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OBJECTIVES: Correlations are made between mainstream cigarette smoke deliveries of individual PAHs over multiple years. Average overall PAH deliveries in mainstream cigarette smoke by study year, mentholation, ring size, and manufacturer are compared. METHODS: Mainstream smoke deliveries were determined by GC/MS for 14 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from selected cigarettes on the US market in 2002, 2004, 2007, and 2011. The mainstream smoke PAH emissions were measured under international standardization organization (ISO) smoking conditions. Pearson product-moment correlation was used to examine the linear relationship among the PAHs over multiple years. RESULTS: A number of the PAH analytes were statistically highly correlated with each other. The overall average for mainstream smoke deliveries of PAHs did not change significantly between study years. Similar levels in average PAH deliveries were seen for mentholated and non-mentholated cigarettes. CONCLUSIONS: The strong correlations between PAH compounds over multiple years show that a limited set of PAHs can predict deliveries of others with confidence over multiple years. A more limited panel of analytes may be considered when designing studies involving PAH measurements in mainstream smoke.

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Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is one of the most frequently diagnosed disorders, affecting about 20% of the general population in Western countries. This syndrome poses an enormous socio-economic burden, impairs the quality of life substantially, and increases healthcare costs. IBS can be classified as either idiopathic (ID-IBS) with unknown etiology or post-infectious (PI-IBS), which develops after a bout of acute diarrhea or gastroenteritis. Little is known about the immunopathogenesis of these two forms of IBS. We evaluated various biomarkers in clinical samples of ID-IBS and PI-IBS patients with the goal to test the hypothesis that the immunologic presentations of these forms of IBS are similar, despite their apparent different etiologic origins. Sera and stool samples from PI-IBS, ID-IBS, and healthy volunteers were analyzed for relative amounts of 36 different biomarkers using the Proteome Profiler Human Cytokine Array Panel A Kit and quantitative ELISA. Our results demonstrated significantly high levels of chemotactic chemokines monocytes chemotactic protein-1 (CCL2) [p-value  = 0.003], macrophage inflammatory protein-1ß (CCL4) [p-value  = 0.010], and CXCL16 (p-value 0.001) in the sera and stools of both ID-IBS and PI-IBS patients. Furthermore, pro-inflammatory cytokines (IFN-γ, IL-1ß, and TNF-α) were significantly higher in IBS patients. Anti-inflammatory cytokines (IL-10, IL-4, and IL-13) were variable except IL-10, which was significantly higher in the healthy volunteers than the IBS patients. Remarkably, the amounts and expression pattern of these biomarkers were not significantly different between ID-IBS and PI-IBS. Thus, ID-IBS and PI-IBS present similar immunologic and clinical phenotypes, in spite of their different etiologic origins.

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Optical spectroscopy has been proposed as an accurate and low-cost alternative for detection of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia. We previously published an algorithm using optical spectroscopy as an adjunct to colposcopy and found good accuracy (sensitivity=1.00 [95% confidence interval (CI)=0.92 to 1.00], specificity=0.71 [95% CI=0.62 to 0.79]). Those results used measurements taken by expert colposcopists as well as the colposcopy diagnosis. In this study, we trained and tested an algorithm for the detection of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (i.e., identifying those patients who had histology reading CIN 2 or worse) that did not include the colposcopic diagnosis. Furthermore, we explored the interaction between spectroscopy and colposcopy, examining the importance of probe placement expertise. The colposcopic diagnosis-independent spectroscopy algorithm had a sensitivity of 0.98 (95% CI=0.89 to 1.00) and a specificity of 0.62 (95% CI=0.52 to 0.71). The difference in the partial area under the ROC curves between spectroscopy with and without the colposcopic diagnosis was statistically significant at the patient level (p=0.05) but not the site level (p=0.13). The results suggest that the device has high accuracy over a wide range of provider accuracy and hence could plausibly be implemented by providers with limited training.

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