been linked to a trait, both their individual and combined effects are small and unable to explain earlier estimates of heritabilit...

The analysis presented here lays out the ethical warrants for requiring community oversight of health research conducted in international settings. It reviews the inadequacies with the current standards of individual informed consent and research ethics committee review, and then, shows how a broader population-based public health perspective raise...

Based on a content analysis using framing theory, this article examines how the microbicide trials for HIV/AIDS prevention were portrayed in local newspapers in South Africa. Twenty-nine newspaper articles on microbicide research in South Africa appeared between 2004 and 2007 in 8 major South African newspapers; 13 had extended discussions of the m...

Splanchnic neurectomy is of value in the management of chronic abdominal pain. It is postulated that the inconsistent results of splanchnicectomies may be due to anatomical variations in the pattern of splanchnic nerves. The advent of minimally invasive and video-assisted surgery has rekindled interest in the frequency of variations of the splanchn...