Background: Biliary tract cancers (BTCs) are rare and highly heterogenous malignant neoplasms. Because obtaining BTC tissues is challenging, the purpose of this study was to explore the potential roles of bile as a liquid biopsy medium in patients with BTC. Patients and methods: Sixty-nine consecutive patients with suspected BTC were prospectively enrolled in this study. Capture-based targeted sequencing was performed on tumor tissues, whole blood cells, plasma, and bile samples using a large panel consisting of 520 cancer-related genes. Results: Of the 28 patients enrolled in this cohort, tumor tissues were available in eight patients, and plasma and bile were available in 28 patients. Somatic mutations were detected in 100% (8/8), 71.4% (20/28), and 53.6% (15/28) of samples comprising tumor tissue DNA, bile cell-free DNA (cfDNA), and plasma cfDNA, respectively. Bile cfDNA showed a significantly higher maximum allele frequency than plasma cfDNA (P ¼ 0.0032). There were 56.2% of somatic single-nucleotide variant (SNVs)/insertions and deletions (indels) shared between bile and plasma cfDNA. When considering the genetic profiles of tumor tissues as the gold standard, the by-variant sensitivity and positive predictive value for SNVs/indels in bile cfDNA positive for somatic mutations were both 95.5%. The overall concordance for SNVs/indels in bile was significantly higher than that in plasma (99.1% versus 78.3%, P < 0.0001). Moreover, the sensitivity of CA 19-9 combined with bile cfDNA achieved 96.4% in BTC diagnosis. Conclusion: We demonstrated that bile cfDNA was superior to plasma cfDNA in the detection of tumor-related genomic alterations. Bile cfDNA as a minimally invasive liquid biopsy medium might be a supplemental approach to confirm BTC diagnosis.
Objective?To treat patients with menstrual disorders with Wenjing Decoction and analyze its therapeutic effects. Methods?80 patients with menstrual disorders were selected as the research subjects, and they were divided into two groups (experimental group and control group), with each group given different treatment methods. The control group was given conventional Western medical treatment while the experimental group was given Wenjing Decoction treatment, and the effects of different treatment methods on the patients were compared. Results: The total number of effectively treated patients in the experimental group (39 cases, 97.50%) was more than the that of the control group (25 cases, 62.50%), and the quality of life score of the experimental group (91.56±4.44 points) was higher that of the control group (81.72±3.19 points), and the number of menstrual recovery cycles (1.11±0.41) was less than that of the control group patients (2.42±1.25 times), P<0.05. Conclusion: The application of Wenjing Decoction for patients with menstrual disorders can significantly improve the treatment efficacy and is beneficial to improve the quality of life of the patients and shorten the number of cycles that menstruation starts to return to normal.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.