The Associating Factors of Parent-Teen and Peer Relationships Among Chinese Adolescents with Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus

Background

Positive parent-teen and peer relationships are crucial support resources for adolescents with type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM). There is quite a bit of research on parent-teen relationships in Western countries, less so with peer relationships. Additionally, information on these relationships and their influencing factors among adolescents from other regions with different family culture and peer cohesion is limited, which impedes the development of targeted interventions.

Methods

This study analyzed baseline data from a randomized controlled trial in China involving 122 adolescents with T1DM aged 12-18 years. Data were collected using established questionnaires on social-demographic and clinical characteristics, perceived stress, general self-efficacy, coping styles, diabetes self-management, and parent-teen and peer relationships. Multivariate linear regression analysis was conducted to determine the associating factors of parent-teen relationships and peer relationships respectively.

Results

The total score of the parent-teen relationships subscale was 11.02 ± 2.77, within a theoretical range of 4-16. The total score of the peer relationships subscale was 16.51 ± 2.42, within a theoretical range of 5-20. Positive coping styles, less negative coping styles, and more collaboration with parents in diabetes self-management were associated with better parent-teen relationships. Younger age, positive coping styles, less negative coping styles, and higher goals for diabetes self-management were associated with better peer relationships.

Conclusion

There is room to improve parent-teen relationships, maybe via encouraging more collaboration between parents and adolescents for diabetes management. The coping styles training is indicated to improve both relationships.

Determination of correlations in multivariate count data with informative observation times

We consider there are various types of recurrent events and the total number of occurrences are collected at the random observation times. It has concerned that the observation process may not be independent to the multivariate event processes, hence the total counts and observation times may be correlated and the dependence may exist among different types of the event processes as well. Many methods have developed nonparametric models to accommodate such unknown structures; however, it is difficult to assess and directly quantify their correlation relationships. A multivariate frailty model is proposed to this study, in which the event and observation processes are linked by frailty variables whose joint distribution can be implicitly specified through the multivariate normal distribution with some unknown covariance matrix. The Bayesian inference method is conducted to obtain the estimates of the regression coefficients and correlation parameters. We use a form of trigonometric functions to represent the covariance matrix, so that it meets the positive-definiteness condition efficiently during the estimation schemes. The simulation studies demonstrate the utility of the proposed models. We apply the model to a skin cancer prevention study, and aim to determine the covariate and association effects. We found treatment is significant in determining the duration of examination times; prior-counts, age and gender are significant variables on the occurrence rates of tumor counts. Using the covariance matrix to access the underlying dependent structure, the mutual correlations among them are all positive, and the basal cell counts are more related to the examination times.

CoCoA: conditional correlation models with association size

Many scientific questions can be formulated as hypotheses about conditional correlations. For instance, in tests of cognitive and physical performance, the trade-off between speed and accuracy motivates study of the two variables together. A natural question is whether speed-accuracy coupling depends on other variables, such as sustained attention. Classical regression techniques, which posit models in terms of covariates and outcomes, are insufficient to investigate the effect of a third variable on the symmetric relationship between speed and accuracy. In response, we propose a conditional correlation model with association size, a likelihood-based statistical framework to estimate the conditional correlation between speed and accuracy as a function of additional variables. We propose novel measures of the association size, which are analogous to effect sizes on the correlation scale while adjusting for confound variables. In simulation studies, we compare likelihood-based estimators of conditional correlation to semiparametric estimators adapted from genomic studies and find that the former achieves lower bias and variance under both ideal settings and model assumption misspecification. Using neurocognitive data from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort, we demonstrate that greater sustained attention is associated with stronger speed-accuracy coupling in a complex reasoning task while controlling for age. By highlighting conditional correlations as the outcome of interest, our model provides complementary insights to traditional regression modeling and partitioned correlation analyses.

A bivariate zero-inflated negative binomial model and its applications to biomedical settings

The zero-inflated negative binomial distribution has been widely used for count data analyses in various biomedical settings due to its capacity of modeling excess zeros and overdispersion. When there are correlated count variables, a bivariate model is essential for understanding their full distributional features. Examples include measuring correlation of two genes in sparse single-cell RNA sequencing data and modeling dental caries count indices on two different tooth surface types. For these purposes, we develop a richly parametrized bivariate zero-inflated negative binomial model that has a simple latent variable framework and eight free parameters with intuitive interpretations. In the scRNA-seq data example, the correlation is estimated after adjusting for the effects of dropout events represented by excess zeros. In the dental caries data, we analyze how the treatment with Xylitol lozenges affects the marginal mean and other patterns of response manifested in the two dental caries traits. An R package "bzinb" is available on Comprehensive R Archive Network.

Flexible copula model for integrating correlated multi-omics data from single-cell experiments

With recent advances in technologies to profile multi-omics data at the single-cell level, integrative multi-omics data analysis has been increasingly popular. It is increasingly common that information such as methylation changes, chromatin accessibility, and gene expression are jointly collected in a single-cell experiment. In biomedical studies, it is often of interest to study the associations between various data types and to examine how these associations might change according to other factors such as cell types and gene regulatory components. However, since each data type usually has a distinct marginal distribution, joint analysis of these changes of associations using multi-omics data is statistically challenging. In this paper, we propose a flexible copula-based framework to model covariate-dependent correlation structures independent of their marginals. In addition, the proposed approach could jointly combine a wide variety of univariate marginal distributions, either discrete or continuous, including the class of zero-inflated distributions. The performance of the proposed framework is demonstrated through a series of simulation studies. Finally, it is applied to a set of experimental data to investigate the dynamic relationship between single-cell RNA-sequencing, chromatin accessibility, and DNA methylation at different germ layers during mouse gastrulation. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Modeling dynamic correlation in zero-inflated bivariate count data with applications to single-cell RNA sequencing data

Interactions between biological molecules in a cell are tightly coordinated and often highly dynamic. As a result of these varying signaling activities, changes in gene coexpression patterns could often be observed. The advancements in next‐generation sequencing technologies bring new statistical challenges for studying these dynamic changes of gene coexpression. In recent years, methods have been developed to examine genomic information from individual cells. Single‐cell RNA sequencing (scRNA‐seq) data are count‐based, and often exhibit characteristics such as overdispersion and zero inflation. To explore the dynamic dependence structure in scRNA‐seq data and other zero‐inflated count data, new approaches are needed. In this paper, we consider overdispersion and zero inflation in count outcomes and propose a ZEro‐inflated negative binomial dynamic COrrelation model (ZENCO). The observed count data are modeled as a mixture of two components: success amplifications and dropout events in ZENCO. A latent variable is incorporated into ZENCO to model the covariate‐dependent correlation structure. We conduct simulation studies to evaluate the performance of our proposed method and to compare it with existing approaches. We also illustrate the implementation of our proposed approach using scRNA‐seq data from a study of minimal residual disease in melanoma.