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BridgesLab / CushingAcromegalyStudy

The source code for the cushing and acromegaly studies, currently ongoing
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Response Issue #2: Age Matching #40

Closed davebridges closed 9 years ago

davebridges commented 9 years ago

In addition, the patients and controls are not age matched; while age has been shown to influence adipose tissue biology. Furthermore, it is not clear if the authors had into account the acromegaly onset, which is crucial to determine the time of high GH exposure.

davebridges commented 9 years ago

The reviewer brings up an excellent point, as the previous analysis did not match the samples for age. To directly address this, we performed an additional supplementary analysis of the data wherein we separated the samples into subjects whom were over or above 40 years of age and repeated the analysis. This is described in the methods section as such:

To account for potential age-dependent changes in the subjects, we also did a supplementary analysis in which separated the patients into two groups, over 60 and under 60. We then added this age group as a covariate along with the disease state, also allowing for an interaction between the age group and the disease.

After this analysis we found that after controlling for age, we observed 75 genes that were significantly different between acromegaly and control patients. If we separated the analysis to look at each age group separately, we found 87 genes which were significantly different with acromegaly in the under 60 age group and 4 genes which were different in the over 60 age group. We have provided a new Supplementary Tables 5-7 describing these data, and their associated pathway analyses. This is now described in the results section as such:

To account for potential age-dependent changes in adipose tissue, we also performed a sub-analysis in which we stratified our subjects into two groups based on their age (over or under 60 years of age). Based on this sub-analysis, we observed that there were 87 genes which were significantly different after adjusting for age, 75 genes that were significantly different if we only examine subjects under 60 and 4 genes that were significantly different if we only examine subjects over 60. These gene-level data are presented in Supplementary Table 5, with pathway analyses presented in Supplementary Table 6 and transcription factor/miRNA analyses presented in Supplementary Table 7.