Is apoptosis in follicles of individuals with female pattern hair loss associated with perifollicular microinflammation?
Apoptosis was prominent in hair follicles from the FPHL group, as well as in miniaturized ones. Moreover, it was also correlated with the inflammatory infiltrate, which suggests that inflammation can lead to apoptosis and play a role in the pathogenesis of follicle miniaturization.
In this study, we demonstrated that a combinatorial analysis using a literature knowledgebase, semantic technology, and ontology is able to reveal important unidentified knowledge critical to biomedical research and public health and to generate testable hypotheses for future experimental verification. As the associations from Semantic MEDLINE remain incomplete, we expect to extend this work by (1) integrating additional association databases to complement Semantic MEDLINE knowledge, (2) extending the neighbor genes of vaccine-associated genes, and (3) assigning confidence weights to different types of associations or associations from different sources.