Browsing by Author "Zhou, Jin J."

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    Association of Kidney Comorbidities and Acute Kidney Failure With Unfavorable Outcomes After COVID-19 in Individuals With the Sickle Cell Trait
    (American Medical Association, 2022) Verma, Anurag; Huffman, Jennifer E.; Gao, Lina; Minnier, Jessica; Wu, Wen-Chih; Cho, Kelly; Ho, Yuk-Lam; Gorman, Bryan R.; Pyarajan, Saiju; Rajeevan, Nallakkandi; Garcon, Helene; Joseph, Jacob; McGeary, John E.; Suzuki, Ayako; Reaven, Peter D.; Wan, Emily S.; Lynch, Julie A.; Petersen, Jeffrey M.; Meigs, James B.; Freiberg, Matthew S.; Gatsby, Elise; Lynch, Kristine E.; Zekavat, Seyedeh Maryam; Natarajan, Pradeep; Dalal, Sharvari; Jhala, Darshana N.; Arjomandi, Mehrdad; Bonomo, Robert A.; Thompson, Trevor K.; Pathak, Gita A.; Zhou, Jin J.; Donskey, Curtis J.; Madduri, Ravi K.; Wells, Quinn S.; Gelernter, Joel; Huang, Rose D. L.; Polimanti, Renato; Chang, Kyong-Mi; Liao, Katherine P.; Tsao, Philip S.; Sun, Yan V.; Wilson, Peter W. F.; O'Donnell, Christopher J.; Hung, Adriana M.; Gaziano, J. Michael; Hauger, Richard L.; Iyengar, Sudha K.; Luoh, Shiuh-Wen; VA Million Veteran Program COVID-19 Science Initiative; Medicine, School of Medicine
    Importance: Sickle cell trait (SCT), defined as the presence of 1 hemoglobin beta sickle allele (rs334-T) and 1 normal beta allele, is prevalent in millions of people in the US, particularly in individuals of African and Hispanic ancestry. However, the association of SCT with COVID-19 is unclear. Objective: To assess the association of SCT with the prepandemic health conditions in participants of the Million Veteran Program (MVP) and to assess the severity and sequelae of COVID-19. Design, setting, and participants: COVID-19 clinical data include 2729 persons with SCT, of whom 353 had COVID-19, and 129 848 SCT-negative individuals, of whom 13 488 had COVID-19. Associations between SCT and COVID-19 outcomes were examined using firth regression. Analyses were performed by ancestry and adjusted for sex, age, age squared, and ancestral principal components to account for population stratification. Data for the study were collected between March 2020 and February 2021. Exposures: The hemoglobin beta S (HbS) allele (rs334-T). Main outcomes and measures: This study evaluated 4 COVID-19 outcomes derived from the World Health Organization severity scale and phenotypes derived from International Classification of Diseases codes in the electronic health records. Results: Of the 132 577 MVP participants with COVID-19 data, mean (SD) age at the index date was 64.8 (13.1) years. Sickle cell trait was present in 7.8% of individuals of African ancestry and associated with a history of chronic kidney disease, diabetic kidney disease, hypertensive kidney disease, pulmonary embolism, and cerebrovascular disease. Among the 4 clinical outcomes of COVID-19, SCT was associated with an increased COVID-19 mortality in individuals of African ancestry (n = 3749; odds ratio, 1.77; 95% CI, 1.13 to 2.77; P = .01). In the 60 days following COVID-19, SCT was associated with an increased incidence of acute kidney failure. A counterfactual mediation framework estimated that on average, 20.7% (95% CI, -3.8% to 56.0%) of the total effect of SCT on COVID-19 fatalities was due to acute kidney failure. Conclusions and relevance: In this genetic association study, SCT was associated with preexisting kidney comorbidities, increased COVID-19 mortality, and kidney morbidity.
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    Exact Variance Component Tests for Longitudinal Microbiome Studies
    (Wiley, 2019-01-08) Zhai, Jing; Knox, Kenneth; Twigg, Homer L., III; Zhou, Hua; Zhou, Jin J.; Medicine, School of Medicine
    In metagenomic studies, testing the association of microbiome composition and clinical outcomes translates to testing the nullity of variance components. Motivated by a lung HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) microbiome project, we study longitudinal microbiome data by variance component models with more than two variance components. Current testing strategies only apply to the models with exactly two variance components and when sample sizes are large. Therefore, they are not applicable to longitudinal microbiome studies. In this paper, we propose exact tests (score test, likelihood ratio test, and restricted likelihood ratio test) to (1) test the association of the overall microbiome composition in a longitudinal design and (2) detect the association of one specific microbiome cluster while adjusting for the effects from related clusters. Our approach combines the exact tests for null hypothesis with a single variance component with a strategy of reducing multiple variance components to a single one. Simulation studies demonstrate that our method has correct type I error rate and superior power compared to existing methods at small sample sizes and weak signals. Finally, we apply our method to a longitudinal pulmonary microbiome study of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infected patients and reveal two interesting genera Prevotella and Veillonella associated with forced vital capacity. Our findings shed lights on the impact of lung microbiome to HIV complexities. The method is implemented in the open source, high-performance computing language Julia and is freely available at https://github.com/JingZhai63/VCmicrobiome.