Jin-Mei Li

Early screening and detection of individuals at high risk of high-frequency hearing loss and identification of risk factors are critical to reduce the prevalence at community level. However, unlike those for individuals facing occupational auditory hazards, a limited number of hearing loss screening models have been developed for community residents. Therefore, this study used lasso regression with 10-fold cross-validation for feature selection and model construction on 38 questionnaire-based variables of 4010 subjects and applied the model to training and testing cohorts to obtain a risk score. The model achieved an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.844 in the model validation stage and individuals’ risk scores were subsequently stratified into low-, medium-, and high-risk categories. A total of 92.79% (1094/1179) of subjects in the high-risk category were confirmed to have hearing loss by audiometry test, which was 3.7 times higher than that in the low-risk group (25.18%, 457/1815). Half of the key indicators were related to modifiable contexts, and they were identified as significantly associated with the incident hearing loss. These results demonstrated that the developed model would be feasible to identify residents at high risk of hearing loss via regular community-level health examinations and detecting individualized risk factors, and eventually provide precision interventions.

Lifestyle choices such as the intake of sweets, history of diseases, and genetic variants seem to play a role in the pathogenesis of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). To explore which genetic and environmental factors are associated with NAFLD in a Chinese Han population, we conducted this study. We collected the medical reports, lifestyle details, and blood samples of individuals and used the polymerase chain reaction-ligase detection reaction method to genotype the single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) from the 2113 eligible people. The GG genotype of the additive model of rs7493 in the PON2, the CC genotype of the additive and recessive models of rs7593130 in the ADCY3, together with dyslipidemia, regular intake of egg and sweets and hypertension, increased the risk of NAFLD (adjusted OR > 1, p < 0.05). The TT genotype of the additive and dominant models of rs11583680 in the PCSK9, together with the regular intake of vegetable, reduced the risk of NAFLD (adjusted OR < 1, p < 0.05). In addition, interactions between some variables were found. Eventually, we identified three SNPs and six environmental factors associated with NAFLD. These results provide the theoretical basis for gene and other risk factors screening to prevent NAFLD.