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Aims: Individuals with substance use disorders (SUD) have higher risk of developing pain disorders. This study aimed to investigate the risk of major psychiatric disorders (MPD), SUD, and pain disorders among their offspring. Methods: This study used data from the Taiwan National Health Research Database. The case cohort included participants who had a parent diagnosed with SUD. The matched control cohort was offspring of parents without any SUD or major psychiatric disorder (MPD). Poisson regression was applied to estimate the risk of MPD, SUD, and pain disorder between case and control cohorts. Results: We recruited 13,840 cases and 138,400 matched controls. After adjusting for demographic characteristics and family history of psychiatric disorder, the offspring of parents with SUD had higher risk for bipolar disorder (reported as risk ratio with 95% confidence interval: 2.48, 1.79–3.43), depressive disorder (2.22, 1.94–2.52), SUD (2.53, 2.18–2.92), and alcohol use disorder (1.43, 1.16–1.76) than controls. With adjustments of demographic characteristics, individual MPD, and family history of psychiatric disorder, they also presented higher risk than controls for several pain disorders, including migraine (1.43, 1.15–1.78), fibromyalgia (1.21, 1.03–1.42), dorsopathies (1.20, 1.06–1.37), dysmenorrhea (1.16, 1.04–1.29), irritable bowel syndrome (1.26, 1.11–1.43), and dyspepsia (1.14, 1.02–1.27). Conclusions: Clinicians should be aware of the influence of parental SUD on the elevated risk for MPD, SUD, and pain disorders in their offspring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diseases can be interconnected. In the recent years, there has been a surge of multidisease studies. Among them, HDN (human disease network) analysis takes a system perspective, examines the interconnections among diseases along with their individual properties, and has demonstrated great potential. Most of the existing HDN analyses are based on either molecular information (which may be unreliable and have limited clinical relevance) or phenotypic measures (which may have limited implications for disease management and not directly reflect disease severity). In this study, we take advantage of the uniquely valuable Taiwan NHIRD (National Health Insurance Research Database) data and conduct an HDN analysis of disease treatment cost. Complementing the existing literature, treatment cost can serve as a surrogate of disease severity (and hence be clinically highly relevant) and also directly describe the financial burden of illness (and hence be uniquely informative for disease management). With inpatient and outpatient treatment data on close to 1 million randomly selected subjects and collected during the period of 2000 to 2013, the human disease cost network is constructed using a novel copula-based approach and the weighted correlation-based network construction technique. Extensive analysis is conducted, and the results are found to be biomedically sensible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is an eye disease causing blindness in the elderly. It shares many common possible pathogenic mechanisms with cardiovascular diseases. Many studies have discussed the association between AMD and stroke, but the results were inconsistent. Our aim was to determine the associations between neovascular AMD and the risk of stroke in the Taiwanese population. Methods This is a retrospective cohort study. We used claims data from National Health Insurance Research Database. Patients aged more than 45 years without stroke, myocardial infarction, or any AMD were selected from 2001 to 2008 and followed until 2010. The index date was defined as the date of nAMD diagnosis (ICD-9 code, 362.52). The comparison group was patients without an nAMD diagnosis with age- and sex-matched to nAMD subjects at a ratio of up to 10 to 1. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis and Cox regression analysis were used. The incidence of stroke events (ICD-9 codes, 430-434) and their subtypes (hemorrhagic and ischemic) were primary outcomes. Secondary outcomes included acute myocardial infarction (AMI), composite AMI/stroke, and all-cause mortality. Results Patients with nAMD had a higher risk of developing stroke, with an adjusted HR of 1.30 (95% CI, 1.01-1.68). A higher risk for hemorrhagic stroke (HR, 1.70, 95% CI, 1.03-2.83) was also found. No significant differences were observed in ischemic stroke, the composite of AMI/stroke, and all-cause mortality. Conclusions Patients with nAMD had a significantly higher risk of developing stroke, which was driven mainly by the increased risk of developing the hemorrhagic subtype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite good clinical results of current drugs, a good reason still exists to search for additional therapies for the management of Chronic Myeloid Leukemia ( CML). Chinese Herbal Medicine ( CHM) has thus far been overlooked by researchers and no data exists on the subject. We studied the impact of adjunctive CHM on the disease course of CML, using mortality as the major outcome measurement. We used the Taiwanese National Health Insurance Research Database to perform a nationwide population-based cohort study. Our study included CML patients diagnosed between 2000 and 2010. We matched groups according to age, sex, Charlson Comorbidity Index ( CCI) score and use of imatinib, and compared the Hazard Ratios ( HR) of CHM group and non- CHM users, as well as characterized trends of prescriptions used for treating CML. 1371 patients were diagnosed with CML in the years examined, of which 466 were included in to this study. We found that the HR of CHM group was significantly lower compared to non- CHM groups (0.32, 95% CI 0.22-0.48, P < 0.0001). We also established that this association between reduced HR was dose-dependent, and the longer CHM users received prescriptions, the lower the HR ( P < 0.01). We also analyzed the most commonly used herbal products as well as the HR associated to their use, thus providing future research candidates. Our results supply a strong reason to assume that when administered by properly trained physicians, CHM may have a substantial positive impact on the management of CML. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perhaps dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry based bone mineral density (BMD) can act as a predictor for fracture risk to avoid interindividual differences in drug response, especially signs such as BMD changes that are strongly associated with vertebral fractures [4]. Keywords: anti-osteoporosis medication; bisphosphonates; denosumab; NHIRD EN anti-osteoporosis medication bisphosphonates denosumab NHIRD 384 385 2 02/22/22 20220301 NES 220301 We have carefully read the cohort study by Fu et al. on anti-osteoporosis medication (AOM) [1]. Regarding: Increased fracture risk after discontinuation of anti-osteoporosis medications among hip fracture patients. [Extracted from the article]

The article presents the results of a study validating the use of the National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD) in patients with ischemic stroke by comparing with medical center database in Taiwan. According to the authors, the overall agreement of comorbid diagnoses of NHIRD was 48.39 percent while the positive predictive value for selected conditions varied from 0.50 for fracture to 1.00 for colon cancer. They mention the high accuracy of recorded aspirin prescription of NHIRD in first post discharge visit than during hospitalization.