We aimed to examine the association between metabolic syndrome and the risk of kidney stone development in a large-scale community-based cohort. A total of 121,579 participants enrolled in the Taiwan Biobank were analyzed. They were divided into two groups on the basis of presence of metabolic syndrome. The presence of kidney stone disease was defined by self-reported history of kidney stones. The mean age of participants was 50 years old, and self-reported kidney stones were observed in 3446 (10%) and 4292 (5%) participants with metabolic syndrome and without metabolic syndrome, respectively. Higher prevalence of kidney stone disease was found in participants with metabolic syndrome compared to those without metabolic syndrome (odds ratio (OR), 1.32; 95% confidence interval (95% CI), 1.25 to 1.39). In addition, the risk of incident kidney stone development was analyzed in a longitudinal cohort of 25,263 participants without kidney stones at baseline during a mean follow-up of 47 months. Multivariable Cox regression analysis revealed that the risk for incident kidney stone disease was higher in participants with metabolic syndrome than those without metabolic syndrome (hazard ratio, 1.24; 95% CI, 1.04 to 1.49). Our study suggests that metabolic syndrome does increase the risk of kidney stones.

Introduction: Androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT) is recognized to be the preferred first-line treatment for advanced prostate cancer. However, the risk–benefit ratio of ADT remains poorly defined and the relationship between androgen depletion and dementia is not clear. Aim: To investigate the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in patients undergoing ADT for prostate cancer. Methods: Data from 24 360 prostate cancer patients were collected from the Longitudinal Health Insurance Database of Taiwan. In total, 15 959 patients who underwent ADT were included in the study cohort, and another 8401 patients who did not receive ADT were included as a non-ADT cohort. Results: During the average 4-year follow-up period, the incidence of AD was 2.78 per 1000 person-years in the non-ADT cohort and 5.66 per 1000 person-years in the ADT cohort. After adjusting for age and all comorbidities, the combined ADT cohort was found to be 1.84 times more likely to develop AD than the non-ADT control group (95%CI 1.33–2.55, p < 0.001). Conclusions: The present results suggest that ADT use is associated with an increased risk of developing AD.

Background. Colony-stimulating factor-1 (CSF-1) is a homodimeric glycoprotein. The main role of CSF-1 is as a hematopoietic growth factor that modulates proliferation, differentiation, and survival of macrophages. Moreover, CSF-1 has also been reported to be aberrantly expressed in several human cancers. However, the precise role of CSF-1 in upper tract urothelial carcinomas (UTUC) has not been studied. In this research, we examined the clinical significance of CSF-1 expression in UTUC. Materials and Methods. One hundred twelve cancer tissue samples of UTUC from patients were included in this study, and the other cohort of 35 UTUC were paired cancer-adjacent normal samples. CSF-1 expression was evaluated by immunohistochemistry, and the association of CSF-1 expression with different clinicopathological variables was analyzed. Results. CSF-1 expression was higher in UTUC than in the normal urothelium (P=0.005). The CSF-1 expression was primarily localized in the nucleus and was significantly correlated with tumor size (P=0.04) and patients who had a high stage (P<0.001), distant metastasis (P=0.006), recurrence (P=0.003), and cancer death (P=0.005). High CSF-1 expression was correlated with poor disease-free survival (P=0.008) and cancer-specific survival (P=0.001). Our results also used univariate and multivariable analyses, which found that high CSF-1 expression was an independent predictor of poor disease-free survival (hazardratio=2.56; P=0.007) and cancer-specific survival (hazardratio=5.14; P=0.022). Conclusions. Our findings indicate that the expression of CSF-1 is a potential prognostic marker for predicting patient survival and recurrence in UTUC.